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) *