Aaron44126

I had a lot more "documentation" on NotebookReview before that site went down that has not made its way over here. The project doesn't really have an official web site since NotebookReview went down. I have many competing priorities for my time, and this project went way down on the priority list when Dell changed how fan control works with their 2021 and newer systems. There is no known mechanism to control the fans on their newer laptops at all. Since both of my main laptops are now above this threshold (and one of them is now running Linux to boot), I'm now in a situation where I have to go out of my way to even dig up a system to test with. If someone ever figures out fan control for these newer laptops, I might look into finishing this up. In the meantime, it is pretty much released in an "as is" state. (Anyone is welcome to take the source code and run with it...) There are command line options but they are not designed to be used in conjunction with the GUI. If you give a command line parameter, DellFanManagement will do what you ask and then quit without ever popping a window open. It uses the same parameters as the old "DellFanCmd" program and you can see them just by passing "-?" or any unrecognized parameter to the app. Past builds did have a version number but for now I have just been kicking out occasional development builds without going through the proper release process, so that is why it shows 0.0.0.0 and "DEV" for the version number.

It all makes sense now... If you do not pass the "-a" option to taskset then it does not apply the affinity that you ask for to all of a process's threads, just the main thread. 😕

Thanks, ah well... Well, I successfully scripted out fixes for both the "screen stays on when lid is shut" problem and "automatic lock after 10 minutes doesn't function" problem, both are effectively solved, even if I think it was silly for me to have to do it myself. Also added a second 8TB drive to my RAID0 array for a total of 16TB capacity. The array reshaping was pretty slow, just moving at a porky 200 MB/sec (I'm used to Storage Spaces going around 10× that fast for similar operations); it took over 12 hours. It appeared to be CPU-constrained, using 100% time on a single E core. It did complete with zero downtime, and without breaking either of my other drives, so no complaints really. (Haven't heard back from the Sabrent people about my broken third drive... I'll be calling them tomorrow probably.) Oh, and I picked up an "AuthenTec Eikon Mini" USB fingerprint reader, which is supported natively by libfprint with no additional driver mucking required. Seems to be working fine so far. We'll see if it sticks. Messing around with process priority ("nice"/"renice") to prioritize and de-prioritize some things and I had no idea about Linux "autogroups" and how they impact this.

Twitter is apparently happy to give you a free blue check, if you are popular enough ... Even if you're dead. https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/24/23695534/twitter-blue-tick-verification-dead-celebrities

Set up jobs to copy of a bunch of data from my main laptop to my "home server" using rsync (home server is running Windows; thanks WSL for making this easy). Scheduled to run nightly, so less worry about losing files if another drive goes out. I still want to find a solution to "snapshot" certain files more frequently and be able to restore to a snapshot similar to Windows volume shadow copy or Apple Time Machine. I'm looking at restic. @Ionising_Radiation, I am wondering if you have any thoughts on this as a longer-term KDE user. Here's a perfect example of KDE being "rough around the edges"; it is failing at what I would consider to be basic laptop state management. Here's the situation: When I shut the lid, I want KDE to turn off the display (and keep it off until the lid is opened again) but otherwise keep the laptop powered on and running. I'd prefer it if the system also locked automatically, but its not a dealbreaker if it doesn't. In KDE settings under Power Management -> Energy Saving, there is setting with a few options for what to do if the laptop lid is closed. "Lock screen" seems to lock the screen, but not turn it off. "Turn off screen" seems to turn off the screen, but not lock it. Also, if I shut the laptop lid and have KDE turn off the screen with this option, and I wiggle the mouse around while the lid is still shut, the screen turns back on, even though the lid is still shut. (I have a USB mouse connected so it is impossible to pick up the laptop and move it without triggering mouse motion.) In addition to the heat coming from the system, the screen creates its own additional heat that is trapped in there when the lid is closed so I don't feel comfortable just leaving the display on in this case. I actually noticed this problem to begin with because the lid seemed hotter than normal! Googling around, I just see people resorting to scripts to get the behavior that they want. You can tell KDE to execute a script on certain events, but I already have a script running an infinite loop to do my fan management so I'll probably just add screen management in to that. cat /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state will tell me if the lid is open or shut. xset q | grep Monitor will tell me if the display is on or off. So I can repeatedly poll to see if the lid is shut but the display is on, and if so, I can turn the display off with xset dpms force off. (I don't use external monitors with this system, but if I ever do I can adjust accordingly.) At least it is easy to do this stuff with one-line shell commands in Linux, it would be much more awkward to do in Windows and I'd probably resort to writing a small program. ...Anyway, I'm still wondering if there is a better way just using KDE settings...? [Edit] Realized that the "automatically lock after X minutes idle" setting is not working either. I had it set to 10 minutes, but just bumped it down to 1 minute, and it won't automatically lock. (I see other KDE users complaining about this as well, it might be tied to having some other power saving option disabled.)

Yeah, seems like it; I usually leave it to someone who actually has a system in hand to kick off that thread, but I'll just go ahead and create one if it looks like no one else is going to do it...

Well. The symtoms seem similar for sure. But I didn't have any trouble putting the warranty claim in and I did get an email confirmation immediately (he mentions that he didn't get one in the article). I had already registered my drives, to extend the warranty to five years. Now, I'm basically waiting to see what happens... I'm not really crunched for space, but this is only the second time I've ever had an SSD fail. All three of my Sabrent drives are from the same batch (sequential serial numbers!) so now I'm a little bit worried about the others. Backup script is next priority! I'm going to start with just an rsync job to copy everything to my "home server" every night. (I do have everything backed up more-or-less, but nothing has been updated in the past week since my backup scripts were also running under Windows!

Well, while I was doing all of this data shuffling, one of my 8TB NVMe drives pooped out. It started acting flaky for an hour or so (it would "disappear" from the OS and I had to cold boot the PC in order to get it back), but now it is not visible at all... either from Windows or Linux, attached directly or I also tried putting it in a USB-C enclosure. It's just dead. Time to find out if Sabrent's warranty process is any good!

I have not tested in-depth on my Precision 7560, but on the Precision 7770, I did test it and found that Turbo Boost 3 enabled causes maximum dGPU performance to notably drop.

Wow, so... KDE first impressions: Holy cow, this is awesome. Why did I wait so long before trying to use this? Well, it is more rough around the edges in GNOME in some ways, and I'm glad that I went with GNOME for the first several days, because the flakiness of some things might have put me off from committing to a switch to Linux if I had tried KDE first. For example, it dropped me on my 4K desktop at 100% DPI scaling. I went and bumped it up to 200%, but that did not change the size of the mouse cursor or bottom taskbar thing, so I had to figure out how to adjust those separately. The mouse cursor then behaved strangely until I started a whole new KDE session. I also had to fight with a few other things. Like, Firefox really wanted to show a whole title bar (above the tabs) in KDE, even though it didn't do that in GNOME and I'm using the same Firefox profile. Had to figure out how to tell it to collapse the title bar and tab bar together. I also had to fight with changing the mouse "double-click interval", there is no GUI option for it and I had to set it in a text file. I'm still trying to figure out how to unbind the "right super" key from opening the applications menu (without breaking the "left super" key from doing so), so that I can use it as the "compose key" instead. (On Dell laptops, there is only one "Windows" key but Fn+Windows corresponds to the "right" Windows button, an easy keystroke and handy for remapping.) BUT it has been super snappy and stable so far, and there is so much opportunity for customization without even delving into third-party extensions/addons. Everything that I complained about with GNOME above was either addressed "by default" or easily addressed by poking around the Settings app. Contrary to GNOME, there are possibly too many settings to mess with in KDE, it's a bit overwhelming. But, I easily got Alt+Tab how I wanted it by setting it to the "thumbnail grid" style. I changed the "switch workspace" keystrokes to be the same as GNOME (Ctrl+Alt+Arrows). Anyway. I went ahead and switched the packages around to use Ubuntu's KDE base desktop and remove GNOME Shell. This is a Kubuntu install now.

So after using GNOME for a week, there are a lot of things I like about it. First off, it looks nice (animations, dark theme style, etc.) and it works well. But I have issues with lack of customization in some areas – for example, Alt+Tab not showing all windows on the screen if you have a lot of them open (requiring a horizontal scroll to see the last ones), I haven't seen a way to fix that. And then what bugs me even more is this sort of "our way is the only way" mentality that they have in some areas and taking options away. The MB/MiB file sizes is a perfect example (1000 vs 1024-based size); changing that across the platform and not giving an option to revert to the old behavior (which basically everyone else uses) is crazy. Displaying virtual desktops in a "grid" doesn't seem possible anymore (I know that I was doing that in GNOME 2 back in the day). I do see that there are extensions to support this and I will admit that I haven't tried one yet. ...Another one that I bumped into is just changing the option for how long it takes for the screen to "dim" when left idle. Apparently this used to be configurable on its own, but they removed the (hidden) setting away and now it is just computed based on the "screen lock timeout" setting. I also don't like some of the UI decisions in some of the bundled apps (which I fully realize that I do not have to use). For example, the whole way the top menu is laid out in Gedit is just all around odd to me. Lots of their other apps follow a similar design mentality, but no one else seems to be following along with what GNOME is doing in this area. ...So, I guess I'm looking for something more "traditional" and with a wider array of customization potential? Anyway, the cool thing about Linux is that there are a lot of choices in this area. So I think after my big file copy is done, I'm going to download the KDE packages and give KDE another go. I did some reading up and it looks like it is easy enough to switch back and forth in Ubuntu. Hopefully, the setup work that I have done + package updates + newer kernel will prevent whatever was getting me hung up at the login screen when I tried this before. Though, I will back up my system partition first in case something goes awry. I might end up finding all different issues with KDE and switching back to GNOME, but the only way to know is to try!

Cool. So, with this configuration I would be worried about updating the NVIDIA driver. It could cause the device to become "enabled" and then BSOD again. (But at least now it is even more clear that there is some connection between that driver, Intel Turbo Boost 3.0, and the crashes.)

No, it will come back. Right-click on it and choose "disable".

I wonder if that might actually be what keeps it from crashing ...? nvcpf.sys is actually the driver for that device, so if that device is not in a functional state, the driver is not running and it shouldn't be possible for nvcpf.sys to produce a BSOD. In fact you might be able to solve this just by disabling all instances of that device in Device Manager. Clearly there's something "not quite right" with this driver (both the BSOD/crashes and the fact that Device Manager often reports it as not working).

Yeah, I might try out KVM and/or Xen at some point. Aside from this file transfer issue, generally I am happy with the performance, though I did also have to fix a problem with kcompactd0 locking everything up (some kind of memory management issue). I could probably fix the file transfer speed problem by setting up smbd on the Linux host and moving files that way, but I'm not really ready to mess with that yet. For now I'm going to stick with VMware. First off, I've been using it for almost 20 years so I am very familiar with how to configure different things. I appreciate its portability in that a VM that I set up on Linux will easily be bootable on a Windows box later on if I need it (or even a macOS box ... if it were Intel-based). I actually have some existing VMs that I will be moving over, and I do not anticipate that I will spend more than two minutes getting one up and running. We use it at work too (bigger stuff with ESXi, etc.), so being knowledgeable about it is all-around helpful. I have tried VirtualBox in the past as well and it has always seemed sort of clunky by comparison, to me.

Trying to move some data out of Windows to the newly set up Linux drive... I do not think that VMware's "Shared folders" feature is very efficient. 😕 (But I don't care enough to try to find a faster way to do it.)

If you want to try to match my configuration and maybe shed some light on this, try to install driver 512.18. During NVIDIA driver setup, pick "custom" and check the box for "clean install". Once it is all settled, try booting with turbo boost 3 disabled. (Everyone in this thread says that this is an issue only with newer NVIDIA drivers, which is why I immediately went to this particular version that someone stated as working — but I didn't see that anyone had made a connection with "Intel Turbo Boost 3.0".)

Spent some time looking at this. That thing is not part of GNOME, directly; it is the "GTK File Chooser" and it does not have options to change how the size is presented (either from the user side via a config file or something, or from the application side via a parameter to the method that makes it pop up). I see more or less where the code is and I might try patching it at some point. They do have a parameter that can be passed to the "format the size" function that will cause it to show in IEC units (1024-based), so it would be an easy one-line change. GTK is a pretty core library though so I'll have to read up on how to do it properly. What I'd rather do is add support to change the behavior via a config file (...there are some other config file options available that are respected by the File Chooser, like hiding the "recent folders" panel, so I could just hook in with those), and then submit it to GTK as a feature improvement. No idea if they would take it. I think it would be easy enough to justify since the GTK File Chooser is widely used even if you are not using GNOME (it pops up in Firefox on KDE for example), just to give users an options to have their file sizes match between apps. Anyway. This is not especially high on my priority list. But it is the one place where I can't change the file size display format and it actually bothers me. ———————————————————————— Things are much smoother with 120 Hz working. I am spoiled and don't think I will ever go back to a system with a 60 Hz display. Formatted one of my 8TB drives for use in Linux. Got it all set up with MDRAID RAID-0 and LUKS encryption. (No encryption on the system/boot volume yet.) It's a one-drive RAID-0 array, but this way I just add more drives to the array as I free them up and grow my partition later. Also, set up a job to sync my KeePass password database between Linux and the other places where I use it. Things are moving along.

This may be related to mine. I wonder if, when I was on the newer NVIDIA driver and getting the BSOD earlier, and if I had gone and enabled "turbo boost 3.0" if it would have bypassed the BSOD. Anyway. It's working now and I don't want to mess with it any further either 😛

I just did the 1.21.1 BIOS update. Good so far. I rolled back from 1.20 to 1.19 after the first hard lock (it happened right after I did the update to 1.20 so I found that to be suspicious timing), but I have since experienced two hard locks on 1.19. Regarding Turbo Boost Maximum Technology 3.0, it is interesting that it was turned on for you (by default or by some update). I'm reasonably sure that it has always been off for me, from when I first got the system until now. I checked again just now after doing the BIOS update to make sure that it was off. In the help text for that option it says that turning it on disables NVIDIA Dynamic Boost 2.0, which is not something that I would want to happen.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/21/23692449/elon-musk-twitter-government-funded-media-labels-removed Twitter is removing the "government-funded" labels from NPR/PBS/BBC ... and it is removing the labels from propaganda outlets like RT in Russia and Xinhua in China as well. The page that used to explain these labels is also gone. Also, now that "legacy" verified blue checkmarks are being discontinued and removed, Elon Musk is giving out blue checkmarks to some celebrities who didn't want to pay for them... (Wasn't the whole point of this new system to supposedly level out the playing field for everyone?) https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23691831/twitter-blue-verified-celebrity-lebron-james-stephen-king

Hmm. I do not have Intel Turbo Boost Maximum Technology 3.0 turned on. (It is not turned on by default, and when I tested it on my Precision 7770, I found that having that enabled decreased peak dGPU performance by quite a bit.)

So I got another hard lock (after almost a month since the last one) so I'm poking around with some different things. First, I reset the NVRAM and put all of the BIOS settings back. I decided to try running with graphics switching disabled (NVIDIA GPU driving everything), so I made that change in the BIOS. As soon as I booted up, I immediately got a bluescreen from nvpcf.sys. Anyone else seen this? It looks like its a thing. nvpcf.sys is the "NVIDIA platform controllers and framework" driver, and I know some users have had issues with it just showing an error in Device Manager. Following advice in the linked thread, I installed an older version of the NVIDIA driver (512.18), after running DDU, and it seems to be working (for now). I was previously using the current driver from Dell, 517.89.

Playing with using "Nemo" as the default file manager. Not sure if this is my final solution; I tried it because it looked really easy to switch to and switch back. Nemo is the default file manager for Linux Mint / Cinnamon. Switching is just: https://askubuntu.com/a/1446372/702934 (A lot of this answer is duplicative, explaining different ways to do the same thing. You really just need to do the first four shell commands at the top and then restart the GNOME session.) Nemo has way more options than the stock GNOME file manager, and it does have an option to use "binary" (1024-based) file sizes, in Preferences under Display. Doing things like File->Open in a program to open a file browser still use the standard GNOME dialog (I'm not sure if there is an easy way to change that).

Copied the kernel packages from Ubuntu 23.04 and installed on 22.04. Pretty straight-forward. Now running Linux kernel 6.2. 120 Hz now works off of the Intel GPU, I just had to go toggle it over in GNOME settings. Now running an "unsupported configuration" so it's manual kernel package updates, and hopefully there's no big trouble. (6.2 kernel on 22.04 should become supported and show up in the standard repo in a few months.)