Oops

[monsterqueers]

We wanted to have been posting more, but then ended up not posting at all for a very long time again!
Weve been super tired and drained due to a whole bunch of stuff and just havent been with it.

Got and then failed a sleep study, going to get another one (this time an in-home one) soonish. The Doc believes we have either/or sleep apnea or narcolepsy 2, he just has to prove one or both to insurance.
Cat was ill for a bit but is recovering now, among many other fiascos.

On the bright side, we DID post two minizines to our website- meant to put it in the rrs feed, didnt, will have to do that at some point later. ALSO posted a little thing on frameworks used in the alterhuman community [HERE].

Need to do a whole lot more but have been mostly focusing on other stuff.

Linux update:
Linux mint works beautifully on our PC with zero issues(it has never worked better and worked out of the box), however after a long time chasing terrible glitches and freezing, we determined it was a kernel level issue for the laptop on all families of distros we tried (yes, including installing arch), and begrudgingly switched it back to windows. Someone better at computers than us might be able to get it working on linux, but we just dont want to burn that much time and energy on that. Windows 11, after some neutering on all the spy and bloatware works fine- ....except for the audio as the drivers do not exist for it on windows 11. Ah well, you get what you pay for in that respect- it was a cheap refurb. It does what we need it to when we are away from pc. Shame we specifically got a model with an audio jack rather than a slightly newer one without it and then it does This but at least it does everything else.

Comments

[monsterqueers]

Alas, no! The 'timeshift taking snapshots way too often and filling your hard drive' would have been easily fixable via disabling that and purging most of the backups, this was something far more messy, sadly.

It was some strange problem with the graphical card and audio drivers interacting with the Kernel as far as we could tell from the few error messages we could see before we got a freeze each time and the related directly observable issues (screen flickering, audio fading out and stopping working until a reboot, etc).
There was apparently something on arch wiki for editing a specific file with some code to fix the freezing issue on that model, but we couldnt get it to do anything and threw in the towel.
The research we did as far as we understood was that linux DID once work well on that laptop, but only on kernel versions no longer supported, and all the current ones Do Not Play Nice. So it gets to be a neutered windows 11 machine instead.

[lb_lee]

Sneak: oh nooooo! That’s awful! What a surreal pain, boo!

Now I am glad that error isn’t one I’ve encountered (yet). o_o

[monsterqueers]

It was valuable learning all things considering- it sure broke any and all remaining apprehensions we had for the command line, but yeah it also was a huge pain.

We are no stranger to chasing computer problems, but that one sure was a doozy- if only for the strange array of problems that presented.

[beepbird]

By any chance, does the issue have something to do with dynamic power management? I ran into a freeze bug involving that at one point that appeared any time I pushed the integrated GPU to any real degree- it would freeze for about five seconds, then crash to an unresponsive black screen where even caps lock wouldn't toggle. Was able to fix it after a lot of forum searching.

[monsterqueers]

Probably not? The freezes lasted until the power switch was hit, and we let one sit for over an hour once. No black screen either, just a full lock up with no keys pressable (cant even toggle capslock) so one is forced to hold the power button down.
The freezes would also happen even if we were not doing anything and sometimes during sleep/suspend.
The other errors were the audio skipping and fading before eventually completely not working, and the screen flickering (usually on the bottom half) to bright colors (mostly white).

The errors we could see listed anywhere were "Random Screen flicker with i915 [drm] *ERROR* CPU pipe A FIFO underrun in kernel logs. " as stated on the arch wiki dell laptop compatibility page but the fix listed did Nothing for that (also tried the kernel parameter listed there for kernel panic and that didnt fix the freezing either so that probably isnt it either provided we did it correctly) and this seemed to be independent of the freezing; and there was something about a daemon file not working correctly that the internet indicated was normal and nothing to worry about.