Screen issues still not sorted :(

I was hoping changing from HDMI to DisplayPort would sort out my screen issues. To a degree, it did.

I can now use my screen at full resolution using the amdgpu driver from Fedora repositories but the intermittent, incredibly irritating, sporadic blank screen issues persists.

Another suggestion that came up from a forum was to try X11 instead of Wayland to draw stuff, that helped with a wonky dialog issue, but still no fix for the sporadic blank screen.

Getting to the point I'm almost tempted to try another monitor in case it's not software. That would be surprising though.

Display issues still being a nuisance

A while back I purchased a nice fat Benq BL2710.

Besides the frustrating front panel buttons, it seems to be a really decent monitor, which I'd be really happy with if I could get Fedora Linux to drive it correctly.

Initially I was using the onboard Intel graphics, which simply refused to offer the resolution(s) I want to run at (2560 x 1440).

So I decided to try a seperate graphics card. After some reading that suggested it may be workable with Linux I went for a 4GB Gigabyte Radeon RX460.

[dafoot@bigfoot ~]$ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Baffin [Radeon RX 460] (rev cf)
[dafoot@bigfoot ~]$ 

Now under Fedora 25 there are included open drivers for this GPU and it appears my system has them installed:

[root@bigfoot ~]# lshw -c video
  *-display                 
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Baffin [Radeon RX 460]
       vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
       version: cf
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=amdgpu latency=0
       resources: irq:131 memory:b0000000-bfffffff memory:c0000000-c01fffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:de300000-de33ffff memory:c0000-dffff
[root@bigfoot ~]# 

So now my 'select resolution' interface at least recognised the Radeon 460 and the monitor as Benq BL2710.

So that's progress.

Unfortunately, any time I select that resolution, it is unusable....all fuzzy/jaggy.

Curiously, I just took a screenshot to add to this post while the scrren was a mess like that and the image showed all the text perfectly clearly.

I wonder if DisplayPort will behave any better if I try that.

Brother MFCL8650CDW

I've recently been battling with a Brother laser printer to get it to print from my Fedora (23) workstation. It had been working before, so compatability wasn't the issue, unless some library withing my system had changed. Turns out it was SELinux getting in the way (I usually have it off altogether as it causes me more headaches than I can be bothered with!). Running the command below seemed to sort it out:

setsebool -P cups_execmem 1

New machine, new OS, new problems

It's been a while since I posted here. Perhaps because I've lost interest in the idea of blogging about Linux or perhaps because it's because I've not had any interesting issues worth sharing.

Thankfully , it's the latter. Fedora has been mostly good to me recently, now running on 23.

I recently upgraded my hardware to an Intel i5 CPU and a Gigabyte 710X G1 Gaming 7 mainboard. A respectable setup for an home machine that isn't used for gaming. Editing my photos is suddenly so much more relaxing, now the computer has to wait for me and not the other way round!

Back to the topic in hand and the reason for this post.

Video playback. After sorting a bunch of issues with old nVidia drivers polutign the bootup of the machine (meaning I couldn't get to a stable desktop only CLI) I encountered an unexpected issue that seems small but will become incredibly irritating I'm sure.

Anytime I attempt to play a video, whether from a disk or YouTube/Facebook etc the display goes black for a few seconds. When the display comes back the video is playing, but I've missed a few seconds.

This also happens when I try to skip to certain points in videos using the progress bar.

I suspect this is an issue with not having relevant drivers or video codecs or some such, but as I've not been able to find any hints in logs I'm at a bit of a loss at the moment.

Fedora 20 and running ASP scripts

A while back I posted about trying (unsuccessfully) to run some ASP scripts on my Fedora (20) box using XSP.

I knew nothing of ASP tech at the time, so I ended up doing a fair bit learning. Turns out ASP has been largely replaced by a newer version of the tech, ASPX. XSP has a half decent go at trying to run the scripts.

I was still getting plenty of issues, so ended up installing a Microsoft IDE on my Windows laptop and doing the work there. I forget what it was called, but I was very glad to have got the project running correctly under ASPX before the trial ran out! It was a nasty to work with when used to the likes of Eclipse and IntelliJ for Java and PHP development.

In brighter news, I've now migrated that project over to PHP so there is no longer a reliance on running a Windows server. Happy days!

Linux, Android, Banshee and file systems

I recently signed up to a new mobile contract, which came with a shiny new Xperia Z1 Android phone. The phone has been greate so far in the couple of months I've had it, but I've just encounted my first real irritation.

Trying to get Banshee to sync music to the SD card in phone is proving tricky. When I run the sync I get bucket loads of errors in the Banshee log:

"Error setting permissions: Function not implemented"

So I figure this must be a filesystem issue and formatted the card into NTFS, where I have had success in the past. Then when I reboot the phone it sees the card format as NTFS and wont let me use it without formatting it back to exFAT.

It seems the phone REALLY wants the SD card to be formatted in exFAT!

Before I got to this point I had to persuade my Fedora 20 system to mount the xperia z1 phone via a USB cable. At first it wouldn't recognise the card, but installing of two packages (fuse-exfat and exfat-utils) seem to sort that.

The system file explorer could copy files back and forth quite happily, so that works. It's just Banshee that's having issues with this exFAT SD card.

I closed Banshee as a bad job while I did some Googling, when I reopened Banshee I discovered the file count shown for the SD card had increased. It seems Banshee had managed to copy my music over despite lots of misleading errors.

So while I don't know how to stop those errors about not being able to set the permissions, it seems Banshee is actually doing what I want.

In case you are wondering, it turns out exFAT is a Microsoft proprietry filesystem they are hawking as the filesystem of choice for larger capacity memory cards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

ASP, XSP, Apache, mod_mono and Fedora 20

It's been a while since I posted here. I've not given up on my project, in fact I'm still very happy with Linux and the Fedora distribution. I've just not been doing anything particularly interesting with it recently.

So why the post? Well I've come into contact with an ASP project I need to make some changes to.

PHP? fine, it runs under Apache.
Java? no problem, I can run that under Tomcat.

So I've landed myself a bit of work on an old website, yay. The site is running on ASP of some sort, boo.

Of course I'm running Fedora with Apache not Windows with IIS.

A bit of reading leads me to all sorts of old pages about XSP and running mod_mono under Apache. I tried getting mod_mono to interpret the asp scripts I've downloaded, but Apache can't find mod_mono plugin.

I really don't care if ASP ends up running under Apache or some other server, in fact in some ways I'd rather use a standalone ASP server. Which is where XSP comes in.

XSP is a small service/server that should enable serving up of ASP scripts as I understand it.

Installed ok with yum. Then when it comes to running it, it seems to be a simple matter of running it in the project directory.

At localhost:8080 I get a 404 page which is clearly being served up by the xsp server, so that appears to be running at least.

When I try to hit one of the scripts (localhost:8080/default.asp), rather than getting anything vaguely like a nice webpage, I get the ASP code as text. So no ASP processing has occurred.

There is no output in the terminal running the server, nor in the /var/log directory.

This one could run for a while I suspect....