Last year, I posted this quick tutorial on the SMBA YouTube channel walking through the steps to use a MIDI controller with Jack using Xubuntu 20.04. I am posting it hear just for the sake of consistency and good housekeeping. Hopefully, I’ll get to make some more of these soon.
Tag: linux
Running Autodesk EAGLE 9.6.2 on Xubuntu 22.04
So, I did a fresh install of Xubuntu 22.04 on a Dell Latitude 7390 with an Intel UHD 620 display adapter. I had some issues with the machine locking up just a few minutes after startup. I was able to resolve this by adding the following kernel option to the /etc/default/grub file.
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.enable_psr=0"
The resolved that issue well enough, and most everything using OpenGL (e.g. Atom, Firefox, etc.) ran just fine after that. The only thing that was giving me trouble now was EAGLE. WebEngineContext would issue an error about not being able to initialize and then the program would seg fault.
WebEngineContext used before QtWebEngine::initialize() or OpenGL context creation failed. Failed to create OpenGL context for format QSurfaceFormat(version 2.0, options QFlags<QSurfaceFormat::FormatOption>(), depthBufferSize 24, redBufferSize -1, greenBufferSize -1, blueBufferSize -1, alphaBufferSize -1, stencilBufferSize 8, samples 0, swapBehavior QSurfaceFormat::SwapBehavior(DefaultSwapBehavior), swapInterval 1, profile QSurfaceFormat::OpenGLContextProfile(NoProfile)) [5376:5376:0100/000000.883007:ERROR:broker_posix.cc(41)] Invalid node channel message Aborted (core dumped)
After much googling, I came across a seemingly unrelated thread where they were removing some of the files from the internal lib folder to force EAGLE to use the system defaults. Since these seemed to be relevant to the error message I was getting, I decided to move the following library files into a folder named “backup” to see what would happen. Those files are shown here.
libX11-xcb.so.1 libxcb-dri2.so.0 libxcb-dri3.so.0 libxcb-glx.so.0 libxcb-present.so.0 libxcb-sync.so.1 libxcb-xfixes.so.0
After that, EAGLE actually opened. Of course, the fonts were huge on a very small 13.3″ screen. I had to go into Options -> User Interface to disable the “High DPI Scaling” option in order to get a more reasonable display.
Now, EAGLE seems to run beautifully. Fingers crossed that we can keep running Autodesk products on Linux in the future!

External audio with USB 1.1 and Gentoo Linux PPC…
In the event that anyone decides to use a junked iBook in a Linux environment, I’m hoping that this article might save someone a lot of experimentation.
The Problem:
Started having trouble getting packet information through Soundmodem after a system upgrade to Kernel version 2.6.36-gentoo-r8. I began to investigate the sound card using Audacity then arecord/aplay to see if audio was even getting through ALSA into the external USB audio interface (snd-usb-audio). The audio was almost unintelligible through the distortion and crackling. After some playing around, I realized that audio recorded through the internal card (snd-powermac) was fine but USB audio was crap. The iBook conveniently has no TRS inputs. Therefore, I’m required to use USB.
The Solution:
I opted to upgrade the kernel from scratch. I disabled the EHCI (USB 2.0) support in the kernel since the iBook has no USB 2.0 support. Secondly (and this is where I think the problem really stemmed from), I enabled both the Big Endian/Little Endian option for the OHCI (USB 1.1) driver after reading about Endianness.
My /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf file looks something like this:
alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss alias char-major-116 snd alias char-major-14 soundcore options snd cards_limit=1 # ALSA portion alias snd-card-0 snd-usb-audio alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0 # card #1 options snd-usb-audio nrpacks=1 index=0 alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss alias /dev/dsp snd-usb-oss
Piping hot ball of Tar.
For those who have gotten into the idea of typing commands as little as possible, here’s out to pipe the output from tar straight into a gzip file.
tar cvf - myfile.jpg | gzip > myfile.tar.gz tar cvf - folder | gzip > folder_backup.tar.gz
Take note of the second example and notice how folder does not contain the trailing forward slash. The forward slash denotes everything inside the folder while leaving it off copies the entire folder itself into the archive. This way causes the extraction process recreate the folder while to former will only extract the files within the folder.
I found the F (-mtime +3)!
forgetting is the bane of my existence. don’t ask why. i’ve forgotten this syntax enough times that i should have it tattooed on my upper arm. in fact, I think i’ve posted it on my own site before and forgotten about that.
find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;
the first argument is, of course, the path to the files that you’re looking to rid yourself. The first flag, -mtime, tells find to look for files older than a certain number of days. the whole “+5” would indicate five days from today (would -5 be five days in the future then? something to look up later). The second flag, -exec, will tell find to execute the following command when it gets a positive result. in this case, we’re “removing” (rm