Wrestling Linux video drivers

These days I no longer have to do remote system administration professionally but I still occasionally help out on a personal basis. With modern Linux systems I find it most awkward to help with font issues; perhaps I do not understand enough of GTK+ and whatnot for me to detect what is happening and why.

I have been working on a different longstanding display issue with a decade-old Nvidia graphics card: X.Org was persistently setting only a 1024×768 display mode and my various adjustments failed to change that. Of course, trying to fix display problems from a distance is rarely easy.

Yesterday I finally hit upon the culprit: in /etc/default/grub I found included among GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX the option vga=791. This seems to cause the direct rendering manager to complain, KMS not enabled. I guess that the VGA mode directive somehow gets in the way of the later mode-setting. I am afraid that it is all rather unobvious to me but at least this problem is now fixed.

Quality of ready-made glasses

Now I have been told that I could find cheap +1.00 glasses helpful I find that the next step is not as simple as I naively hoped: consumer research indicates that some ready-made pairs of glasses are not carefully made, optical issues including positioning of the centers and accurate lens strength. In the UK it seems that those from Boots and from Superdrug's Foster Grant range get good reviews consistently, albeit from a rather small sample size.

Foo fighters

On yesterday evening BBC television showed the band Foo Fighters performing in London and I got to thinking about the original foo fighters: lights seeming to exhibit fast movement and direction changes, named before the term flying saucer was coined, though I am not aware that foo fighters' shape was discerned. Nonetheless, they were seen by many wartime pilots from countries on both sides of WWII.

I had been expecting to now be able to search the web and find some reasonably widely accepted explanation for these lights. With the Bermuda Triangle we have a theory about methane release from the ocean floor making the seawater less dense and so on. However, even an article last year in Air & Space Magazine does not give the impression that anything convincing was ever figured out about foo fighters though some ideas were circulated. I wonder what caused them to be seen.