Updates / Pi2 / Dell / Lie-chan / Mei-chan

I first will apologise for not posting in almost two months; it's been a bit rough on me when the screen on my first ZenFone 2 cracked and I tried to replace it myself without backing the data up first - I "lost" quite a number of project pictures.

About a month afterwards, I bought another one because I wasn't able to stand the Galaxy Nexus, and I've been fine with it ever since (just handling very gingerly), but it still irks me that I have numerous pictures I'm unable to access.

Besides the loss of motivation to update because of that, I've just been somewhat busy with work and sometimes coming home fairly exhausted.

Today was a bit different though, because I had planned on working with the Pi2 a bit, because Raspbian Jessie was released. I also wanted to try Tumbleweed again, because I couldn't remember if I tried using YaST2's software management to install XFCE, which didn't turn out.

After initial testing, everything seemed a bit nicer, so I pulled off some files (mainly just vsftpd.conf) and overwrote whatever Raspbian I originally had with the newer version.

I had gotten everything set up and changed the "pi" username, and started running into trouble when trying to get it to boot into XFCE with auto-login.

I tried quite a number of things, and the closest I got left me with a "file/directory does not exist" error (because /home/pi was no longer there). While I tried to look for a fix, I gave up and went with my original thought of creating a symbolic link, which worked (though not the best fix).

I'm done with the Pi2 for now, but I really hope I can migrate to a true rolling release distro at some point.

I ordered the Pentium D 945 a few days ago and got it yesterday. I put it into the Dell after finishing with the Pi2 and immediately noticed a difference in speed during POST; it also was evident that the CPU was no longer the bottleneck for 64-bit. I ordered 4 x 1 GB of RAM last week, which will be here sometime next couple weeks or something. Altogether, about $30 USD to max the Dell out, which isn't bad at all. Hopefully I remember to update the machine reference page after writing here.

Last week (or maybe earlier this week?) I decided to tinker around with Lie-chan, since she's not really being used right now and I had found a way to possibly get the Sound Blaster Audigy SE card working in Manjaro. I don't remember too much of the specifics, but it involved setting the default card by hand, which made the sound work pretty much perfectly with VLC, but not G(something) music player. I then found that I had to make a configuration file to copy the sound from the front speakers to the rear speakers and to the subwoofer, and luckily, the post also explained how it worked, so I copied the sound from the front speakers to the centre (just like the subwoofer) because the centre's tweeters are better than any of the other speakers.

I'm quite happy with the results, since I don't have to have GNOME 3 and XFCE in Tumbleweed and mess around with the YaST2 sound setting to get the card to read properly or whatever it was.

With Mei-chan, I finally got her the pair of blu-ray burners, did the massive near-300 data-disk DVD copy-job, cleaned up the files/folders, and got the burning projects lined up and saved in K3b.

What I had forgotten was another large project (about 44GB) that was on Melty, which I transferred this past Thursday after work, burning the first blu-ray before going to bed (which wasn't the best idea).

Yesterday after work, I burned the second disk of that project and got an I/O error, which made me suspicious (though I should've been when the first disk technically erred out but was still readable except for the last file). I then found that I was supposed to use cdrecord and not cdrkit, but because the article/post was somewhat old, cdrecord is no longer its own package - it's now included with cdrtools.

After burning the first disk again, it finished and verified with no problems (albeit faster as well), which made me wonder why cdrkit hasn't been depreciated if it can't handle blu-rays.

I've got other projects that I have pictures for, but I probably won't be getting around to that until I get my Nexus 5x. (More on this in the next post.)

An upcoming project is to get the Banpi to Tumbleweed - I know I'll only have cli, but since I haven't a need for a graphical manager, I should be fine (it's only a matter of figuring out how to configure transmission-cli). With that, I'll be able to do a headless system and save myself the bluez headache (along with removing the bluetooth adapter).


Things I've learned:

• cdrkit is junk for blu-ray burning.
• I can configure the sound card to work properly in Manjaro.
• Try the simpler way to fix a problem before the more complicated ways.