I updated my old laptop HP Pavilion dv3 (2238tx) recently, which was bought in year 2010, installed with Arch Linux.

Because of Linux kernel version, the NVIDIA driver is not officially supported by Arch Linux (detail).

There are two options to resolve this: install (i) Nouveau or (ii) NVIDIA driver from AUR. The former is open source, the latter is closed source from NVIDIA official site. Furthermore, using the latter theoretically allows the usage of CUDA, which is important if I am using it to do some neural networks training.

I am using Arch Linux, and recently I found that my fonts are little different after upgrade.

In DBeaver, the monospace font shows this:

This causes the monospace doesn’t follow the same width. And I found that, the default “Monospace” doesn’t use DejaVu Sans Mono anymore after the recent upgrade.

After looking some solutions, I tried edit ~/.conf/fontconfig/fonts.conf according to this this one.

[code lang=text] monospace DejaVu Sans Mono [/code]

Sharing a simple script I recently used. Because recent development, I need to run a build command which needs about 2-3 minutes. I run it in the background so that I can continue my other work.

But switching the window in order to check whether the build is completed, it is frustrating. To make it easy, I wrote the following script,

[code lang=bash] #!/bin/bash

notify-send -t 1500 -i applications-utilities “$@” aplay /usr/share/orage/sounds/Knock.wav &> /dev/null [/code]

Med (Linux Memory Editor) 3.0 released.

Recently I did a great revamp. Remove most of the old code which was not rightly designed. And previously I wrote a ByteManager, which I guess it causes a lot of trouble and crash, together with the memory value locking using multi-threading.

As a result, I spent some times to do a revamp. Remove the ByteManager and use the shared_ptr instead. Because C++ doesn’t have garbage collection. It is hardly for this application to manage the dynamically allocated memory, because the scanned address needs to be hold awhile, or stored for saving, or hold for editing. By using shared_ptr, the memory will be freed automatically when it has no reference.

In my previous post, I mentioned about NVidia and xcompmgr, it is not true reason that causes the Chrome not updating the display.

The root cause is partially found. The issue is caused by the optimus laptop (dual graphic card, NVidia with Intel). In unknown conditions, resume from hibernation will cause the Intel graphic card doesn’t work properly. This can be checked by running “glxgears” after resume. You will see the OpenGL fails to refresh on the display.

I have a Dell Vostro 5459 with Arch Linux. Previously, whenever I do a hibernation, and resume will produce a black screen, which I can do nothing.

Then I believed that one of the NVidia updates fixed this issue.

However, very soon later, I faced another issue is, resuming from hibernation causes Chromium with freeze content, or the content doesn’t redraw. This not only happen to Chromium, but also Opera and SMPlayer. I thought it is caused by NVidia. Tried a lot of solution, search nothing from Internet. I also installed “bbswitch”, nothing solved.

My first open source project, Prayer Clock, I moved from SourceForge to GitHub recently. Yeah! Everyone should git!!!

And today I just made some changes, and updated to GTK3.

[gallery ids=“1757,1758” type=“rectangular”]

With GTK 3, I removed the title bar. But not yet successfully moving the menu bar to the icon like Evince or Nautilus.

I plan to convert the right hand panel to WebKitGtk. But this will not be the priority yet.

Because I am using the Openbox (window manager), and I believe that the laptop Fn+F8 (or whatever combination with Fn) doesn’t work properly on Linux. Because the combination is detected as Super+p (aka Win+p). As a result, I wrote a Perl script to solve the switching display/monitor/screen issue on my laptop.

[code language=“perl”] #!/usr/bin/perl

# This script requires xrandr, and several bash script created by arandr

use strict; use warnings;

I just found that, if I have an AAC audio file (technically M4A), and if I added the ID3 tag 2 (aka ID3v2), then the audio file will failed to be converted by ffmpeg.

It can be either converted to mp3

• using DeadBeef audio player, or
• remove the ID3v2 tag then convert

So, how to add the metadata like ID3 tag? Use the Kid3 and add the Tag 3 (aka APE tag). This will not affect how ffmpeg to read the file.

In the previous post (1 year ago), I mentioned the hibernation issue. I believed that it was related to the NVidia graphic card. Related forum can be found here.

But these few days, I notice that whenever I shut down the laptop, it will show the systemd messages. Previously, if I did suspend my laptop, then resume, then shut down will show only black blank screen, until the power off. I believe that the graphic card issue is being fixed with the recent update.