[Discuss] Issues with new Linux computer mostly addressed

[Alan W. Irwin]

The current status of the RX 550 graphics card lock up issue I
mentioned before was I was advised (see
<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106671>) to update
kernel and mesa to latest versions to see if the lockup problems went
away.  Soon after I was told that, Kernel 4.6.12 was propagated from
Debian Unstable = Sid to Testing = Buster to replace 4.6.5, and sure
enough, the frequency of lock ups was significantly reduced (only one
lock up in the 6 days I have been running that new kernel).  So if
that slow rate of lock ups continues, I can live with that until
further improvements in kernel and mesa are made and are propagated to
Debian Buster to completely eliminate the RX 550 Linux system lock up
issue for that version of Debian.

Meanwhile I have been working on finishing up all other aspects of
configuring our new principal computer.  For example, last night I
turned off our old principal computer for what is likely the last
time, and replaced it in that same physical location with our new
computer.  This change required a modest amount of recabling in our
office, but that change isolated our X-terminal (a.k.a "thin Linux X
client" which is actually a low-power nettop I inherited from somone else here)
from our LAN with "network unreachable" messages.  To make a very long
frustrating day short, it was not some aspect of networking or routing
software that was the issue.  Instead, when I replaced the cable with
a new cat5e crossover cable from London Drugs, all network issues went
away.  The old cable had worked fine just before the recabling so I
expected that to continue, but I assume what happened is the RJ45
connector on one end of that cable failed when I plugged it into the
rather stiff RJ45 plug on the new computer.

Anyhow, because that X-terminal is now on the net again, I can write
this e-mail using my own (KDE) desktop on our new computer while using
non-local display, keyboard, and mouse provided by the X-terminal.
This arrangement has worked well over the years because it allows
Barbara simultanously to run her own (KDE) desktop on that new
computer using display, keyboard, and mouse local to that computer
which effectively halves our computer hardware costs.  And the
hardware costs would be reduced even further if more than two users
were involved (See the on-going series of blogs at
<http://davelargo.blogspot.com/> for comments about a hugely scaled up
thin client project for the City of Largo Florida.)

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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