Weather day

[altivo]

This was one of those days when the weather alarm goes off every hour or so with another warning or watch. Tornado watches, severe thunderstorm warnings, flash flood warnings, and so forth. We actually shut everything down at one point because the lightning was so heavy, though we never got much rain beyond a spattering. Now they say it will snow on Sunday. I'd scoff, except that there are actual blizzard warnings out in the Dakotas and Minnesota.

Finally got a good stable graphical display on the Alpha this morning, no thanks to the software. This is the first occasion in many years that I've had to say bad things about Linux. Well, not Linux itself, which runs fine on the Alpha, but the X.org graphical interface, which serves not only Linux, but several flavors of BSD and some other operating environments. When it was XFree86 it was constantly improving. Now that it's X.org, the bugs are multiplying faster than the code. I couldn't get a decent windowing interface on the S3 Trio 64, my original choice for the Alpha because it also works with OpenVMS. There seem to be multiple introduced bugs in the S3 driver (which used to work just fine back on XFree86.) I went on EBay and got an ELSA Gloria L for about $20. That doesn't work with OpenVMS, but should work with Linux. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with the X.org version of the drivers. Same problems as the S3 Trio, even though it's a totally different driver. So I bought another cheap video card off EBay, this time a Matrox Millennium. I knew that one would work because I have one running in the other Alpha at the library. And it does work.

Unfortunately, while trying to debug the S3 driver, I installed beta versions of several system elements at the request of the software support team. They didn't fix the S3 problems, and it seemed like too much trouble to remove them, so I left them in place. That was a bad mistake. Something in the X.org system turned around and crashed today, hard. It trashed some undetermined number of files on the hard disk on its way down. I'll probably end up having to reinstall everything to get a stable system back out of it. That wouldn't be too big an issue, since there's next to no actual data on there right now, except running a network install over a dialup line takes many hours. Like about 24 to 30 of them.

Maybe it's time to try Gentoo...

Comments

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's time to try Gentoo...

You say that as though you think it'd make things easier.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, no, but perhaps it might be a little better supported or documented pathway.

There appear to be four choices for Linux on the Alpha. One is RedHat, which I rule out automatically because I simply hate them. I want open source Linux, not something filled with commercialized aberrations.

CentOS appears no longer to be progressing.

Debian has the advantages of a huge library of application packages and plenty of documentation support. Unfortunately, the Alpha developers seem mostly to speak Italian and German and their interests lie on somewhat other directions from mine.

Gentoo is the only one left that I haven't tried. ;p

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Just curious...lets say Y2K happens late, and
the infrastructure goes down. What kind of plan
do you have for you, Gary, and the boys?

I know, I'm not a shear survivalists either,
I'm just curious how that would work, I'm
figuring you have some kind of plan.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Not so much a plan as a collection of skills and experience. We have some advantage in that we live in a more or less rural area. We have a garden and know how to work it. I know a lot of the theory behind generating your own electricity (and we have friends a mile or two away who have just installed a full setup with a wind generator and solar cells.) We have the horses for local transportation, though we'd have to do some repairs on the harness and wagon. I know how to preserve food by canning and drying so an electric freezer is not required, and we have a functioning woodstove (and our own woodlot should it come to that.) Many of the necessary resources are still available within the local area and I think people would quickly adopt bartering, eggs for tomatoes, that sort of thing.

Our most pressing issue would be the well. It's 200 feet deep and uses an electric submersible pump. Because of the depth, that can't easily be replaced by the old mechanical lift mechanism. We have a gasoline generator that can be hooked up to make the well operate when the power is out, but of course when there's no gasoline, that doesn't help. So effective power generation or a new shallow well and crude water purification methods would be the top priority.

[deffox]

Last time I used a weather radio I found it somewhat annoying with it constantly going off for every neighboring county. The same storm cell was always good for four or five alarms.

The overactive alarming was a detriment. Coworkers would turn the volume down after the first alarm, and sometimes forget to turn it up later. One quiet weekend there were anvil clouds outside, but found that the weather radio was turned off during what was a tornado warning.

Dialup networking sounds fun...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Most weather radios have the capability of limiting the alarms by county, so you can configure them to go off only for your local area. Ours is set for two counties because we are about ten miles from the county line.

We still get some irrelevant alerts because the weather service seems to be staffed by incompetents nowadays and they don't code them properly.

Dialup networking is what it is. When it's the only flavor you can get, you live with it.

[deffox]

Why doesn't it surprise me that we had an old, cheap model. Ours had a volume knob, an on/test button, and an acknowledge button.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

It's what's known as a "political storm" All that noise and activity then nothing.