Debian GNU/Hurd 2017 edition

Just for a bit of fun I have set up a VM running Debian GNU/Hurd 2017 edition just to see what it will do. The installer is pretty much the same as the ones that come with regular Debian and quite similar to the text mode installer for Xubuntu. Like the regular Debian installs you have a choice of GUI, out of which I chose Xfce for familiarity. I downloaded the Netinstall image to create the VM, and unsurprisingly for something that is pre-release, there is only one repository, in the Netherlands. Downloads from this are quite slow so it took a while to get all the files needed for the install, as a Netinstall image (equivalent to a mini installer for Xubuntu) is a 159MB ISO that only contains what is needed to get the install running to the point where the rest of the install can be downloaded from a repository.

Debian GNU/Hurd is quite interesting as the only well supported and current open source operating system based on the Mach microkernel. There is a very well known proprietary Mach based system called macOS (OS X) which is probably the best known and really the only commercially successful implementation of Mach. It would seem that the purported benefits of microkernels have not captivated widespread support in the IT community at large, except when it has been forcefed to users of Mac computers.

The Google homepage in Midori, the default browser installed with Xfce on Debian GNU/Hurd.

I don't expect to spend a lot of time playing with this, it is academic interest only but it would be interesting to see what it could do in future.

Xubuntu Artful

So now I have all three computers in my household running Artful. Which everyone assumes will come out as 17.10 in a few months. The issues haven't been too major but the latest big issue is installing it on computers like mediapc with the problem that it has with the two screens with different resolutions. Whereby I have had to file a bug report on Launchpad. This is actually the reason why I gave up trying to upgrade it in place, because when it got to 17.04, the screen was all messed up and I couldn't figure out how to fix it at that time. So I tried the mini install of Artful Core, which had other significant issues (failing to load kernel modules), so I had to download the full install image for 17.10 and install it from a DVD (although a pen drive probably would have worked. Then after install I had to hook the RAID-1 array back on like on mainpc and then reinstall Samba to share the media volume like before.

The main issues when reinstalling software is that not everyone has an artful branch of their third party repositories. For Kodi I used the version that is already in the Ubuntu repositories, which is branded "Kodi by Debian". In the case of Qgis I followed the steps listed on the Qgis website for the development build, and then configured sources.list to use the zesty branch of the repository. On mainpc this has resulted in Qgis updating itself through several different master builds as new ones are produced. On all three computers video hardware is natively supported by Xubuntu, although the radeon chip in the bedroom pc is significantly more limited in performance than the NVidia 210 cards in both the other computers. I think the issue with the radeon chip is probably from the change in AMD driver architecture in Ubuntu of late and that the open source drivers are significantly compromised. I have found that higher bit rate mp4's really struggle on the radeon. It may well be that in time I will look to replace the motherboard in that computer with the Asrock Q1900 mini ITX board, since Intel video chips are well supported with open source software, but it is not a high priority at present with my limited funds.

I have been running development versions of Qgis forever as well. Some of the latest versions on Linux have been more difficult to work with; there seem to be some architectural limitations in the software that restrict the maximum number of layers in a project. I doubt Linux itself has this limitation as it is used to handle serious data with big servers and high end software in graphics and audio processing. The Windows version of Qgis is more reliable and I have kept it as a backup option both on my Windows computer and in a Windows virtualbox, but for now running an older development version in a Linux virtualbox is what keeps me sane as I work towards winding up the project at the end of this year.

Upgrading a version of Xubuntu (16.x to 17.x)

Well I had hoped to keep my mediapc running 16.04 with Qgis 313ec55 but it tells me I should update to a new version so I have followed the procedure to update to 16.10 and then 17.04. Unfortunately it automatically uninstalled Qgis as part of this and can't reinstall from the Xenial repository for 16.10 so I have let it go off this machine. I have decided that mediapc may as well go to artful like the other computers as this is fairly stable. It is being updated quite a lot, there were a lot of new packages for the bedroom computer when I checked last night. 

Fortunately a virtual machine running 16.04 and 313ec55 on my mainpc has proved to be quite usable for nearly everything in Qgis and can be set to have two virtual displays making it relatively easy to keep editing maps on older versions of Qgis as will be necessary to continue with the project work and having the advantage of being on the mainpc which is the best ergonomically with the placement of screens in my desk layout.

I have had quite a few virtualbox VMs running all sorts of different Qgis versions because of various issues with different editions of the software but I can't go back to 2.18 or earlier from 2.99 because of changes in the project format which would see a lot of stuff that would have to be put into the 2.18 project that would be a lot of work I would rather not have to do.

However because of some issues in this combination I still need a VM running 2.18 to run the composers for outputting pages of maps so that one will be used as well. The project version issues don't affect the composers so it continues to work quite well.

How to stop Chrome from offering to save credit card information

If you use Chrome you'll hopefully know there are settings that can control the information that it stores and syncs. I always turn off the offer to sync passwords - and also credit card details. But although you can stop syncing your credit card details, Chrome will still popup a message each time you enter a credit card number to ask if you want to save those details in the browser - and it doesn't provide an option to turn this off.

However, the following undocumented settings might be able to turn off the credit card details save prompt.

• Type chrome://flags into the address bar of the browser
• Search on the resulting page for "Google Payments card saving checkbox"
• Change the setting to Disabled

I am not sure that this works because I was still prompted to save when I put in a credit card number the other day.

Xubuntu 17.10 on MainPC

In reference to a post that I have updated a lot of times since first writing it earlier this year, I have addressed the issue of the graphics card by removing the four head card from mainpc and putting in a simple $50 two head card that is supported out of the box by nouveau. This makes life a lot simpler because it seems likely that the problem that keeps crashing hibernation is related to having to use the proprietary NVidia drivers for a card that Nouveau doesn't as yet support. I decided to take this action after several recent resume failures and finally a crash while working in Xubuntu. I decided some time ago I did not need more than two screens on this computer because three screens take up too much room. And swapping out the cards seems justified by the experience with the mediapc which has just the same card in it and is rock solid and never has had the resume problem coming back up after hibernating. This card that I have just put into mainpc was in win10pc and since that computer has good enough onboard graphics then it can use the onboard to drive its screen and the TV as the  second screen.

A second issue has been that I couldn't get Qgis to update on Xenial to the latest master which I assume is because the Qgis people have stopped offering updates on that platform or else there is some technical reason for it. When I took the card out and put the two head in then tried getting Nouveau to work it could not set the display resolution or detect the second screen properly and after a lot of mucking around I decided just to bite the bullet and reinstall as I have done many times before. After a couple of false starts trying to install 17.04 I decided to use the mini.iso installer for 17.10 that I have since I installed that on the bedroom pc so I did that and got the system going again that way, using the option for the full Xubuntu install.

Everything looked good but I could not get the system to hibernate so after mucking around I realised that I had no swap partition and the reason was simple and that was that I had read somewhere a suggestion that swap partitions were not needed any more. But of course apparently whoever wrote that didn't realise that the system simply will not hibernate without one. So again it was simpler to do another reinstallation and set up a swap partition. This time I have just gone for the minimum installation or Xubuntu Core as they call it which installs the minimum set of applications needed. And then I tested hibernation straight away and it works right out of the box.

Getting the RAID going again was a little more straightforward than before because it had been detected and mdadm installed during setup so there were slightly fewer steps to get the home drive mapped back to the RAID-1. Just like all my previous experiences once I had /home mapped to the RAID-1 and rebooted everything comes like normal and all my previous settings are restored so it all goes brilliantly. That is one of the great features of Linux that makes it so easy to reinstall, without even needing to back anything up (although to be sure you should always back up of course :). Because redirecting /home to a different drive is properly supported in Linux. In Windows you can hack the registry to enable this but then Windows won't put on any updates if you use it. And also Windows stores all its settings in the registry which is stored on C drive whereas Linux stores everything in config files in the home drive.

One advantage of reinstalling was to get the latest version of Qgis master from the Zesty repository (even though this is Artful, I just told it to use the Zesty install files and they work just fine) because on the Xenial system it hadn't got any new releases for the last 6 months or so.

Well that just leaves a question over the network card driver and whether it is going to play up like it did with 16.04 and we shall just have to wait and see.

The new version of Qgis master turns out to have the old problem that they seem to fix and then a new release corrupts it and that is nulling all the fields when data is pasted from one table to another. Because of this I will have to use an older version of Qgis running on Windows or in a VM to paste tables. Since I am merging two projects together at the moment. In order to get that running I have to install Samba to share the network drives. That will have to wait until tomorrow when I finish setting up the rest of the stuff on the system.

There were a few networking issues with shares being mounted in /etc/fstab, the security options have changed so it has taken a few days' work with the Xubuntu developers to sort this out, now networking is all running fine again which I really did need as I needed to use different versions of Qgis on other computers as mentioned above. So now I am using the mediapc running an older version of 2.99 to edit, and the win10pc running another older version of 2.99 as well when needed.

Xubuntu issues: Graphics card not starting / network dropping out

There are two significant issues I seem to be seeing a lot of in Xubuntu lately.

• Network disconnecting: I will go to load a new web page and it fails to load. 
• Fail to resume after hibernation: previously resume has been very reliable.

The network problem is fairly new but it is difficult to pin down. Over the last week or so I have been connecting through Linewize, and obviously there is going to be a question about whether that is responsible for the problem. The other computers seem to have no difficulty with it, and it doesn't look like the physical network interface has actually disconnected from the network. Considering that last week I used the media computer to download a large volume of Youtube stuff and had no real issues I can't understand why MainPC keeps losing web browser connections. I should check by running some terminal commands to see for example what nmcli's output returns when the issue is experienced, or what some pinging does.

I have a wireless bridge to a wireless network next door, and the bridge also acts as a router and does NAT as well. So everything from here appears at one network address as far as the wireless system next door and its Linewize system is concerned.

The hibernation one has been happening for a fair bit longer. The system simply freezes after completing the restore; you get blank screens and the keyboard num lock light can't be toggled, indicating it has just frozen. It is not every time the system is resumed but is happening about every week or two. 

In both cases upgrading the system with the latest software packages for everything has not resolved the problems. Whilst hibernation can be problematic at times it has been a lot more reliable before now.

After the same thing happened this morning the kernel log is full of messages like this. These messages keep repeating until the point where I pulled the plug on the computer as all I could see was a blinking text-mode cursor in the upper left corner of one of the screens:

Apr  5 09:46:19 MainPC kernel: [ 8240.834662] NVRM: API mismatch: the client has the version 375.39, but
Apr  5 09:46:19 MainPC kernel: [ 8240.834662] NVRM: this kernel module has the version 367.57.  Please
Apr  5 09:46:19 MainPC kernel: [ 8240.834662] NVRM: make sure that this kernel module and all NVIDIA driver
Apr  5 09:46:19 MainPC kernel: [ 8240.834662] NVRM: components have the same version.

I should have tried Ctrl Alt F1 to see if I could log in to a terminal window but I did try a lot of key combinations, possibly including that one, so it seems the system has locked out the keyboard at that point.

It looks like the issue therefore is the graphics card not initialising and maybe hibernation is a red herring because I use hibernation all the time, this would seem to be just happening randomly on some boots but not all of them, however it may be hibernation linked.

First thing to try is remove and reinstall the NVidia driver:

sudo apt purge nvidia

sudo apt install nvidia-375

then restart

On restarting it says "System problem" with an option to report and after clicking the button it shows another message "Sorry Ubuntu 16.04 has experienced an internal error." The error turns out to be in xserver-xorg-core 2:1.18.4-0ubuntu0.2  and the title is Xorg crashed with SIGABRT in OsAbort()

The time given corresponded to the time when the kernel messages were being reported as above and the exact timestamp corresponded with the first appearance of the message in the kernel log, for that boot sequence. On the current boot those NVRM messages are not present.

We shall see if this addresses the problem, it must have occurred through at least two system upgrades but I have not seen a similar issue on the MediaPC which is the only other linux system I regularly hibernate. Although it has a different model NVidia graphics card.

However I did find this referred to elsewhere on the web, where it was also noted it was not possible to open a terminal and the outcomes appeared to be the same - the X Windows server could not start so the GUI would not run. So it would seem this indeed is the issue.

• https://peniwize.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/how-i-solved-my-nvidia-driver-kernel-module-api-mismatchj-problem/

UPDATE: Resume failed again a week later and there is no obvious cause. Just as not all of the previous resume issues had stuff in the logs. After seeing blank screens I pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1 and logged in textmode then had a look through a few logs, found nothing obvious. Then typed in startx and the GUI started but none of the previous windows were restored. Will keep testing.

UPDATE 2017-04-28: Still seeing this issue and unsure what is happening. The whole session gets restored from hibernation but the desktop is not loaded. You can start a terminal and type startx which gets you a new blank desktop whilst the applications for the restored desktop are all running but that desktop is not visible. So apps that will only run one instance cannot be started because they are running in the invisible restored desktop, and when this happens the only thing that can be done is to pull the plug.

UPDATE 2017-04-31: The system was stable for about a month and then there was a random instance that it failed to restore from hibernation. The difference this time was that the system first of all had a problem mounting a disk, and came up in emergency mode. After resolving the mount issue, there was then an instance of the blank screen after resuming with the funny x shaped pointer and nothing else displayed, which is what has happened in some of the other failed instances.

The main difference is now I have learned about journalctl (a systemd component) that will give me all the kernel logs. With a configuration change this is now storing more than just the most recent boot. I am now waiting for another resume failure (there have been several lately) to help me diagnose the problem. There is a pile of updates waiting to be installed so I am putting those in as well.

UPDATE 2017-06-30: After two months of no problems I installed some updates that required a restart, then the system hibernated (not shut down), then on resume I had this problem again. Once I powercycled it came up with the system error dialog to say it wanted to send an error report. It lists the following bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/1543192

In this case the screen just showed the blinking cursor but did not allow me to go into a terminal.

I have debug mode set in the Grub command parameters and I could poke through the logs with journalctl but right now I can't be bothered.

I keep seeing the network problem with no obvious cause and have dug around without figuring out what is happening. On the other Linux PCs this never happens, so it must be specific to the chipset in this computer.

UPDATE 2017-07-08: I have had a situation where the system repeatedly failed to boot after I had connected a TV as a third screen (it normally has just two) and that screen was powered on, but the settings in xrandr were set that the screen's "Use this screen" box was unticked and also the setting to configure screens when new ones were connected was also off. Each reboot (two so far) the system failed to resume from hibernation, in that I was left with a blank screen. It would seem this setting causes problems if you use it, and in this respect the software is way below Windows, which copes pretty well with screens missing or whatever on startup. To resolve this I disconnected the cable for the TV and so I will only plug that in physically if I need it. It seems the software can't handle that it can detect the screen but it is told not to use it in the settings. However I am not getting the xorg server bug error messages popping up when I restarted in this instance.

The problem persisted from this point and by changing a setting in the display settings only then could I get a reliable resume. This has been reported to Ubuntu Bugs.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/1703098

Xubuntu Core 17.10

Well there is going to be a Xubuntu 17.10 out soon so I decided to jump into the deep end with it and install it onto the second media computer (the one in my bedroom). To get the core edition you need the mini.iso for netboot, and while this isn't officially available for Artful, you can get it by searching the internet and in my case finding it from someone else's repository. Put it on a pen drive, boot from that and it is a text based install, eventually you get to the point where you are asked what to install and specify "Xubuntu minimal install". This installs XFCE and a minimal set of applications, so you don't get stuff you don't need, like LibreOffice.

I wanted to see, naturally, if video playback performance on this system has improved from 17.04, given that on 16.10 or 16.04 there were not the issues I have seen in 17.x releases. Although there was a small improvement the overall issue of slow or stuttery playback is still there. I'm guessing there may be a change in the video drivers from 16.x for the AMD video hardware in this computer and this may or may not be related to AMD dropping support for this particular chipset, or it may be that I have to hunt out alternatives to the drivers supplied with Xubuntu.

It didn't take a lot of work to install Firefox Developer, Chrome and Kodi, and then to copy stuff from the old user profile to the new one, so with not really much work post install everything in the system is working just as it was with the Zesty install. I don't really expect to save much resources from using the Core install instead of the regular full install. But it is good to see 17.10 is stable enough as a developer edition.

Avoid the Trademe courier price wizard pricing in your auction

Not so long ago Trademe added a nifty courier pricing wizard into their listings screen. When you list an item you can use this feature to work out what it will cost to ship items by courier (it works out what options are available from different couriers and gives you a list of them). There are however two important limitations of it that are manifestly problematic for sellers:

1. The buyer can apparently choose which option applies to them even if they don't know what they are talking about. I have had the situation where they were in a rural delivery area but chose a cheaper option that did not apply, fortunately in this case I did not have to argue with them over the correct rate.

2. Much more of an issue is if you choose to have the prices automatically listed on your auction. Without notifying you, Trademe changes the wording from "courier" to "shipping" and you can't fix the change. This is a very big problem because most people assume "shipping" is a complete price whereas there is no means to incorporate additional packaging costs into this pricing.

When I complained to Trademe their lack of response showed they do not care if as a seller you end up out of pocket or in a dispute with your buyer because they changed the wording without your permission.

In addition to this you can easily end up as I did overlooking the fact that the so called convenient and easy courier option isn't like that at all if you have to sit around waiting for a courier to turn up and collect the item. Trademe attempts to get around this by suggesting you can leave the item out for the courier to find themselves! LOL

The simple answer is: Trademe pushes this because they can get a cut of each sale of a courier product through their website. If you do your own shipping they don't get anything out of it. But they don't care if a seller ends up out of pocket because they supplied their own packaging instead of using a courier bag.

Me, I'm sticking with Parcel Post Tracked like I have always used. On the two packages I shipped this week, one cost me $3.20 more to ship on PPT than the courier rate the customer chose. The other one was cheaper to ship than quoted because I found a smaller packaging option. So overall I was able to weasel out of using a courier this time and next time I will use PPT from the outset.