Obsolete Your Idols

So I upgraded the two laptops I use to Ubuntu 8.10 which has the friendly name of Intrepid Ibex.  Bold sounding, adventurous, able to scale and bound around on mountains.  One the laptop where I have a variant configuration (using ion3 instead of GNOME, for example) it hasn’t been a big difference.  Everything works at least as well as it did before, and it even seems more robust under some previously challenging load conditions.

The other laptop, the one with a totally default configuration, has been a big pain.  Wireless, never very reliable on it, has completely become unusable and I spent hours yesterday trying to uncover why.  The keyboard became bizarre and the perfectly functional set up under 8.04 required lots of Keyboard Layout fiddling to find something, anything, which would let me use anything more arcane than letters, shifted letters, and the control and enter keys in 8.10.  All of which has me thinking of things which might have been better names for 8.10.

• Irritating Insect
• Inconsistent Parakeet
• Incontinent Iguana
• Inauspicious Inchworm

Yeah, this is just noise.  I’ll keep using Ubuntu, I’m just annoyed at the number of regressions my laptop suffered by upgrading which I’ll have to spend time fixing because they’re core functionalities I actually use like, oh, having a network connection.  Or, you know, typing.

So once again I am attempting National Novel Writing Month.  I ‘won’ in 2003 and tried it a couple more times without success.  I’m trying again and trying to recreate my earlier success by posting chapters online as I finish them.  In order to safeguard the innocence and purity of people who might be shocked, shocked, shocked to discover that simply everything I write becomes pr0n, I’ve created them as password protected pages.  You can ask me for the passwords or have some fun trying to guess them if you really sincerely want to read them.  If you have any doubt: you don’t.

Arrayed on my nanowrimo2008 page

I decided to try to keep an eye on the temperature on my laptop. Some digging around turned up the statusd_laptopstatus.lua script in the ion3-scripts package which seemed exactly like what I wanted.  So I copied it out of the example directory into my .ion3, and the cfg_statusbar.lua file as well and tweaked it up according to directions and a simple F12 session/restart later, voila:

/usr/lib/ion3/ion-statusd: /usr/share/ion3/statusd_laptopstatus.lua:96: attempt to index local 'file' (a nil value)

Ooops.  So I actually learned to read enough lua to discover that the problem was that whatever file was supposed to be ac_state wasn’t there.  None of the four choices:

ac_state = {"/proc/acpi/ac_adapter/AC/state",
"/proc/acpi/ac_adapter/ACAD/state",
"/proc/acpi/ac_adapter/ADP0/state",
"/proc/acpi/ac_adapter/ADP1/state"},

So then I pawed through my /proc tree and found the closest match, /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/AC0/state which, great. So my fix was to re-hardcode by adding a 0 to the AC in the first file pattern. Yes, yes. I’m a bad person. Another hardcoded tweak to poll temperature info from
“/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ00/temperature” as opposed to any of the other choices and, voila, original yak shaved.