[GTALUG] Fedora 22 Live Workstation Install - no fglrx - no pdftk

[Russell Reiter]

On 7/31/15, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh at mimosa.com> wrote:
> | From: Russell Reiter <rreiter91 at gmail.com>
>
<snip>
> My recollection is that lm-sensors has a large database of motherboards,
> and the plumbing of the sensors for each motherboard. The problem is that
> it is like wikipedia: it may be inaccurate or incomplete.  Even the
> mapping from raw sensor reading to degrees is part of that.

Hmmm. Maybe I will invest in the lazer temperature thingy, get a
better mapping of what is and is not a problem heatwise.

>
> | So far It looks like I don't have the chassis fan plugged into the
> | right slot.
>
> The table entry might be wrong.  Look at the board's manual or the
> silk screening.

I got a copy of the manual when I picked up the bios. I've been
leafing through it. I'll most likely take any additional cooling fan's
power directly off the PS with an adaptor. I don't know if upgrading
the disks to sata will help cooling but if it does become my workbox,
I'll re-use the sata drives from my squeeze box. I'm trying to create
a consolidated unit for both my partner and myself.

I'm not a bachelor any more so I can't have cables running all over
the place and three or four boxes with monitors strewn about.
>
> | As you can see from lm-sensor, after the firmware update, I'm within
> | operating parameters now. One feature of this motherboard is the
> | ability to recover from different bios's. I'm curious beyond making it
> | stable now, I may regress the bios and log what was happening at the
> | time.
>
> Take your winnings and go!  Unless you have a lot of spare time.

Sound advice which I intend to take after I am more certain of the
state of things.

>
> | Apparently ASUS has a MS utility they ship with the board. Ai gear 2,
> | which allows overclocking the MB from userspace. The condition seems
> | similar to the laptop I experienced where the MS OS had hooks into
> | controlling the power management.
>
> Calling it "a MS utility" suggests that Microsoft provided it.  I'm
> sure MS had nothing to do with it.  It is true that it will only run
> under some MS Windows, but that isn't the same thing.

Noted. Linux windows and MS windows are the same type of widgets, just
created differently. Perhaps I'll substitute the word widget in the
future. Although widget was originally an accounting term.

<snip the middle>

> Your computer has one processor chip, a die, but two cores (I'd call them
> two processors, but I'm old fashioned).  The "die" is one of the pieces
> after the silicon wafer is "diced" (cut into bits).  The plural of "die"
> is "dice" but most hardware folks seem to use "dies".

I suppose this is so as not to confuse it with casino dice. Another
place where it's better to take your winnings and run.

<another snip>
> Yeah, there is animation in some desktops.  That's surely not done with
> conventional sprites.  Of course somebody might recycle the term to mean
> something different.

I first heard the term as "Windows Desktop Sprite." I first heard
about sprites in old fairytales.

Here's a googled definition.

noun
1. an elf or fairy.
synonyms: fairy, elf, pixie, imp, brownie, puck, peri, leprechaun; More
2. a computer graphic that may be moved on-screen and otherwise
manipulated as a single entity.

>
> | My error. I used + & - to set the date but tried to type in the time.
> | It let me enter the numbers and in fact did display them in the right
> | place but didn't commit them.
>
> Odd.  But differently odd.

Yea, my friends say that about me all the time, so I can commiserate.

>
> | At this point I'm still a little at odds with what to do about QT, but
> | I can live with this state of things.
>
> After thrashing about a while, leaving unknown randomness in ones
> system, sometimes it makes sense to install the system afresh and
> apply the distro updates.  The less fiddling one has to do to make it
> work, the less fiddling one will have to do in the future.

I always count on installing my workstation system two or three times.
Once to get a general feel of the GUI. I like to try new things and
people move stuff around all the time. Plus features and bugs come and
go. Once again to harden it, ie add and remove packages and the final
install so that I have an order of operations should I have to install
again from scratch.

>
> [Excuse me for the quaint use of "one".  I'd normally use "you" but
> that sounds like a command or an accusation.  "One" captures more
> accurately what I intend.  Too bad it is vanishing from our
> vocabulary.]

No problem at all for me. You sound like my Doctor when I'm trying to
explain the conditions that make me feel the way I do so that I had to
go see him. He's always reminding me of the "Queens English."

English is a living modern and fluid language, said to take the best
of others, laissez faire if you will. Some say it's the language of
technocrats, others of Shakespeare/Bacon. Kind of like historical
rhyme, ie. words that used to rhyme but now do not.

>
> I find that it pays to keep a lab book.  I don't always write down
> what turns out to be important :-(

Me too, when I do the work for others. Myself, not so much.

>
> Some fiddling is forced upon one.  My ideal behaviour is to document these
> things in bug reports.  Perhaps they get fixed, but at least they are
> documented.  Embarassing fact: I sometimes rediscover my own solutions via
> google.
>
> You might have noticed some of my "war story" postings.
>
> | It looks to me like this bios is heavily vested in Windows gamer land
> | with the bios optimized to accept hooks from the ASUS GUI overclocking
> | utility.
>
> Usually this can be ignored.  An overclocker-oriented board might have
> better margins making it more stable for those who don't use the
> capability.

At least lm-sensor gives me a start on educated guessing for moderated
performance. That plus you help in oversight pinning down the exact
issues. Thanks a bunch.

I'm still looking for a table of sic sigma recommendations, often the
service manuals are available somewhere deep in the bowels of the
internet.

Russell
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