Programming and Life
TLDR; Running the configuration utility xrandr wakes up the dedicated GPU on your machine. This is not a problem on a desktop but running it periodically on a laptop will drain your battery and might have other unintended consequences.
The rest of the blog describes the issue I faced due to running xrandr repeatedly, how I identified and circumvented the problem. Let’s begin.
Continue readingAfter using my old Asus Vivobook S15 for about 3 and a half years, I bought an Asus Strix G15 Advantage Edition (G513QY) laptop in August 2021. It’s an all AMD laptop with a Ryzen 5900HX CPU and Radeon 6800M GPU. I prepared a checklist for things to check and do after I got the laptop. Most items on this list should apply to any laptops, but a few are region and model specific. Sharing it here with the hope that it helps someone else.
Continue readingIn this blog, we will look at setting up i3 tiling window manager, and a status bar for i3 named i3status-rust. All of this is tested on Debian Bullseye. Some basic understanding of configuring i3 is expected.
This is part 2 in a series of 3 blogs regarding setup of Debian Bullseye on a Laptop with i3 window manager. Read part 1 here.
Continue readingI had been using PopOS on my laptop for a couple of years, but wanted to shift back to using the i3 window manager. My laptop has the NVIDIA MX150 graphics chipset along with the inbuilt Intel GPU and the primary reason to use PopOS was to get switchable NVIDIA graphics working properly. I had trouble getting this to work back in June, 2018 but I expect it to work now with recent versions of the X.Org Server and the NVIDIA graphics driver.
To get recent versions of the Linux kernel and various packages I will be install the testing version of Debian code-named Bullseye. This may vary based on the time when you are reading this post.
Continue readingAs a developer, I work on projects that require a variety of software, each tuned to different configurations. The easiest way to achieve this is to set up a virtual machine and configure that as per the need of the project. This allows me to keep my host machine clean, and share the virtual machine with other developers on the project.
In this blog, I’ll describe the configuration of a Vagrant machine that I’ve setup for PHP web development. Here’s a link to the box on vagrant cloud.
Continue readingI recently got a new Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD to add to my existing 128GB SSD that was filling up fast. After setting up the SSD on my machine using fstab, I started moving all my vagrant boxes and projects to a new partition dedicated to development. I mounted all the partitions under my home folder, and gave myself ownership of the respective folders.
I was ready to submit a patch to Wikimedia’s Gerrit platform. When you commit code, Gerrit runs a git commit-msg hook to add a Change-Id to every patch that is submitted for review. Committing code locally gave me the following error,
hint: The ‘hooks/commit-msg’ hook was ignored because it’s not set as executable.
hint: You can disable this warning with git config advice.ignoredHook false.