Unfortunately, I did not, and I was unable to help him. I was glad he asked me though. I probably should have tried what I just did though, google it, and copy+paste.
Since I very rarely type in my native tongue on that computer, and I annoyingly frequently have had to reinstall the OS from scratch, I no longer bother with customizing xmodmap or similar things on that computer.
So the few times when I have to type æ, ø or å on that computer, I just Google aelig, oslash or aring respectively and I go to the Wikipedia article about the letter or some other page from the results that has the letter on it and copy it from there.
Works well enough given how rarely I type any of those letters on that computer.
compose + a + e = æ
compose + o + / = ø
compose + a + o = å
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
Something I find absolutely criminal is that this hasn't taken off in a broader sense, and that most users memorize the unicode terms for characters like ©, rather than just typing a simple, eminently memorable sequence like (compose + o + c)
Ctrl+k a e = æ
execute 'digraph :) 128578'
This was before I knew that the Julia plugin allows emoji entry too (\:<Tab>), but I still find this more convenient for the common ones because the names of emoji are all over the place.
It wasn't standard on Atari either but that it even was a thing 30 odd years ago shows yet again that we're not always as innovative as we think.
Hold ALT while typing the Extended ASCII number for a character on the numpad (not the row of numbers above the letters) results in that char.
For é: Hold Alt while typing 130 on numpad.
TIL, apparently this can be extended to unicode too.
https://superuser.com/questions/1024948/windows-10-alt-code-...
> On Xorg the default Compose Key is ⇧ Shift+AltGr [...] The X keyboard driver does not allow the key used for Compose to also function as a modifier.
Which might explain why my altgr doesn't seem to work when I try it since it's mapped to mod in i3.
A backup of your home fir, (or at least all dotfiles in it), etcd running on /etc (or $HOME too), and a list of packages that were installed might go a long way towards making setup after reinstall fairly trivial, and you might no longer feel like some customizations aren't worth it.
It's Gtk. Gtk applications on Windows and macOS also use the same keybind to enter characters by Unicode code point. (It's kind of a pain if you use a lot of cross-platform applications, because you end up having to think a bit about what GUI toolkit the application is using before you can type a special character. “Does this one do the native thing or something else?”)
Is there a story behind that?
Sometimes the machine will run for days without freezing up. Sometimes it can freeze up after just a couple of hours.
Sometimes I am browsing the web when it happens. Sometimes I am writing code and compiling stuff when it happens.
I think the longest uptime I have had on it after the problem started without it freezing has been maybe 8 days. It’s been like this for a long while. A couple of years at least.
And when it freezes it’s not just the UI. It even stops responding to ping.
A few months back someone suggested that it may be due to a faulty PSU. But even after changing the PSU to a new one, it still happens.
And it’s been happening both with different Linux distros and with FreeBSD.
My hardware is:
- MSI B350 Tomahawk motherboard
- AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU
- MSI GeForce GTX 1060 6GB graphics card
- Crucial DDR4 2133Mhz 32GB ECC (2x16GB) CT2K16G4WFD8213 RAM
I bought those components in March of 2018, according to the order history in my account on the store where I bought it.
I don’t remember if I ever did run a memory test, but I will do so again anyways soon because I am suspecting that faulty RAM may be the reason. It just takes a long time to run a memory test on 32 GB of RAM and so whenever I think about needing to run it I don’t have time to do so at that moment. But as I am typing this I realize that I’ve got to go ahead and actually find time for running it soon.
Another couple of ideas I’ve had is that maybe the graphics card or the nvidia drivers are to blame. Or that I may have damaged some component with static electricity at some point. Or maybe it’s a thermal issue.
I most recently did a fresh install earlier today, and at the same time I switched out the SSD that was in it for another one. As far as I can remember though, I think I was having this kind of problem even before I was using the SSD that I switched out today. But I am not sure about that. So it could be that the SSD was the problem. But it may be a few days until it freezes again if it’s not the reason. Or it could happen in some hours.
I’ve also tried to look for clues in /var/log/syslog but haven’t really known what to look for specifically. And since even pinging the machine stops working when it freezes I am not sure the system would even be able to write to any logs at the moment that it freezes, since it seems that at that point pretty much everything has stopped working.
Currently I am running tail -F /var/log/syslog in a terminal in the hopes of either seeing something relevant frozen on screen, or in the surrounding output when I reboot the machine since I will then know which line of output I should begin looking in the vicinity of.
But yeah, a memory test is the next thing I plan to do after that.
I reused my now old X370 Ryzen build to run TrueNAS Scale (Based on Debian), and have hard lockups like yours.
My personal notes on the subject seems to stabilize things a bit but not completely, and it's a mixture of BIOS Settings Tweaks and Kernel boot parameters that seems to help partially. Things I tried/applied with varying degree of success:
- Disabling Cool&Quiet
- Disabling C-States
- Gear Down Mode: Disabled
- Power Down Mode: Disabled
- VDDSCR_SOC: Offset by +0.00625v (seemed to stabilize things on Windows)
- Someone in the kernel bugreport mentionned the need to power off (as opposed to just reset) so all the BIOS Settings are applied correctly (didn't try it myself yet)
See those links for more infos:
- https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683 (a very long bugreport thread, people commented lots of things they tried to stabilize their build along with kernel parameters ideas)
- https://gist.github.com/diracs-delta/876d74d030f80dc899fc58a...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20201020144021/https://www.truen... (linked from Archive.org as TrueNAS WAS specifically mentionning Ryzen stability in the first paragraphs of this page)
Good luck; and if you ever found how to get rid completely of those freezes, let me know :)
(edit: formatting)
- Global C-state Control: Auto -> Disabled
- AMD Cool’n’Quiet: Auto -> Disabled
- CPU NB/SoC Voltage: Auto -> Offset Mode; CPU NB/SoC Offset Mode Mark: +; CPU NB/SoC Offset Voltage: Auto
(The offset value can only be auto with my machine, not a custom value it seems.)
Only ones I couldn’t find were Gear Down Mode and Power Down Mode.
Clicked save and exit in the UEFI.
Then I powered down the machine and even flipped the on-off button of the PSU to off and let it stay off for ~20 seconds for good measure. Then turned the PSU back on and then powered the machine back on.
Currently reading the bug report thread and will try some of those things as well.
- https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/KernelRcuNocb...
- https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Setup
And I've changed the following line in my /etc/default/grub from:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rcu_nocbs=0-15 processor.max_cstate=5"
sudo update-grub
Thanks again for the help bilange.
cat /proc/cmdline
BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.11.0-38-generic root=UUID=4dcba509-efff-4ccc-a099-f919240c767c ro rcu_nocbs=0-15 processor.max_cstate=5 quiet splash vt.handoff=7
Maybe run memtest while you sleep? :)
> Or maybe it’s a thermal issue.
I'm no expert on thermal issues by any means, but I did have a laptop that overheated frequently in the past. It was very easy to identify that it was a heat problem, because the fans would start screaming and then it would reliably overheat and power itself off anytime I tried to do anything CPU-intensive with it. Sticking it in a freezer "solved" the problem.
Anyway, given that your freezes are completely random, it doesn't sound like a thermal issue?
Yup, did that tonight. The test is finished now and it found zero errors. The test took 7 hours and 56 minutes to run. I used a bootable USB stick with MemTest86 v9.3 Free to test it.
- Even if the RAM modules are not faulty, ECC is not officially supported by your CPU and motherboard, right? So this could be a problem... They might also not be correctly configured, so check the UEFI settings.
- Regarding the GPU, you could try lowering your PCIe mode to a slower one, especially if you are using a riser cable.
- I have had overly bent SATA cables cause complete freezes every few hours on a brand new PC. I luckily got the hint quickly because the HDD LED was staying lit.
- What about the quality of the power going into your PSU?
- Have you tried rebooting more gracefully with the SysRq commands?
Correct.
> So this could be a problem... They might also not be correctly configured, so check the UEFI settings.
Most of the settings in UEFI that I can find about RAM are related to overclocking, and I am not using those features.
But it may well be as you say that using ECC RAM with a non-ECC motherboard could cause problems.
> I have had overly bent SATA cables cause complete freezes every few hours on a brand new PC. I luckily got the hint quickly because the HDD LED was staying lit.
My SATA cables are cheap ones I bought off of eBay. I may try and replace them.
> What about the quality of the power going into your PSU?
The freezing has happened in all of the different places I have lived during this time, so I don’t so. Unless the power cord could be doing something, but the power cord looks fine on the outside at least.
> Have you tried rebooting more gracefully with the SysRq commands?
Going to try that in the future.
Thank you.
> Correct.
I should also add to this for the record, that my mistake here was that when I bought the system, I checked to see that Ryzen 7 1700 supports ECC RAM, but that I was unaware that the motherboard also needed to support it in order for ECC to work.
Someone in a sibling comment pointed me to some links and gave me some info about some UEFI settings to try along with some kernel boot arguments and I've applied these. Hopefully it will be enough to take care of the issue, or at least to improve the stability a bit. But if the system continues to be unstable then I will probably try and save up a bit of money to replace the RAM that I have with non-ECC RAM instead, or alternatively that I save up money for a new motherboard which supports both ECC RAM and my current CPU as well as being able to host a newer generation of Ryzen CPU that I can then buy further into the future.
Also, I went to an electronics store today after reading your comment and bought a new SATA cable that I now use instead of the one that I had.
Video here https://youtu.be/pP2D4DEQBTU?t=146
We both knew it was \hbar in latex but could not figure out how to get there on Windows. He was collaborating with somebody on a paper and was not used to having to do so with windows/word (he had a RHEL 5 desktop).
He was also 83.
Great to find characters you don‘t even know the name of.
Anyway, I'll keep pushing for Libre Office. Word is a complete bullshit of a tool. If people's work involves numbering every odd paragraph into a list, they are probably better with LaTeX, but they won't learn it anyway. Yet, Writer simply works.
Except that today i literally ran into the problem of Writer crashing whenever an image in the page was resized. There was a table that was spanning multiple pages and my dad was attempting to add pictures to it, along with small text comments below each picture. And, without fail, that particular document crashed whenever you'd use the drag tool to attempt to resize the picture, so that instead of overflowing into a new page, it'd fit within the current one.
Now, i didn't have the time to debug further (Windows 10, Writer 7), but one cannot say that Writer is bulletproof either, even if it's perhaps one of the very few office suites out there that are probably worthy of most people's time and present a usable alternative to the proprietary .docx and other file formats.
Honestly, at this point i'm convinced that Writer is okay for when you absolutely need a more advanced text processor, but for every other sort of note, shorter pieces of writing etc., Markdown is more than enough. Now i mostly just reach for Visual Studio Code, Notepad++ or even just nano when i want to take notes, write some fiction or anything of the sort.
Plus, i can currently combine all of the notes from my driver's ed by simply concatenating the .md files, as well as searching becomes infinitely more easy when compared to binary file formats and such.
Edit: Also, if we're talking about annoying cases of LibreOffice breaking, here's an example of references (bibliography) failing to work when i had to hand in my Master's thesis: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/libreoffice... (the tone expresses my frustration at that time)
Oh, yeah, not go adding formating that one doesn't need is a great way to avoid a lot of pain.
Markdown if more than enough for nearly all the writing people do. (But it's not enough for all the writing that most people do.)
Maybe true, but Libre Office is not really any better, just free and open source. It's also nowhere near as familiar and well supported, and that's worth a lot.
For books and similar long docs: Definitely LaTeX (preferably with Emacs org-mode), because Word has a way of f[oul]ing up automatic cross-references even in short documents; pandoc can then turn the LaTeX into whatever other format you want.
I agree for most people, though I feel like I'm pretty quick with Markdown + Pandoc -> LaTeX.
Definitely agree with the citations stuff though; Pandoc's BibTeX support is generally good, and I've had substantially fewer headaches with it than trying to get the reference stuff in MSWord to work.
I've worked in the book publishing industry and I've typeset books both using QuarkXPress (now everybody moved on to InDesign) and LaTeX. Using Word to typeset a book is a major PITA. Nobody in the professional book publishing industry is using Word to typeset books (well, ok, maybe 0.1% of masochists out there).
Word is convenient to quickly edit crappy looking documents: it's a document editor. It's not a typesetting program.
Weirdly enough I know someone with a book published by a big programming book company, and they accept manuscripts in Word only.
Word is really complicated to understand and often makes formatting more difficult than it needs to be. So this doesn't seem like an elitist thing.
Is that fair? No, not at all, but that just seems to be how it is.
That really depends on what you mean by "casual users". It's a lot of overhead for someone who isn't familiar with LaTeX already. I've tried showing this to students, and it's a much heavier lift than MS equation editor for limited tasks. Of course for professional typesetting or many complex equations LyX will win, but truly "casual" use it isn't close IMO.
Do you mean the app, the web or the Teams version? Or is it the way each allows different things, blocks certain actions or displays differently?
It is incredible that this mess is the industry standard.
Fair enough.
> It works well for the specific set of things it is designed to do, but once you need anything else - images,
It's never been particularly hard for me to add images in markdown when rendering with Pandoc. It's fairly easy to add images and adjust their size and whatnot, not 100% what you're referring to.
> headers/footers,
Yeah, I'll give you that one, you gotta muck with the preamble YAML in pandoc to get headers, and that's some irritating LaTeX.
> Color
Also fair, not sure it's possible to have color in Markdown->PDF with Pandoc.
> page numbers,
Page numbers are output by default in Pandoc with Markdown. You can also add an optional Table of Contents if needed. Not sure where that rumor started.
“Pandoc lets you achieve X by embedding latex in your markdown file” is a lot different than “markdown supports X”
The other challenge with page references is that they’re at least in theory, a potential source for a loop condition in rendering. We can have a reference to “on page xcix” which will cause the referred to element to move to page c, but then when the output is changed to “on page c” the element moves back to page xcix.²
⸻⸻⸻
1. PDF in a way doesn't count as electronic presentation in that it’s inherently an electronic representation of a print product, things like PDF reflowing notwithstanding.
2. I suspect, but can’t prove, that in LaTeX, this could even happen if a page reference becomes longer, thanks to how LaTeX’s line breaking algorithm works on a paragraph at a whole. When I get to that part of finl, I guess I’ll know for sure whether this is possible, and if so, will work out how to avoid it.
I always wanted my documents (and particularly equations) to look as nice as the formatting in my textbooks, and it felt like no matter how much finagling I did (which was not an insignificant amount of time being spent), it never looked quite as good.
Also, I never fully knew what copy-paste was actually going to do. Was it going to copy the source formatting? Was it going to adopt the style of where I was pasting? Was it going to do neither and just break everything? I was never sure, so I always ended up pasting into Notepad and then re-copying it to guarantee all the formatting was stripped out.
And sometimes there would be just a vanilla "I pressed a random keystroke by accident, all the formatting broke, and undo doesn't appear to do anything" issues. This might just be gross incompetence on my end (it wouldn't be the first time) but nearly everyone I've described this issue to has experienced similar problems.
Also, I can't remember the details of it, and it's possibly fixed now, but I had issues with the equation editor simply not having all the symbols I needed.
In fairness, I have similar complaints about most of the other WYSIWYG word processors, so I don't mean to pick on MS Word specifically (most of these complaints apply to Pages and LibreOffice as well).
On a Mac, Option+Shift+Command+V is paste without style.
I can’t understand why this wasn’t the default (or when Command+V is pressed).
Edit: > I was referring to the app, whatever was recent in 2011 or so. 2007 I think? I haven't used it in a long time.
I was raging at my world. Things have got much, much worse in the MS Office world. Going back to it after a long absence had me baffled. It’s all online now, except when it isn’t, or when it sort of isn’t and it does not work well.
On Windows, it used to be Control-Shift-V. Unfortunately, it does not work in Office 2016 (and likely other recent versions). While the new approach is more flexible, it would have been nice if they kept the old behaviour bound to the old key combination.
I agree with recent versions of Office being a baffling mess. The only reason why I keep Office 2016 around is for the rare case that I need to send an editable document to someone else and I have no intent to upgrade since figuring out that mess is more trouble than it's worth.
Not to mention most LaTeX documents look like crap - the might get the "standard LaTeX paper-like formatting" but as a formatting it's nothing special to write home about, and the fonts don't look particularly good either.
What I find especially funny, is there was a foreign commercial book from LaTex experts (and contributors), about LaTex, typeset in LaTex (of course), whose typesetting was all over the place -- including text running off the page inadvertently.
"""
It was a major advance, and in the introduction he proudly claimed that the printing once again looked just as good as the hot type of volume 1.
Except it didn’t.
Reading his introduction to volume 3,1 had the feeling that Knuth was wearing the emperor’s new clothes. Squinting closely at the type in volume 3, I saw the letters had that telltale look of a low-resolution laser printer—not the beautiful, smooth curves of real type or even of a photo typesetter. There were “jaggies”— little bumps that make all the difference between good type and bad. Yet here was Knuth, writing the same letters that I was reading, and claiming that they were beautiful.
“Donnie,” I wanted to say. “What are you talking about? Can’t you see the jaggies?”
But he couldn’t. Donald Knuth’s gray matter, far more powerful than mine, was making him look beyond the actual letters and words to the mathematical concepts that underlay them. Had a good enough laser printer been available, the printing would have been beautiful, so that’s what Knuth saw and I didn’t. This effect of mind over what matters is both a strength and a weakness for those, like Knuth, who would break radical new ground with computers.
Unfortunately for printers, most of the rest of the world sees like me. The tyranny of the normal distribution is that we run the world as though it was populated entirely by Bob Cringelys, completely ignoring the Don Knuths among us.
"""
From Accidental Empires. Which you can get as a book, but he uploaded a scan to his blog here: https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/10/accidental-empires-part-...
- According to this story, TAOCP Volume 1 was typeset using hot-metal printing, Volume 2 was typeset using "photo-offset printing to save money for the publisher" (which Knuth didn't like), and Volume 3 was typeset using TeX. But in reality, the first editions of all three volumes of TAOCP (Vol 1 1968, Vol 2 1969, Vol 3 1973), and the second edition of Volume 1 (1973), were all typeset using hot-metal printing. It was the galley proofs of the second edition of Volume 2 (in preparation around 1977) which used photo-typesetting, but this was never published. Ultimately the second edition of Volume 2 when published in 1981 used digital typesetting (TeX + Metafont).
- He claims that in "volume 3" (let's charitably assume he meant the 1981 second edition of Volume 2, as this is the only thing that makes sense: the next editions of these volumes were from 1997–98, after "Accidental Empires" was published), he "saw the letters had that telltale look of a low-resolution laser printer" and "Had a good enough laser printer been available, the printing would have been beautiful" — but this makes no sense, as these published books were (obviously!) not printed using a low-resolution laser printer, but were printed using a good digital typesetter at 5000+ dpi.
For more history, see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/367058/wheres-an-exa...
So either the story is completely made up, or (accounting for lapses in memory etc), Cringely may have meant one of the following:
1. The fonts used in 1981 (Vol 2 2nd edition) were not the final version and were further refined (see Knuth's "burned with disappointment" linked above), leading to the current Computer Modern (BTW: try not to use the thin/spindly on-screen versions: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722) after further consultation with leading type designers,
2. Cringely may have been talking about something like the 1979 book "TeX and METAFONT: New Directions in Typesetting", which is basically a very early application of the prototype TeX78 that was still being developed at the time, and was indeed (I think) typeset on the Xerox Graphic Printer (XGP), and you can indeed easily see the low-resolution artefacts. (They're impossible to miss: if such a conversation as above indeed happened, and about this book or something from that early period, likely what Knuth said was something like "yes of course the type looks bad in this book, but it's been designed for a real (higher-resolution) digital typesetter and it will look fine there", not that he couldn't see it.)
I would personally say that it totally depends on what you're trying to do. Most of what corporate types need is done fine with MS Word and like others have said, there's always that "expert" that can get you out of tight spaces. It works well enough for the general public so to speak.
You want something scientific to look the part and not have any of the formatting hassles we all know from Word? Go use LaTex! I wrote both my Bachelor's and Master's thesis in LaTex. Yes, pure TeX is way outdated and even with LaTex you have to look at what the "current" packages are to use for various things (this was 15+ years ago and I have totally never had a reason to use LaTeX again, so I'm not current).
Fun anecdote (at least to me): I did my Master's thesis at a company, so sort of outside of the "scientific environment" where LaTeX would've totally been accepted. The company wanted my thesis as a Word document. I refused. I said I'd give them a Word version as an export afterwards but without any changes to the formatting, no niceties, nothing. Just a plain export, that's it. I was not gonna go through the formatting and editing hell of Word for a thesis, ever! Unlikely hero: my direct 'boss' at the company, who was overseeing the thesis work had written his own thesis like 10 or more years before that in LaTex and he defended me against his boss. Next day he comes to me and proudly tells me he went and grabbed his own Master's thesis from backup, downloaded a current LaTeX and ran it through. Looked as beautiful as ever!
Did you turn on kerning?
The problem is that MS Word kinda require you to be a software engineer to be able to use it and produce a document which does not look like a ransom letter (and even then, it doesn't look great). Word, just like Excel, are extremely complex and complicated software.
Sure, they can be used in a "simple" manner, but god forbid regular users to select something by mistake then click on the wrong button (among the myriad of buttons around).
> I discovered LaTeX + Pandoc, and it created documents that I thought looked much nicer
About any document editor or typesetting program produces documents that are better looking than Word. It's not a thought.
I discovered LaTeX + Pandoc, and it created documents that I thought looked much nicer, and I could use trusty Vim to work with it, so it felt perfect, and I subsequently made fun of people who insisted on using Word. After about two years of doing this, my dad eventually snapped back saying "Tom, we're all really sorry we didn't become software engineers, I guess we'll all quit our jobs and go back to college," which (rightly) made me feel like an asshole.
Obviously this stuff was easy to me, I live and breath in text editors and in plain text, but I had to realize that not everyone is trying to create publisher-worthy documents. They want a document that looks good enough to share with some coworkers, or print out for a school report, and for that MS Word will work fine for most use cases. They don't really want to sit there and learn the minutia of how to compile with `pdflatex` and dissect its weird error messages. They didn't really feel the need to finagle with begin and end tags, and that's totally fine, people should use the right tool for the right job.
After that I would still recommend LaTeX (particularly if the document required equations), but I became substantially less pushy about it.