Pete's Log: Sigh

Entry #1859, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)
(posted when I was 42 years old.)

Staycation is nearing an end. Since my back is still sore from Sunday, I accomplished fewer of the house/garden tasks than hoped. But I've done some good relaxing, found a promising IRC server, and made some decent progress on esgeroth.org stuff. It's been mostly fun and relaxing. But...

1. esgerbeastie is running Debian unstable and I've been trying to keep on top of updates. At some point the kernel got upgraded and my ethernet adapter (which isn't supported with a stock linux kernel) stopped working. Since I had configured wifi in order to get the ethernet card working the first time, my system helpfully fell back to wifi and I didn't notice except to think that a couple big downloads I ran didn't feel like I was getting gigabit speeds anymore. But they were fast enough that I didn't look further into. This morning I finally noticed the wifi symbol in the status bar and thought "huh" and looked into it. Recompiling the driver for my ethernet adapter led me to realize that the following is generally the wrong approach, even though it's recommended all over the place:

apt install linux-headers-`uname -r`

The reason being that this won't keep pace with distro kernel updates. Instead

apt install linux-headers-amd64

is the way to go (if your architecture is amd64), since it'll actually keep in sync with the installed kernel. Probably should have realized it at the time, but I was just eager to get my ethernet working so I could truly appreciate my gigabit fiber.

2. Sound on esgerbeastie randomly stopped working last night. A reboot fixed it, but I was scared I'd be mucking with linux audio again, since it took a bit to get working when I first got esgerbeastie up and running.

3. I've been trying real hard to become an Emacs user again. At first I thought my Emacs muscle memory was completely gone, but it's actually slowly been awakening again. It was a real satisfying feeling when I hit C-x b to switch buffers and then after the fact realized I had done so automatically without having to look it up.

It's been a real struggle though and several times I have almost given up. I've tried to find my .emacs file from way back when and had no luck, so that's a bummer since a lot of work had gone into it. I think I'm finally over the hump but VS Code would certainly be a path of less resistance.

PS if anyone *cough*b*cough* is reading this via RSS, please alert me if the code snippets didn't render right, I made some markup enhancements to the Pete's Log code. kthxbye