A home for Science, Technology, and Slackware.
Posted on Nov 30, 2020 by kingbeowulf
Here's the long awaited update to my Slackware rebuild started in October (see 'To Everything There Is a Season' post Oct. 10, 2020). The new Ryzen system is up and running Slackware64-current multilib. I am a couple of weeks behind on updates. The new KDE/Plasma5 and Xfce 4.14 just hit /testing and should soon be merged in the main tree. The 15.0 release is looking good so far and will really shine on this new system.
Posted on Nov 28, 2020 by kingbeowulf
Recently we ran into a glitch using an online editor in a website CMS with the Firefox browser. Every time we tried to paste plain text into the editor, the editor would crash or display an error message. Other browsers worked fine (chromium, SeaMonkey), and Firefox worked fine on other workstations. It turns out it was the method some online editors use to process clipboard events. In 'about:config' the offending browser had
dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled
set to 'false'. Resetting to 'true' fixed the issue (the default setting). I had probably set this, or some no longer in use add-on/extension had set it, to enforce additional security or privacy.
Posted on Oct 10, 2020 by kingbeowulf
It is finally time to say goodbye to the MSI X99S Krait SLI build from 2014. This was my first Intel CPU build since 1999-2000. That winter I built an Athlon64 system with a Gigabyte Geforce 256DDR as more performance than what Intel offered (no 64-bit!) at a much better price.
It was shortly thereafter that I briefly switched to SLAMD64 until Slackware64 was released.
I started out with an Intel i7-5820k and 16 GB DDR4, with a Gigabyte Geforce GTX660 Windforce. Then came the EVGA GTX 1060, followed by an additional 16 GB DDR4 (I deplore empty slots...), 256 GB NVME, and the current Intel i7-6850K. When I added the new CPU I upgraded the passive CPU heatsink and fan with a Thermaltake 240mm dual fan closed loop liquid coolor (Water 3.0 pump).
When Slackware64-current added kernel 5.4.x, I temporarily blacked out and replaced the Nvidia GPU with the
** XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC Ultra III **
Why? Absolutely no idea. As I said, I must have blacked out. This is a massive GPU card and barely fits in the Antec P100 case.
The bonus of a Navi class CPU on kernel 5.4 is that I can now run a full opensource amdgpu/Mesa GPU stack with OpenGL and vulkan hardware 3D accelleration. I can hardly wait to see what this PCI-express 4.0 card can do on the new GIGABYTE X570 AORUS ELITE AMD Ryzen motherboard with PCI-express 4.0
Now I just have to rip out the old Intel guts, and plug in the new AMD guts...and clean out the dust.
Posted on Jul 22, 2020 by kingbeowulf
For many years I used nvidia drivers and utilities along with an xorg.conf to set up 2 to 3 monitors on KDE and Xfce. Recently I switched to the new AMD NAVI GPUs (RX 590 and RX 5700 XT) and the new Slackware-current amdgpu driver stack. In KDE, setting up dual monitors was easy in their display GUI, but Xfce-4.12 was problematic. No matter what I did, the second monitor was always on the virtual right side of the primaty monitor, or the primary and secondary were switched. A workaround is to invoke xrandr directly:
Posted on May 10, 2020 by kingbeowulf
On some AMD Ryzen X570 (Gigabyte) motherboards, virtualization is disabled in the UEFI firmware (BIOS). If are having trouble running qemu or virtualbox, the kvm module is loaded, and lscpu indicates that the CPU supports KVM, go into the BIOS, Tweaker menu tab (advanced mode), find "Advanced CPU settings" and enable "SVM mode".
On some boards, you can find the KVM settings under "Advanced CPU Core Settings" option group, under M.I.T tab - "Advanced Frequency Settings" option group - frequency settings - CPU core settings.
Older posts..