I got a big fat BLOCKED screen today trying to post a comment. It had no links, no profanity, and I didn't even use the b!zx word or the Naz! word. Pack your shit, folks

You can tell this place has really gone to shit because the people trolling me keep coming up with dumber and dumber arguments.

It's slow as fuck and it doesn't work worth one.

Normally I'd post an article like this to my own blog, but since I've not bothered to bring it back up since my web host died this is, sadly, the most reasonable place for me to post. In the past I've done detailed howtos and this will not be that, because all I really need it to be is just a record of more or less what I did. To wit, I got Ubuntu installed and working correctly on my antique potatoe, an FX-8350, 990FX-based system with nvidia graphics, NVMe storage, and UEFI with BIOS compat.

I installed from vmware on Windows. Created my VM with 3 out of my 8 cores and 8GB RAM. I added the physical NVMe disk to the VM config as an NVMe disk specifically. Install went off smoothly. But after updating my Firefox snap was already broken, so I decided to blow away snap and install normal firefox. I also installed kde-plasma-desktop and kde-full in order to get away from Unity, and because gnome is in a snap too. I could have just installed kubuntu, but I wanted to see what the process would be like with the normal Ubuntu CD.

Unfortunately, after the install, the USB3 doesn't work. This turns out to be a problem with IOMMU settings. It also causes the boot to be extended while things fail. Short form, in /etc/default/grub: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash amd_iommu=on iommu=pt"

On boot I was using Nouveau and needed to install nvidia drivers (sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall). Sadly these driver versions only support "Mosaic" "SLI", which is where your display spans monitors. I may try an older driver to get SLI working again. Getting nvidia-settings working required running nvidia-xconfig (as root) in order to produce a working xorg.conf, and also fixing a polkit permissions issue (sudo chmod u+x /usr/share/screen-resolution-extra/nvidia-polkit). Even worse, the screen stays dark after resume from suspend. This is of course because of systemd.

sudo systemctl stop nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl stop nvidia-hibernate.service
sudo systemctl stop nvidia-resume.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-hibernate.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-resume.service
sudo rm /lib/systemd/system-sleep/nvidia

Finally, part of the use case is being able to boot Windows from Linux and Linux from Windows, both in vmware player. The Windows stuff is trivial, clicky clicky. The Linux stuff isn't because vmware doesn't bother to keep their vmnet and vmmon modules updated for modern kernels. After installing vmware but before launching vmplayer, install the right version from the above repo for your vmware and kernel versions. You have to be root in order to use physical devices on Linux (or maybe you can solve it with group perms? Haven't tried this yet.) Windows is on SATA on my system so I added the SATA full disk as a SATA disk and it works fine.

In order to install a modern Linux on my PC I have to write out TWO pieces of installer media because neither latest Ubuntu or Pop! OS will successfully boot the installer otherwise. Once installed, Pop! OS can't resume from suspend on my desktop, not even a laptop. Had to install a bunch of patch crap to get vmware player to run on a modern kernel. As long as all these basic things are gotchas, Linux can never reasonably even have a year of the desktop. Not enough time and effort are spent on actually making things work, it's always the new and shiny that gets the attention. I've been using Linux for decades now and the quality has decreased even as the functionality has increased. What a shit show. Just a couple years ago I could write out an installer from Windows and expect it to work, things are actually going backwards. WTF?

As Lithium-Ion batteries, isolated "islands" of lithium form in the battery, inhibiting its ability to carry a charge, and decreasing its capacity. Researchers have discovered a means of restoring that lost capacity (paper) by rapidly discharging batteries after fully charging them. This causes migration of the isolated Lithium, and in experiments with cells designed with such islands they saw increases in voltage as the cells were rapidly discharged.

I need a new webhost because my old hosting service deleted my database for being over quota. I have backups, of course, but they're slightly old, so this is irritating. The quota was very small.

MARTIN ESPINOZA
2277 GLENROSE AVE
ALTADENA , CA , 91001
(480) 516-7385

This person has given my email address to Jiffy Lube so that I would get spammed. Obviously it would be inappropriate to call them and tell them they're an ass. "Please" "don't" DO THAT.

When "you" (or your OS) upgrade[s] Firefox it opens a new welcome screen. This one says "Your privacy respected, automatically". Yeah, no. I configured my home page to be my most visited sites, not some page you decided I should visit so that you could collect statistics. Gaslighting much?

When I submit a comment, the resulting page usually doesn't load. It just spins for ages. Now it works. If you can see this, the journal is also fixed — I haven't been able to post to mine for months. Is this a nginx fail or something?

I wrote some user scripts for /., you can find them (with some other people's) on GreasyFork. The scripts remove hostnames from Slashdot links, so you're not being bounced to multiple hostnames, and to send you straight to the domain if you do get sent to a hostname by mistake.

I got interested in actually doing this because I couldn't leave comments on *.slashdot.org a few days back, only on slashdot.org. But it's annoying all the time, IMO.

My scripts probably have no elegance whatsoever, but they work.

Last time I tried to post to my journal I got an error, so I'm trying again now.

FACT CHECK: Snopes is no longer a website (Tb). When you go there without javascript you don't see any images. When I activate all the reputable javascript sources, I still don't see all of the images. I am no longer going to cite Snopes for debunking as a result. Are there any good fact-checking websites, as opposed to Javascript SNAFUs?

I don't know if Slashdot is malfunctioning, functioning poorly as designed, or whether I'm outright being censored. Since I don't know, I'll list that possibility last. I'm trying to leave a response to This comment by Bruce Perens. This is that response:

If this is not important, why are you engaging me?

Open Source is a wave that you've ridden, not one which you've churned up with your splashing about. There are obvious benefits in the Open Source model to developers and even to corporate rightsholders.

The internet, just as it remembers that people were using "Open Source" before Christine's claim. Faintly, distantly, because archival was not a major concern at the time. Perhaps one day in our apparently inevitable future of surveillance societies, we will remember everything and we'll always be able to look up who did what and when.

The audience thinks I'm being a troll because it doesn't know what trolling is, and because some people have abused moderation by modding me as a troll. Trolling is saying things you may or may not even believe because you want to make people angry. My goal is not to make people angry, although it's okay if people become angry with what I say. My goal is to support the truth, in the form of facts. I and others have provided citations which support the view of events which I remember. I'm not alone, nor does the entire discussion hinge on a single press release, and your attempts to suggest otherwise seem disingenuous.

The truth? I've thought about it again and again, and I just can't comprehend any other explanation than those we've discussed upthread why you spend so much time supporting this nonsense. You say it's not important, then you spend a ton of time on it, then you criticize me for spending time on it. Why don't you make up your mind?

I got a solid scoop on the fact that OSI members did not invent the term "Open Source Software" and Slashdot's not interested.