19 March 2026

Perhaps this is not really a rant, since actually I have managed to address most of the niggles that have grown up over the last couple of years. Today things are ACTUALLY looking good and even a reboot of the desktop is less that a minute where it was taking that time simply to shut down, and then a few minutes to reboot. The servers are almost sub 10 second from hitting reboot now to logging back in so the desktop should not be too much longer.
So the first aggro was the drive to retire YAST which I rely on almost exclusively to manage the servers over ssh text sessions. It seems that perhaps the 'YAST' that is being retired is only the graphic sections, as others are saying that the text versions will still be around? Anyway, after some fun with the graphics clients for a proposed alternative, I find that the client is perhaps overkill. Cockpit is now running on all three machines and simply accessed via the browser. It complains when I first go in, and insists I need to manually enter user name and password, but one in I can simply toggle between the three channels. The overview is giving me performance data on the servers that I've not had access to before and I can see if something heavy is hitting a machine. The one thing that it does flag up are all those errors and warnings I've been ignoring, although both servers are actually pretty clean! logrotate had been an irritation on the main server, and the cockpit display of errors gave all the pointers to clearing up the problem, even down to fixing the php-fpm.log. That one was a particular problem as it was growing gigabytes an hour and so got large quick, but was not rotating and compressing. Everything is fine now.

The problem with php was simply down to incompetent craw bots hitting every date in the calendar on the timeline pages that phpgedview creates. Add to which, most of them were still on the todo list to clear all the warnings and errors that PHP8.4 was creating for them, hence the large file size. I no long have phpgedview active, having switched to webtrees, following my completion of updates to the firebird driver for laravel/illuminate. Style wise it even follows the same style as the rest of the Bootstrap3 backed bitweaver framework. Wins all round. Now I just need to find time to add more of the current information that the family tree is lacking.

With the php-fpm.log file only growing a few megabytes a day, I spotted a couple of PHP8.4 niggles which I've picked off and I will have another go at the remaining bugs over the weekend. The stats display process had an update and no longer tells me which site it is processing which is something I've asked about but not seen a reply yet. Other problems such as a niggle trying to get phpgedview to redirect to webtrees, I'd asked the question, and the following day posted the fix myself. Claude can actually be useful at times but only after you have spotted why his first responses will never work. I did consider a subscription to duck.ai for a better service, but I don't see that it is 'intelligent' enough yet to be worth paying for, and once I hit the days limit, we are probably off track anyway, so a fresh start the next day is actually more productive!

So with the servers running nicely and almost clear reboot logs, the next step was to address a few niggles on the desktop machine. The first was the fact that the wifi connection was not working, and various attempts in duck and Claude had not given any real answers to the error messages. I tried a more general enquiry and an interesting forum post popped up saying switch off and take the battery out. It was for a laptop, but it prompted me to consider that while I had rebooted and even shut down, I had NOT pulled the mains ... That proved to be the magic bullet, and the wireless just popped back into live and reconnected without any other work needed. "probe with driver mt7921e failed with error -5" cleared without any explanation of why it had failed.

Next problem was one that has been bugging me for a while but I'd been putting up with. Hum from the computer speakers when nothing was being sent to them. It goes away as soon as a sound channel is created, but then after short while after a ping, or playing some music, the hum comes back. The consensus is that this is a known problem and is caused by the speaker socket essentially being switched off and so floating without an earth. The rant question has to be WHY! Digging through all sorts of fixes from Claude and on-line made no difference despite knowing exactly what was happening. Currently there is no hum ... but then neither is there and sound from the windows box or the TV since I've currently got the powered speakers plugged directly into the desktop machine. I need a better solution but for now it will have to do! There is still an error caused by the module module-x11-xsmp not initializing when pulseaudio starts up but as with the network driver error, no explanation of what needs to be fixed.

A few short errors related to the printer were cleared by simply deleting the the config files as they were apparently no longer needed. The printer is still working and 4 fewer lines in the log.

The ping pong between X11 and Wayland has been an ongoing irritation. That module-x11-xsmp would not initialize because it could not find an X11 session was just annoying as it was running the X11 session fine, and all of the applications that need X11 - or at least used to - were working. I'd been avoiding switching back to Wayland as it seemed to cause it's own problems, and that is at least in part because the two simply do not play well together! After logging in on a Wayland session, first problem was the left and right monitors were switched, so once I worked how to navigate the mouse to the System Setting window I had to swap them back. That had caused more problems in the past, but this time it simply blanked the screens and opened up again the right way round. A quick check of KiCad 9.0 ran it up without any warnings and the font sizes look good. Rayforge is also displaying with the right fonts and a layout that actually works, so perhaps we are not far off a usable Wayland session!

The next niggle is plasma rather than graphics. The saga of the 'global menu'. The latest setup ended up with my having a 'global menu' on the start bar so I could use several packages, but they only really worked on the middle screen. I never subscribed to the idea that this should be separate to the related window, and on a multi screen display, more so. So after various questions, it seemed that I simply needed to 'disable' the global menu. Starting by dropping the widget, and also removing the global bars button from the LibreOffice window. The final piece of the jigsaw turned out to be a reboot to get the windows recreated cleanly, and magic, we have the files menu back below the title bar on all of the windows ... and available which ever screen one is working on. The one thing I'd had trouble with was not being able to hit 'recently opened', but once it was back I was only seeing the current module files, so spreadsheets. Fortunately the fix was just a tick box away below the list, and the document I was looking for popped up. NOW the question is 'why is LibreOffice not opening in this Wayland session! And the fix ... don't use Wayland :) However dropping back to X11 had the same problem, so reboot and it's working again in X11, and now also in Wayland ... and Wayland seems to have remembered the correct screen order, but for some reason is not seeing the 4k TV next door, which X11 mimics the right hand monitor on happily.