google-earth anybody?

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 30 July 2012 04:16:55 Ric Moore did opine:

> On 07/29/2012 03:05 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > Greetings all;
> > 
> > I first tried to dl and install with dpkg, the current version from
> > google. No dice, can't find its binary pieces, bales out.
> > 
> > Then I found the make-googleearth-package utility and installed that,
> > then ran it, which downloaded yet another copy from google.  Then it
> > failed, missing dependency's.  Fired up synaptic, used fix broken to
> > pull in several other bit & pieces.  Re-ran the make script, bailed
> > out on versions & recommended I use the --force option.
> > 
> > That squawked about 200 or so libraries it couldn't find the versions
> > of, but made a package anyway, so I installed it.
> > 
> > Now it fusses about lack of direct-x availability, which I assume
> > nouveau doesn't have, but regardless of which box I check on the
> > startup requester, google-earth's startup advisory box just goes
> > away.
> > 
> > Has anyone succeeded in making google-earth run on a ubuntu
> > 10.04-4-122- rtai system?
> 
> Gene, ole buddy, ole friend. Why are you using Nouveau and expecting it
> to do useful stuff? Don't make me come up to WV to hurt you. Use
> "additional drivers" and get your nVidia card installed correctly. It's
> not like you ever listened to Stallman anyway. <chuckles> Ric

Well, its not like it isn't working pretty well these days Ric.  Not quite 
as fast as the nvidia driver, but a hell of a lot less hassle.  But the 
main reason is that the nvidia driver gets some of its speed by totally 
locking out the IRQ's for hundreds of microseconds at a time.  I know for a 
fact that it is absolutely verboten if you want to be able to move stepper 
motors more than 3 or 4 rpms with self generated steps.  We have a program 
called 'latency_test' which can be very illuminating.  Anyone who wants to 
run steppers and the nvidia driver might as well go ahead and spend the 3 
to 7 hundred dollars for external hardware step generation cards, you flat 
cannot do it on a machine running the nvidia driver.  Even the vesa driver 
is actually far faster for cnc purposes but limits you to 4x3 aspect ratio 
images at max rez of 1024 x 768.  All my monitors are 1680 x 1024 or 
better.  The lathe has a 23" samsung digital tv whose tuner died on it, 
does the full 1920 x 1080.  Sweet, but facing the door is a bit dim when 
the morning sun is pouring in.

This quad core phenom machine cannot even play on the same ball diamond as 
an Intel D525MW dual core atom powered board, and if I were to tie a 
machine to it, my maximum motor speeds would be reduced by at least half 
since the BASE_THREAD jitter is about 18 microseconds in a 24 microsecond 
loop.  The atom powered boards I actually use have intel on-board video and 
report a 2.3 u-second jitter in a 20 u-sec loop.  The motors on my lathe 
can be moved at 3 or 4 hundred rpms as I have more voltage available in the 
motor supply for the lathe.  Because you need a steady heartbeat, this 
machine could only be trusted to about 200 rpms.

That intel atom powered board can be had in a shoebox with a 250G drive and 
a dvd writer, with 2 gigs of dram, a psu, keyboard and mouse for $265 
dropped on my front deck by UPS.  Open it up, stick our custom spun 
ubuntu-10.04-4 LTS plus linuxcnc cd in the drive as you power it up the 
first time, and be ready to sweep up the swarf in 20 minutes.  Plug in a 
network cable so you can update it, takes another hour maybe o a 390kb/sec 
cable circuit.  That is about 5% of the cost of commercial cnc setups, and 
its capable of handling up to a 9 axis machine in real time, usually at 2x 
the carving speeds the Fanuc or Heidenhahn controllers can do.  Toyota is 
carving their racing engine blocks from raw alu castings using THIS 
software. The production rate of the machining center it is driving went up 
when they converted it to run this.  And it is under constant development, 
with a new build available about weekly.

Whats not to like?  Just don't let the nvidia driver into the same box, its 
poison to a realtime process with its IRQ hogging.

FWIW, I repeated the installation of GE, and now it works, a bit slow but 
works. GE has updated their imagery, and now shows my place minus the trees 
we lost on June 26 2010.  There are other manipulations too.  Major power 
generation facilities that I am familiar with are both moved or erased.  
The San Juan Generating station just off the Navajo Reservation on the 
north side of Hiway 64 west of Farmington is marked as a P.O. Box alongside 
the road, with no sign of the facility itself, a 2.5 Gigawatt coal burner 
that occupies about a square mile north of the road, fed by a 20 square 
mile strip mine.  The Navajo version, located almost directly across from 
it on the south side of the road has been moved 50 miles west into Arizona!  

DHS requested fuzzing no doubt.

Even the images of my house are poorer quality than before.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up!
Absurdity, n.:
	A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own 
opinion.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"