Linux Basics - Finding Stuff

Something has happened with the latest versions of operating systems. The 'find' option has become ridiculously stupid. It seems that there is a move away from actually searching on the disk for the stuff you want, and towards the machine managing a database of all it's files and searching that when you want to look for something.

Inevitably what you want has either recently been written to the disk or is not in a folder which has been indexed by the search routine. This means you can't find fucking anything. Another brave step into the future, backwards.

Linux, at least, has a useful brute force command line command to find stuff. It is called, sensibly:

find

To use it to find a file in your current folder and all its subfolders, with the letters 'abc' somewhere in the file name, you type:

find . -name "*abc*" -print

If you want to find all OpenOffice spreadsheets in your home folder, you would instead type:

find ~/ -name "*.ods" -print

The squiggle "~" is just a linux way of say "My Home Folder, whatever it is actually called."

I have to use this sometimes when I have built a bit of software from source code, installed it and it has fucking vanished. Some applications hide away their executable files somewhere monumentally stupid. If it isn't in the path, you have no chance of running it. So, you can run:

find /usr/bin/ -name "[name of program]" -print

and it should track it down for you. Helpfully this should also locate the documentation for the software if you drop the /bin bit of the path. If this doesn't work, you may want to try /opt/ instead, or even the surprisingly common /up/the/programmers/arse/.

This command does not rely on bloody stupid index databases and therefore actually stands a decent chance of locating the thing that you want.

The fact that Windows 7 is revered like the coming of the chosen one tells you how fucking frustrating the previous versions were; users go mad for this one just because it bloody works. Well its search function certainly doesn't bloody work. I can't go near it. The result is that I now have to load Ubuntu from a live distribution, mount the Windows disk and then run the find utility just to get my stuff. This does not make me happy.

Further Adventures in the land of Leave My Fucking Screen Alone

Right. Apparently, the problem is that all the lovely gui interfaces that come with ubuntu do not know how to talk to the xserver properly when it comes to things like bloody screen savers.

This means command line people.

If you type in:

xset q

the system should show you some settings relating to the xserver. These are the settings that should be, but actually are not, changed in the Screensaver and Power Management programs that you launch from System -> Preferences.

What you are looking for is the section:

Screen Saver:
prefer blanking:  yes    allow exposures:  yes
timeout:  0    cycle:  0

If you do not want a blanking screen they should look like the above. If they actually show "timeout: [some number of seconds probably 600]" then you will be enjoying screen blanking hell.

So, you type in:

xset s 0

to disable the screensaver timeout.

Now, you should be able to leave the machine for more than 10 minutes without frantically wiggling the mouse or hitting random keys to keep it alive. Why in the name of sanity the Preferences settings DO NOT ACTUALLY CHANGE this setting is a complete fucking mystery to me. I mean really, what is the fucking point of having a Preferences dialogue for this setting anyway? It doesn't actually change anything, other than my blood pressure. Here is a bug report on what appears to be this issue going back to 2006.

Apparently, if you want this change to be permanent you need to stick the following lines into your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Oh yes, that should be fun. Editing xorg.conf is a shortcut to corrupting your display and having to sacrifice your first born to get a graphical user interface back. Use at your discretion, and for fuck's sake keep a backup and have a LiveCD on standby.

Section “ServerFlags”
        Option "BlankTime" "0"
        Option "StandbyTime" "0"
        Option "SuspendTime" "0"
        Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection 

Now, back to using F1 Live Timing without the screen going dark in the dying moments of Q3 a-fucking-gain.

Another thing that works

In my current mellow mood, I thought I would also draw attention to Microsoft's bitlocker software. I have been using the open source Truecrypt if I need security on my USB sticks. It is useful, but it has a crappy open source licence which is non-GPL. This means that it does not automatically integrate with Ubuntu or other fully open source software. Also, you need to wipe a drive clean to encrypt it, which takes some time to get started.

Windows Vista and 7 come with bitlocker software which is Microsoft's version of drive or partition encryption. It is available in the premium versions of Windows, so you do have to pay extra to get it. It does, however, just bloody work.

If you have an external drive which you use to back up all your personal data, including password safes, personal correspondence, personal photographs of your family and so forth, then the last thing you want is some sticky oik in PC World sifting through all of that if the external drive fails. In particular if you happen to buy a Seagate Clicky Clicky Special, which then starts clicking, you may feel that a PC World trip is in the near future to arrange a repair or a replacement. Now, if you also use this external drive to transfer large video files between your HTPC and your desktop PC, you do not want to have to type in a passphrase every time you want to move the disk between the two machines. That would be a pain in the neck.

Having used Truecrypt for some time I was anticipating having to wipe the disk before creating a full encrypted partition. This was going to be a pain because there was about 650GB of material already on that disk. Not only was it going to be a pain to copy over the files again, but I was going to be without a backup while that procedure completed.

I decided to carry out a test run on a 4GB usb stick. Amazingly Windows gave me the option to simply start encrypting the disk without wiping it and starting again. This was unexpected. I agreed to the option, set up the passphrase and stored the encryption key, and left it running for a few minutes. It just bloody worked. I was stunned. The other great thing about the system was that it would let me pause the encryption procedure while it was ongoing.

With some small trepidation remaining I connected up the 1TB external drive and went through the same procedure. It worked. After about 30 hours of encryption. For obvious reasons I did not hold the cat's arse to the fire by trying to pause and unpause the encryption procedure.

As far as performance is concerned this is a fairly big hit. The sustained data rate on the drive unencrypted was about 50Mb/s. During and following encryption that rate has dropped to about 30Mb/s. A 40% hit is, as I say, significant, but when the drive is used solely to backup operating files data rate is not a mission critical feature.

Lastly, and perhaps most pleasantly, I noticed that windows has an option to dispense with the need for a passphrase on the removable drive on a per PC basis. Fan-fucking-tastic. This means that once the drive is connected once on a machine you can avoid having to re-enter the passphrase every fecking time.

All of this means that I can now use the disk in exactly the way I used to, between the two PC's, with the only negative effect of the encryption being a 40% hit on the data rate.

Having done all this, of course, the fucking click went away and there is no imminent visit to PC World on the cards.

Ubuntu Screen Saver Redux

IMPORTANT UPDATE: There is a solution here. Well, it worked for me anyway.

There is quite clearly some sort of bizarre fetishist working at Canonical. This individual gets their rocks off by entering into a cat and mouse game with Ubuntu users who do not want their fucking screens to go blank every 10 minutes.

The user starts by thinking that the screen is being turned off to save it from burning in. Realising that CRT's went out with Prince's last chance of decent royalties from "Let's party like it is 1999", the user will turn this option off. Especially if the user has a laptop which very rarely have a CRT displays - even in the second millennium.

(Although I did once encounter one. Some stupid bugger had bought a "Laptop" off some bloke down the pub for his child for Christmas. Turned up at my house at about 8pm on Christmas eve with something that looked like a double sized oscilloscope. You could only accurately describe this as a Laptop if you were a T100. He wanted some games for the vessel of his genes to play on their new computer of Christmas morning. I found some mouldy 5 1/4 inch disks (!) with some shareware on them and sent the man home, with a tear in my eye at the thought of the agonised disappointment that was going to be etched into the face of the little cherub that has been expecting a Sega Mega Drive from Santa and instead got a shitbox that could barely play monochrome pong. Oh, and I missed most of Hunt for Red October which was on TV trying to get the fucking thing to work).

So you turn off the screen saver and wait the requisite 10 minutes. Blank screen. Oh for fucks sake. You then think "A Ha!", maybe this is a POWER saving not a SCREEN saving option. After all I am running a Netbook where battery life is at a premium. The OS may be cutting the power to the screen not just saving it! So - into Power Management and select 'never' for "put display to sleep when inactive for" when running on AC power. Wait 10 minutes, blank screen. Oh for fuck's sake.

If you used previous versions of Ubuntu, then you have fought this battle before. You will recall that what you need to do, after HOURS of googling, is use your friendly neighbourhood gconf-editor to change the /apps/gnome-screensaver/idle_activation_enabled setting to false by unchecking it. So, using Karmic you uncheck this.

At this point the aforementioned fetishist giggles with glee and starts to touch themselves inappropriately.

You wait 10 minutes, and ......

Blank screen!

Fucking bastards. This worked in the previous version of Ubuntu and now you have fucked it up you bastards. Where, WHERE FOR FUCK'S SAKE, is the god damned setting which stops the fucking display going blank after 10 minutes. And why if you uncheck Activate Screensaver AND set turn off display to never does the fucking display keep going blank?

If this is not fixed in Lucid, I am going to hunt down the little pervert who is toying with me, and I am going to perform activities on them that would sicken Dr Mengele EVERY 10 MINUTES until they fix this.

Intermittent Problems

You know what I really fucking hate? If you read the post title you do. Intermittent problems. I have a logical rational and determinative approach to problem solving PC's.

Step One. Discover Something is not working.
Step Two. Make an educated guess as to the cause.
Step Three. Come up with a way to find out if that cause is actually the cause.
Step Four. Use that way to test.
Step Five. Check if the problem remains.
Step Six. If the problem remains go back to Step Two. If the problem is gone, Congratulations you have solved the problem.

Say the display shows a blank screen only. Guess it is the video card. Reason that if the video card is swapped and another one works it is the video card. Swap the video card. Display active? Yes? Then it is the video card.

This is brilliant. However, I really fucking hate it when you cannot rely on Step Five. This is the crappy situation where, for example, the VGA connector on the motherboard or the cable to the monitor has a wire or pin on the verge of breaking. Hence the simple act of jiggling all the connectors by removing one card and replacing it with another can, temporarily, solve the problem of a blank display despite the fact that the problem really was not caused by the card.

You think you have solved the problem, but give it a few hours, days or weeks, and it will reoccur. You are now back to Step One, but you now cannot rely on Step Five. Or in other words, you are fucked.

This is extremely annoying, and it turns problem diagnosis into an exercise in statistics. I feel a bit like Einstein, complaining loudly and longly about the unfairness of a universe in which matters cannot be predicted by a study of cause and effect. Instead you are left floundering in a sea of random chances and statistics.

I have an intermittent problem at the moment - a 750GB SATA HDD keeps disappearing. Not literally, obviously, but Windows from time to time just forgets it is there. I lose all my desktop shortcuts to that disk and it does not show up in My Computer. A swift restart fixes this, and the disk comes back. I have no idea why this is happening. It could be the disk on the way out. It could be a dodgy SATA cable. It could be the SATA controller on the motherboard. It could be the drivers for the SATA controller on the motherboard.

The Step 3 plan is to swap the cable, and use a different SATA port on the motherboard. I will be unable to rely on Step Five though, because the fucking thing may keep working for a week or two before the problem re-occurs.

Pain in the arse.

Something that Works

While most of what passes for intelligent comment on this blog is in the nature of complaints about the stupid way that some things seem to be designed not to work, it seems only fair that I record a recent positive experience.

I have commented on the spectacular hardware failure saga below. What I was left with during the repair period was a hard disk with the OS installed, and a video card.

Ordinarily with microsoft operating systems if you swap a hard disk from one machine to another, windows, to put it politely, shits itself. If it boots at all you get regular blue screens and no peripherals will work.

However, this hard disk had windows 7 installed on it. I thought to myself, what the hell I'll try and plug it into another motherboard. I already had a spare machine so I dragged the new machine's case over to the old machine. I ran the power cables from the new machine to the motherboard on the old machine. The SATA data cables were run between the motherboard in the old case to the disks bolted into the new case.

On firing the machine up I was stunned, nay astonished, to discover that against all previous experience windows did not shit itself.

Instead the OS loaded up drivers for the changed wireless card, and sound card and started working perfectly well.

The only problem was with fucking stupid DRM in iTunes. Despite purchasing upgrades to DRM free mp3 files as and when they become available I still have several protected files in my iTunes database. Of course iTunes thinks I have copied the files to a shiny new machine. This is despite the actual physical files on the disk being identical. iTunes says new motherboard and CPU = new machine so you have to re-authorise the files. Of course because of the catastrophic failure of the new board, that means I have to use up one of my 5 authorised machines.

All my other software, including Steam games, worked fine.

So, thumbs up to windows 7. It doesn't shit itself if you swap motherboards. They can put that on the box.

Of course, linux is perfectly happy to run on whatever machines you throw it at (even from a USB key) as long as you enable the appropriate kernel parameters. Which stuff like Ubuntu does by default.

Hardware Fuckup

Most of the grumbling herein refers to software not acting the way it should. Of course, computer fuck ups are not solely related to software. I therefore take this opportunity to present the saga that was my recent hardware failure fuck up.

There comes a time in a PC owner's life when the game plays like a slide show, video takes an age to encode and Windows takes about three ice ages to boot. It is the time of an upgrade. This year, I reached such a time. My general rule is that if it doesn't double performance, it's not worth buying. I was running a 2.2Ghz Athlon X2, with 2Gb of RAM and a 9600GT graphics card. I was also using a 750Gb HDD.

When I purchased my last motherboard I wanted to keep the RAM I had so I went for the socket 939 chipset instead of the newer AM2. This was, ultimately a mistake, because it meant that this time around I could not just buy a brand new AM2/AM3 Athlon/Phenom. The only 939 chips still on sale are only marginally faster than the chip that I had. So, new platform then.

At the time of writing there is a clear leader in home PC enthusiast CPU's. It is the Intel i5 750. This is a Quad core processor running at 2.66Ghz. It has a nifty facility whereby one can reduce the number of cores in use and boost the speed up to a max of 3.2Ghz. You get the best of both single/multi core worlds in other words.

The motherboard I went for is the Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2. It comes highly recommended for the i5 750. To this I added 4Gb of G.Skill 12800 DDR3 RAM. All that guff means that it is rated to run at (12800/8(bits)) or 1600Mhz.

My biggest decision was whether to get a new graphics card (specifically the ATI 5770) or a Solid State Disk. A 64Gb SSD is about the same price as that graphics card. It is also the first size of SSD that actually makes sense. You can install Windows and a couple of games in 64Gb. Large video files, iTunes libraries and so forth, do not require a speedy SSD, so that can happily still take up room on the 750Gb HDD.

In the end I went for the SDD. I picked up a OCZ Agility drive. I have to say it is not a decision I have regretted. The drive has the fancy new 'Trim' enabled firmware and has performed flawlessly. Until you have actually used an SSD based PC you do not really have an appreciation for how much of a speed increase you get.

As for the graphics, it turns out that the CPU was something of a bottleneck in my old system because the new platform gets much more out of the 9600GT. I can now run the games which really tested my previous set up (Crysis, GTA IV, World in Conflict and Assassin's Creed) on mostly full settings. Bear in mind that my monitor is a 19" 1440x900 job, so the 9600GT does not have to pump around too many pixels.

Anyway, the system ran perfectly sensibly for a month. Then, all of a sudden, it just stopped. As in power off, no start up when button pressed. Now, I admit I had applied a modest overclock to the CPU. If I recall it was running about 3.3Ghz instead of 2.66Ghz. You will find plenty of reports about the chip running at 4Ghz, so I thought I was a-ok.

I am no stranger to overclocking failures, so I tried the usual method of restoring the machine. Step one, wait for the system to cool down. Nothing. Step two, clear the CMOS chip. Nothing. Ah. Something bad has happened. Try another power supply. Oh - lights and the CPU fan spins! For 500 milliseconds. Bad. However the other power supply only had the 20 pin power cable, not the beefier 24 pin. Plus it only had a 4 pin 12v cable and the motherboard needs an 8 pin connection. So, test the first power supply on another machine. Nothing - A HA! Dead power supply. Odd, but not impossible. You see I did not change power supplies when I upgraded the kit. The existing one was a beefy 500W Enermax unit, with all the necessary connections. However it looked like it just wasn't up to the job of overclocking the new kit. So, I order a new 600W power supply. It arrived next day and I fired it up. It behaved in exactly the same way as the older PSU - lights, brief fan spin. Oh bollocks.

I now have RAM, a CPU and a Motherboard. All could be faulty. I have no other machines which use this platform so I cannot test any of them. On balance, and because it is the cheapest to replace I opt to send back the motherboard first. I bought the stuff from ebuyer.com. Their policy is not to accept any returns if you have had the kit for more than 30 days. They just direct you to the manufacturer. This is extremely frustrating. And not entirely legal. There is nothing in the Sale of Goods Act which allows them to adopt this rigid attitude. However, when you have been overclocking you cannot really complain too much. So I emailed Gigabyte. I have not used a manufacturers RMA system before, but I have to say that Gigabyte were excellent. Highly recommended. They asked for some details, and gave me an address and reference number. I boxed up the board and sent it recorded delivery to Gigabyte. Cost was £5.

I sent it to them on a Monday, and by Friday it was back in my hands. They had identified some components on the board which had failed and they had replaced them. Good stuff think I - problem found and fixed. The components were the VRMs which also explained why the PSU had failed.

So, I install the board back into the machine, hook up the new PSU and let rip - and it works. Brilliant. I get all my stupid DRM licences re-activated and get back to the video encoding I was doing when it all went south the first time. I do not, however, overclock the machine. I installed Speedfan to monitor the CPU temperature. I had set the alarm temperature in the BIOS to 60C. I noted that Speedfan seemed to be reporting a temperature of 80C which was a little alarming. I left it encoding for a while, and came back to find Speedfan's graphs showing a temperature under load of more than 100C had been recorded. However, no alarms were going off, and the system seemed find. So I ran another encoding task. This time when I returned, however, the system was dead again. Exactly the same symptoms as the first time. Dead power supply, brief fan spin up. Oh, fuck.

I had had the PSU for less than 30 days, so I got straight on to ebuyer and reported it had failed. They asked me to return it to them, and it was picked up on the following Monday morning. I also went back to Gigabyte and reported a further failure with the board. I have to say at this stage that I had no idea what the problem was. I asked Gigabyte to carry out more detailed burn in checks with the board. I sent it back to them the same Monday.

My concern at this point was that the CPU has been fundamentally damaged by the original overclock - and that to the point where it was killing other components. Gigabyte actually asked me to send them the CPU but said they could take no responsibility for its safety. On balance I wasn't prepared to risk it - it could still be the board after all.

I spent some time researching the operating temperatures of the i5 750 and found out that 80C and 100C were way beyond what it should have been running at. My suspicions turned to the cooling system. I was using the reference intel heat sync and fan that had come with the chip. It uses this plastic push pin system to attach it to the motherboard. It struck me as badly designed and flimsy when I was installing it, but what do I know about heat sync design. I formed the view that this was the problem and needed replaced asap. The biggest and baddest heat sync and fan for the i5 750 is the Titan Fenrir. This is a frankly ludicrous 120mm fan and heat sync. So I ordered one while the board and PSU were away.

Both ebuyer.com and Gigabyte technical support had the components back in my hands by the Friday, which I do consider to be excellent service. In particular Gigabyte sent me photographs of the board being thoroughly tested and remaining stable.

I got all the components back and reassembled the machine with the Titan Fenrir. I was extremely apprehensive but fired it up. It happily loaded windows, and I checked the temperatures asap. 25C. Not 80C - 25C. The new fan had made a significant difference. Since then I have had no further failures.

So what was the actual problem with this? I put it down to the stupid Intel Cooler design. It is too easy not to get a decent fit to the motherboard. The Titan Fenrir, by contrast, has a backing plate and bolts, meaning that when it is fixed, you know it is fixed.

There is another possibility though. Remember the memory I got was rated to run at 1600Mhz? Well, the bus speed of the i5 750 is 133Mhz. The memory runs at 10x the bus speed. So how does the 1600Mhz work? It uses a system called XMP - which has a particular profile built into the memory chip which the BIOS on the motherboard can read. I had activated this (before each failure) without thinking too much about it. I looked more closely at it after the second failure. It turns out that what it does is raise the CPU bus speed to 160Mhz which then allows the memory to run at 1600Mhz. This means that if you then further over clock the chip you are going way beyond the original settings. This meant that when I did the first, modest over clock, I was actually stressing the system more that I had thought. This time around I have not activated the XMP. So far, so good.

Lessons learned? Intel heat syncs and fans are crap on the i5 750. XMP memory profiles may not be good.

Oh, and my i5 chip must be made out of asbestos. It's max temperature is 72C. It went way beyond that to the point where the power draw was enough to (presumably) fry the motherboard (twice) and 2 power supplys. At no point did it shutdown to protect itself - or the other components.

Finally it turned out my case did not have a speaker, so the BIOS was probably beeping away its warnings to no avail because no speaker was attached to the jumper. I have now attached a small stand alone speaker which should mean I get the warnings in the future.