[Coco] My OVCC development environments and Ubuntu

[Walter Zambotti]

Just thought I would share a (in retrospect) story regarding my dev setup
and my
recent experiences with setting up Ubuntu on a laptop.

 

Nothing in depth hopefully more entertaining.

 

In developing OVCC I have a number of systems ready setup for specific
purposes.

 

The list includes:

 

Ubuntu Full Dev System.  This is where I develop AGAR and OVCC and all the
libraries and
main code are fully debuggable with extra assertion code for error trapping.

 

Ubuntu Semi Dev System.  This is similar to the full dev but all libraries
and code are optimised
and all assertion code is disabled.

 

Ubuntu deployment System. This is a clean Ubuntu build which I deploy the
fully built optimised
app.  It has no dev environment so I can identify missing components when I
try to finally test the app.

This was actually a very late addition to my systems, that I determined was
necessary after already
having released Linux OVCC for a day.

 

Then I have the same environments again for Windows.

 

These are not all separate systems and some are dual boot which is not ideal
but unavoidable.

 

I do most of my development on the Ubuntu systems as the turnaround time for
an AGAR modification is
less than 1 minute but under Mingw on Windows it takes 35 minutes on the
same hardware.

 

Now starts the story of the Ubuntu deployment system build.

 

The system is a HP Pavilion DV4-3029TX.  Gen 2 I5 2 Core 4 thread. 2.3Gh.
8GB mem.  512GB SSD for Windows. 640GB HDD for Ubuntu.

It has hybrid graphics Intel & Radeon.

 

This is the system where all my initial experimentation for this project
originally began.  From concept to prototype to early Alpha code.

 

I had a spare 640GB HDD that I could attach via the USB 3 port so let's get
started with the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS install from a live USB thumb
drive.

 

The first issue I ran into was that the Ubuntu installer refused to accept
the HDD (from USB) was correctly partitioned.  I could even
successfully use gparted from 'Try Ubuntu' but still it would refuse to
install to it.

 

The work around for this was to remove the Windows SSD from the drive bay
rip the HDD out of it's USB case and plug it directly
into the SATA drive bay. 

 

The next issue was the wifi adapter was unable to connect to my home access
point.  It could see the AP but it would refuse to accept
the correct password. Oh well connecting to the network is optional anyway
when performing an Ubuntu install. Push on!

 

The next issue was the show stopper. After successfully installing Ubuntu
and rebooting the graphics was displayed upside down.

But only the graphics were inverted not the mouse coordinates so I could
never click on the right thing!

 

I know my laptop was not equipped with accelerometers so what the heck.
Even worse the screen would go black for about a 
minute and then display upside down for about 10 secs and continue to repeat
this behaviour. I suspected the two built it graphics 
cards were competing for the screen. 

 

Why was this happening when the graphics displayed during the install was
perfect?

 

I managed to find an article (via another system) describing how to disable
any graphic acceleration via the boot loader.

 

I now had a usable system albeit only 1024*768 res.

 

After connecting to my access point via an ethernet cable I applied all
updates and installed all updated drivers.

 

Still the graphics and network issues persisted.

 

An update to the backport network drivers completely broke the wifi and that
was quickly deinstalled leaving me with a
wifi adapter that still refused to connect to my router.

 

I then tried connecting to the hotspot of my mobile phone.  Hey that worked.
Now I was annoyed with myself for not having
done a little bit more basic troubleshooting in the first place!

 

The wifi issue turned out to be a setting on my home AP security type.  Even
though it offered both WAP2+EAP & WAP+TKIP

simultaneously. It wasn't until I turned off the EAP that Ubuntu would
connect.

 

Next I stumbled across an article where someone having the same graphics
issue as myself on a very similar system had a
response I almost rejected.

 

The suggested solution was to uninstall the accelerometer driver from
Ubuntu. But the laptop doesn't have one!

 

After doing that the graphics worked as expected.  Go figure the
accelerometer driver must forget to check if a system has
such a device or not!

 

So three days after starting my install I had finished.

 

I then deployed the beta of Ubuntu OVCC and tested OVCC for the first time
on a non development system.

 

This all occurred while I was trying to release the Linux beta of OVCC.

 

I have some big plans in store for OVCC so hopefully all goes well.

 

Hoping you all have a great 2019.

 

Walter