Note to self [x11-drm]

You've had to do this twice, so remember for next time if you get wonky behavior: =x11-base/x11-drm-20070314 works. x11-drm-20071019 and now x11-drm-20080710 do *not* work with the hardware on cabinet, and are masked in /etc/portage/package.mask. If a new version of x11-drm is released and causes an error message that drm is not supported, the solution is to downgrade x11-drm.

Alternatively, it appears those two versions are marked unstable, whereas 20070314 is marked stable. You may have had to switch to unstable to get a working version a year and a half ago (explaining why you have ~x86 in package.keywords), but the version you want is currently the latest stable version. Fix that.

In case anybody is randomly coming across this page, your graphics controller lists as "00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82945G/GZ Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)"

[Hopefully this was the cause of my other trouble as well as causing a failure in graphics acceleration that I never observed as I don't rely on it often...we'll see.]

Secret Decoder Ring

I have been informed that some of my recent posts here and to my Twitter account have been less than clear to the lay reader. I accordingly offer the following translations:

"Congratulations, you are the baddest motherfucker in the galaxy now!"

The devnull tournament has a "Unknown Challenge" every year (Unknown because they don't tell you what it is). These both indicate that I completed it. See the LJ post for more details on the challenge.

ARGH!! I "upgraded" xorg, and it completely stopped working...they renamed the driver for my video card. And fixing it is...having problems.

xorg is the part of Linux which allows it to display graphical things including a GUI. Without it it's like using a computer running DOS circa 1988. They released an upgrade to this key component of my operating system, and the people who made the upgrade cleverly designed it in a way that it required reconfiguring to work with my video card, but didn't *mention* that. This caused things to stop working correctly.

emerge -avtuND world

Update everything installed on the system. (That post is about how a particular upgrade which came out recently is a little extra-tricky if you don't do it exactly right.)

e2fsprogs, etc.

Important programs, without which my system will not operate correctly. Notably, they are required to be in working order for the program which updates bits of the system to operate correctly. Notice that having them get messed up when upgrading them therefore creates a major problem.

drm

Direct Rendering Manager -- a component which allows the computer to take advantage of advanced features of video cards released after 1995.

hup

Hangup. In this case, my computer has been randomly freezing approximately every 4 hours for the past few days. I'm playing nethack on a remote server, and I was concerned that the loss of connection could cause my games in progress to be messed up. I've been lucky.

04:48 < oracle> *** magus (Kni Hum Mal Law), 1937255 points, ascended. [Washington DC 1]

I won a game of nethack in the /dev/null/nethack tournament (abbreviated devnull). I played a lawful male human knight, on the Washington DC 1 server. This being my first ascension (win) of the tournament, it earns me a Dilithium Star.

x11-drm

See above regarding DRM. This is the package which supplies DRM support. Apparently the latest versions of it don't work with my hardware. I've now had to learn this twice, and I'd prefer to avoid a third time.

I hope this helps my readers understand a little better what I've been talking about. If not, maybe I'll post something when I get back from dancing tonight, 'cause that won't be esoteric...