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Noise won and signal lost: Google is either a gaming company or a gambling company.

September 4, 2023 at 5:00 PM Eastern Time

The evolving problem of the Linux community in 2020. I haven't talked much about what I enjoy doing, because the Internet has mostly turned out to be a shallow rig meant to get you to overexpress or overconsume so you can be run around the side by McAuthority figures that turn into plausible A.I. automates whenever it's profitable for the MITM that's juicing you. So, I thought I'd be a little more modern or current and bring some things in my expression forward into 2021 by starting to talk about my HP Chromebook.

Its product name is both HP Snappy and HP Alan. I was curious to see how a real Linux kernel performed on the Chromebook, not the proprietary one that ships with it, and knowing that the Celeron has always been the best microprocessor value in making a statement, I spent 1/5th of my November 2021 pay check on that laptop and a USB drive. I set this up as my Debian machine, as I still have Ubuntu running on my ThinkPad. I knew how Debian was differentiating from Ubuntu, and I thought they deserved to have their drivers verified as working on whatever the Chromebook hardware would provide, but as I outline below it hasn't lived up to the driver support that a non-Google PC has. So I'm glad my decision to be cautious by not recommending this hardware yet seems to be wise. This computer has proven to be a not-too-bad author's machine in terms of keyboarding, but obviously never under Chrome O.S. It's survived a lengthy outdoor usage, two hospital stays, a 9-month shelter stay, and a year of light transit with everyday usage.

Following are some unfortunate drawbacks to supporting free software on a fully-paid-for $100 payments-centric laptop while Chromebooks and Google itself, not me, are an industry controversy because of who they undercut. So here's a disclaimer: HP, Google, and Intel are the same company until you complain about them. That binary blob may as well be known as 'silicon'. .. Hmm..

  • Sound configuration proprietary; November 2021 - This Chromebook PC was built with a sound rights management chipset that is mostly incompatible with Linux while being compatible only with the pre-installed pre-refund Google Chrome O.S. Since there's no Linux community these days without a broken search engine and a bunch of complicated mis-architected web pages in the middle to distract people and piss them off, my first mitigation was to avoid the HP/Google game of "keep reporting something to our marketing team on Twitter so we can pretend like we didn't hear you so you look weak to everyone who you were stupid to speak up around". My next mitigation was to invest in a USB sound card attachment. Finally, about a year later, I changed my kernel configuration, and that repaired part of the problem in what seems to be the most popular fix for this insulting sound architecture. In hindsight, this chipset was only priced in and placed where it was at the time of purchase only to have me complain about simplicities being overarchitected and stupid numbering systems being an existing game. The SoundBlaster code from Linux 1.2 was much easier to understand. (fault: linux da7219 sof-audio-pci-intel-apl bxt_da7219_mx98357a sof-bxtda7219max)
  • Linux 6.3 backlight hit; May 2023 - The "Intel Corporation I915" device driver was broken in an official Linux kernel update to the point it would kernel panic instead of allow changing the brightness of the Chromebook's backlight. I guess you could say somebody qualified a hit of this driver in to make a point about working in the merry-land game system of 9-to-5. Wink-dows. I started avoiding repairing and reporting bugs in Linux software at this point due to what I know about who is using pseudo-software (drivers) to hurt (a.k.a. politic) people in this complex way. Hint: This computer still has the oppressive stock Chromebook firmware with Google Chrome O.S. still pre-installed. First mitigation was to stay on an earlier kernel, as complex as that would seem. (fault: linux-6.0 drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_uncore.c __unclaimed_reg_debug)
  • Linux 6.5 visual hit; August 2023 - After my July post about theming the GNOME shell and going on strike, the official "Intel Corporation I915" device driver was further sabotaged to now not allow the video card to start up, resulting in a kernel panic. First mitigation is to again avoid reporting the bug and now to blacklist the i915 module and use a 'vga=' command line to allow the now-opinionated GRUB operating system to start Linux. This tries to use the hardware's historical VBE VESA BIOS extensions and not a wound proprietary chip stack full of ham and egotistical coding science majors. (fault: linux-6.5 drivers/gpu/drm/drm_vblank.c drm_crtc_vblank_helper_get_vblank_timestamp_internal)
  • USB boot lockdown; August 2023 - After a Google Chrome O.S. firmware update happened, this Chromebook PC is now, under known conditions of usage, locking down USB ports from being able to be used to boot Linux until Google Chrome O.S. is started instead using Control-D. After this, the USB ports reappear upon power-off to the BIOS. I keep an empty no-name Google account on this Chromebook so Google doesn't know who I am because keeping secrets is important. It builds character. That's what I say today to get Google in trouble tomorrow since they're still stealing people's web sites in the midst of a writers' strike.
  • USB flash drive blocking in specific; September 2023 - I have Debian 12 installed on a USB flash device that was able to boot on this PC before a Google Chrome O.S. firmware update. This USB flash device now does not qualify past the Chromebook home/boot screen into the legacy-region BIOS for booting. It now only works on this device after the boot phase. The USB device is from Micro Center and it blinks the right-hand side of the drive to illuminate the casing, so since someone at Google wants to play alphabet bingo with a non-gamer in September, I think it's about time for public elections of Google's company officers to start and for the government to enforce the elections to ensure liability when this monopolist company does not represent its customers and shareholders. Stop complicating PC users to death by complicating the PC to death, and stop putting everyone at risk with bad computing. I decided to withdraw from funding Debian until they counter the platform threats Google has provided.
  • If you think you're going to fix i915, be careful: way back in Linux 2.6, a moron made definition labels in the i915 module source code that mention a chicken. I remember the code coming in back then, and yes, it's still in Linux 6.0 now with lots of associated definitions and stupid function names. Now that Chromebooks seem to have pre-purchased Intel 915 graphics chipsets for everyone, I'm holding Intel Corporation as being blameworthy for the conduct of placing obscenities in source code to gain free controversies (text editor oil). If you push off the computer drama for a while, you know what's going on: another attempt to show how untouchable mainline developers are, especially in the ivory tower of corporate.

    Separate from the Linux problems perhaps, I made a stimulating post about media stimulus upon this web site in 2021 that may provide information about how to handle industry code-naming (gaming) – in this case, possibly related to certain Chromebook platform manufacturers' antagonistic naming lineups. Guess the industry shouldn't have let Google bankrupt everyone to the bottom by locking all the money in California.. Fake crypto-chickens being hidden in a forced-ship proprietary/free interlock mess? What a network!

    Note: Since juicing was mentioned, in the instance of i915, you may think the juice is not loose, it is proprietary and therefore bad. However, it seems the looseness or the perception as such of the juice is inverted due to users' expectations of ease of use. The chipset not working means the juice is loose and probably away doing bad things, and when the chipset is working the juice is in a status of proprietary since computers need to work, and work equals money, and therefore money is good. The juice may, actually, after all this time, prove to be people and not more O.J. Simpson references or other sly abstraction complications.

    Obviously it's Linux's fault.

    But if you don't like me, consider how stupid and devalued my post will make my user account seem in ten years when Google and Alan are out of business — whoever they were.. (bxt_dmc_ver1_07.bin) *



    Copyright © 1996-2024 Douglas Rice Winslow III. All Rights Reserved. E-mail Address: <winslowdoug@gmail.com>