Brasstacks

The previous notes don't seem to work in all circumstances. In particular, trying to enable a CHAOS networking port in .VLM configuration causes NFS to fail in the writing of the Site file. I have been unable to diagnose this as it appears the VLM stops trying to use NFS to access the file after starting a write, and then times out, not even showing any activity on tcpdump when a restart is attempted. It's possible the presence of a CHAOS interface causes it to expect NFILE or perhaps it decides to prefer FTP over TCP. In principle, it should be possible to invoke the debugger on the VLM to understand what is going on, but all the networking is very flexible and elaborate and I have no idea how to debug Genera at this point. On the Linux side, I can find nothing at all that shows an error or misconfiguration or anything at all once the problem starts. After defining the site and saving an incremental world, adding a CHAOS interface seems OK, but I have been stumped trying to ge...

There are some existing guides to setting up the (unauthorized) Open Genera VLM on x86-64 Linux, but I wanted to tweak them a bit, and came up with a couple of items that diverge from the existing advice. Note that a bunch of URLs on that link should point to https://archives.loomcom.com/  not the static.loomcom.com address. My general goals were to avoid having to run the genera binary as root, and run as a distinct user to have some sense of security (even if the sense is misplaced). I also wanted to change the network addresses, and don't want to use the standard pathnames for the Unix system files and the user directories, and the changes to do so were only in screenshots. My setup Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS, amd64 My Linux machine is named ubuntu I want all this simulated Genera stuff to happen on  subnet 10.0.10.x  with my Linux host under the name  genera-ubuntu  at 10.0.10.1  and the virtual Lisp machine genera  at 10.0.10.2  (...

In order to better serve those folks Googling "2007FP xorg.conf", I've included an annotated xorg.conf file that seems to work well for me and my Dell 2007FP monitor. I hope it helps you. (It is, naturally, provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, etc., etc., because it could very well damage your hardware, although nowadays monitors are much more forgiving than they once were.) (It seems from my site logs that my venting about my adventures with Linux, xorg.conf, and the 2007FP is one of the more popular Google hits for my site now, just one day after it was posted.)

Time for a "Linux is not ready for the desktop" rant. Some time ago, I picked up a Slackware 10.1 4-disc set. I've been trying to use it on a Dell Precision 610 MT workstation, Xeon Pentium III. (That's what you can read on the label.) Through some struggling through the initial start up screens, I was able to determine the box has two SCSI internal drives. I also have a Dell 2007FP monitor (pretty nice). Getting X to come up in something other than 1024x768 was an ordeal. Perhaps I should have realized that no amount of so-called "handholding" was going to help me, and gone to the xorg.conf man page directly. Silly me, I thought this would be like a normal desktop environment, where I would open something called something like a "control panel" and find a sub-thingy labelled "Display" (KDE buries this under Peripheral) and select the 1600x1200 resolution my display claims to support. No. Only 1024x768 or worse. So I go to slackware...