Laziness can save us!

The ATI has just released new version of their video drivers, so I pretended to install them. But then I newly discovered that the driver isn’t installed under linux-2.6.20. The problem was much more severe this time, so I just refused to dig down any more. I downgraded the kernel to the previous version, and everything went just smoothly. How much time would I save if I did this when I was installing the previous version of drivers?..

How I applied for information

Yes, it’s very easy, every kyiv man knows it’s nesessary to call 09 and to ask a phone girl. So did I when I took on the bus:

—Would you please tell me where is a military store?
—Which street is it situated on?
—I’d like you to tell me that.
—Sorry, I can’t help you...

But because I was speaking loudly enough, two passengers turned to me and prompted politely exactly what I wanted. Next time I shan't call the 09 at all, I’d rather just ask people around me.

Think global

Hi there! Recently I've been looking for the suitable way to connect to the internet. Actually, I've been already using gprs connection for two months, but the way I did it was very awful. First, I logged in as a root than in console I typed wvdial umc. And finally, when the connection was established i copied /etc/ppp/resolv.conf to /etc/resolv.conf to use just received DNS nameservers' addresses. But this approach completely contradicts to my developer's nature: I'm lazy (in a good sense of the word), that is my credo is "It's better to spend an hour and reach in five minutes". So when I digged deeply into system configuration, I discovered that there were a simple way just from the beginning. I just had to use the system network configuration utility (it's called system-config-network), add new ppp connection, configure dialling parameters and that's it! Now to connect to the internet, I just launch another system utility that's called Network Device Control, choose desired connection (ppp0) and click on the Activate button. All this operations are performed from within my usual user account. And what is the most important, the DNS resolver gets configured automatically, I don't need to do any dangerous manipulations on the system manually. The conclusion from the story was for me to think sometimes as usual user, to think global and to regard the system as the whole ignoring its parts.

Dancing with teachers

I really like dancing with teachers! They treat me very carefully, just like my mother does. The fear of failure goes away when I'm dancing with a teacher, so the dance become much more clear and fluent. Tonight I liked dancing with Anya (the teacher of NY) very much, just can't recover my sense!

Dancing with tambourine

This little story tells, how I installed driver for ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 under Fedora Core 6. Well, everything worked just fine primarily with the generic open source driver called radeon. The universal linux test for OpenGL glxgears showed that my new laptop processes near 450 fps, that's to say there was no hardware acceleration at all. Offensively. So I went to the ati.com, downloaded their native driver. It doesn't matter that the 'radeon xpress 1100' doesn't even appear in the list of supported hardware, the driver is as generic that it can work with many others. It turned out also that there were the only driver suite for any configuration, and I had to download near 60 MB. So I became a happy owner of a copy of new ATI hardware driver with version number 8.33.6. Very well, we begin shortly. First I have to confess that I've just customized my linux kernel and installed the newest version available at that time, that was 2.6.20. Actually, this let me have spent MUCH MORE time getting the driver to work. 1) Launch $ ati-driver-installer-8.33.6-x86.x86_64.run --listpkg showed that my system distribution should be well supported. 2) But when I tried to build RPM packages, I got first surprise: ati-driver-installer-8.33.6-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Fedora/FC6 .... (lots of compilation errors go here) The short look at the messages revealed that the version 2.6.20 of the linux kernel isn't supported by the driver. Actually, there were no macros _syscallX() anywhere. But deep investigation in the web found out that that problem can easily be solved by defining missing macros either in the source file where they're used or in the kernel source. In my case the latter was more suitable. 3) I tried to build desired RPM packages again. The second problem prevented me from success, it appeared that my system lacks the fireglcontrolpanel application. The web helped me again: the source of the program can be extracted from the driver package and compiled manually. It appeared that to do so, one must solve some easy programming puzzles ;-) 4) At last, I succeeded building RPMs for my system: $ ls *.rpm ATI-fglrx-8.33.6-1.fc6.i386.rpm ATI-fglrx-control-panel-8.33.6-1.fc6.i386.rpm ATI-fglrx-devel-8.33.6-1.fc6.i386.rpm kernel-module-ATI-fglrx-2.6.20-19.02.2007-8.33.6-1.fc6.i386.rpm $ su # rpm -ivh *.rpm 5) At this point everything seemed to be ready to restart X Window system, so I pressed ctrl + shift + backspace. The X server started, but nothing interesting happened. The glxgears showed the same 450 fps, fgl_glxgears refused to start. That was the best time to look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log. There were errors! So I disabled the option AIGLX in the section "ServerLayout" of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. 6) And that was the turning point! The glxgears printed out that my system was able to produce 2000 fps, almost four time increase! Enough about computers. I spent for that process near 24 hours, two times I decided to give it all up. But every time I came back and tried again. This insistency made my success, so I can safely say: "Never give up!"

Dangerous thoughts

Be careful with your even non-dangerous thoughts, aspecially when you're going to share them. I've posted a notice about women cloths on a web forum. I just supposed those cloths were reused from another performance... I didn't even had time to turn around, as I was plied with stones. It doesn't matter that I appreciate "reusing" in life very much... So I had to beg pardon.