I wish I was joking. 2022-01-14
That appalling joke has been doing the rounds for a few years now – but apparently 1024×768 really is my New Year’s Resolution, since I just made the mistake of allowing Linux Mint to update itself, and now it won’t do anything higher.
<sigh>
Oh well, while I’m being old and grumpy, I might as well get something else off my chest:
You know what I miss? Web forums.
Continue reading2021-11-21
So I’m still, in between tinkering with FPGAs, trying to settle upon a Linux distro for desktop use. I still keep coming back to Mint Mate edition despite the annoyances I’ve found with the latest version, and having installed both an SSD and some extra RAM in the machine I’m about to migrate to, I figured I’d better run some tests. The Ubuntu (and thus Mint) live install contains Memtest86+ so I booted from USB, selected the test and watched the machine lock up half way through the very first test.
Odd, since the machine actually runs just fine…
It turns out the version of Memtest86+ in the current Ubuntu LTS is completely and horribly broken.
The solution to my problem was to install memtest86+ using apt, then remove it again. The removal doesn’t remove the meta files, so provided there’s an image of the correct name in /boot it remains in the grub menu. Therefore, one can download a non-broken binary, copy it to /boot, run grub-update and *now* the RAM test actually works.
One side-effect, however, is that the grub setup installed by the USB live system when installing Linux is somewhat different from what you get when you subsequently run grub-update from the installed-and-running system – I had to edit some config files to get the menu back..
2021-10-19
Out of curiosity I recently tried to build the toolchain for ZPU – and as I rather suspected would happen, it has succumbed to the Half Life of Software, and no longer builds cleanly on up-to-date systems.
[smug mode]In the meantime, I recently succeeded in building the 832 toolchain (832a, 832l, 832d and the 832 VBCC backend) for Amiga, using the Amiga version of VBCC and the Minimig core![/smug mode]
I still have a definite soft spot for ZPU, though.
Continue reading2021-09-23
A few months ago I bought a couple of the ridiculously cheap DECA boards from Arrow – they’re sadly sold out now – but $37 bought you a MAX10 FPGA with 50,000 LEs, some DDR3 RAM, i2s audio, an HDMI port, USB and network ports, and a couple of GPIO headers. (It also bought you all the blue LEDs – I highly recommend not looking directly at the board when you power it up for the first time!)
I’m not the only one who’s been interested by this board – a bunch of MiST and MiSTer cores have already been ported to a DECA-based reference platform which involves a MiSTer-style SDRAM module, PS/2 keyboard, DB9 joystick and VGA video on the GPIO headers.
There is now an open-source DDR3 memory controller which has DECA as a main supported target.
And there is a project which caught my attention recently, which turns the DECA board into an external USB2 soundcard.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Naturally I wanted to try this out, so I cloned the repo on my own machine. Hmmm… there seems to be lots of Python involved. I’m not familiar with Python, but by now it’s a well-established, mature language with reliable, well-thought-out packaging and dependency management, right?
Continue reading2021-08-11
This little rant’s been brewing for a while.
I’ve been using Linux Mint for some years on my daily driver machine, and Mint13 Mate edition had been working well enough that I hadn’t noticed how many years had gone by since I installed it.
Until…
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