Always nice to be greeted by this unlock screen:

Login screen with blurred background and boxes of static that are the right size for a large digital clock and a login message.

Ever since upgrading to the latest NVIDIA driver, my Linux system has had a weird quirk with resuming from suspend/hibernate. All the applications and services that were running pick up right where I left them, but anything drawn by Gnome shell — including the unlock screen, the top bar and the dock — has corrupted text and icons. Sometimes it’ll be missing every few letters (Firefox is often captioned “ire ox”). And sometimes all the letters and icons will just show static.

It clears up if I log out and back in, or reset the display with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. And I recently learned about another useful shortcut for Gnome: Typing “r” in the Alt-F2 “Run Command” box (whether I can read it or not!) will reset Gnome Shell without closing the session, so I can keep all the applications running and actually use suspend for what it’s meant to do — though with an extra step.

Update July 10: The latest driver (515.57) appears to fix it!

After a brief stint at distributed computing early in the pandemic, I came back first to Folding@Home, then BOINC, with the following goals:

  • Use some spare computing power to help with worthwhile research.
  • Not drastically increase my power usage.
  • Mainly run projects when my computer would be on anyway, not start running a full desktop power supply full blast 24/7.
  • Avoid damaging my primary system, and especially not have to replace a fried CPU or GPU in a hurry during the ongoing chip shortage! (I’ve had heating problems with graphics-intensive games on this box.)

Folding@Home only seemed worth doing with the GPU, and the tasks took long enough that it only seemed worth doing if I was going to keep the computer on, which tripped up on my targets for power usage, uptime, and overheating risk. And their ARM version had dropped 64-bit support, so I couldn’t put it on the Raspberry Pi either. Well, not without installing a new OS and setting everything up again.

I tossed BOINC on an old Android phone (via F-Droid) to start with, using Science United as a manager to automatically choose projects based on areas of research instead of having to dig into each project one at a time. After a week or so, that seemed to be working out pretty well, so I looked into expanding.

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  1. Put Folding@Home on my desktop.
  2. It’s using too much power.
  3. Can I put it on my Raspberry Pi 3B?
  4. The software is 64-bit. The OS on there right now is 32-bit.
  5. Specs show the 3B has a 64-bit processor.
  6. /proc/cpuinfo shows it has a 32-bit processor.
  7. Specs show it should have BCM2837
  8. /proc/cpuinfo shows it has BCM2835
  9. Magnifying glass shows BCM2837 stamped on the chip.

A close-up view of a circuit board with Raspberry Pi 3 written on it and a Broadcom chip partially hidden by plastic spacers.

WTF?

It turns out all Raspberry Pi CPUs appear as 2835 in the kernel?!?!?

I decided to put BOINC on an old phone instead. I don’t feel like installing a new OS on the Pi. *sigh*

I tried out the Chrome beta for Linux on two different computers yesterday. On the first one, Flash worked right “out of the box.” On the second, it wouldn’t even show up in about:plugins. I couldn’t figure out what was different.

  • Both are 64-bit systems running Fedora 12.
  • Both are running the 32-bit version of Flash from Adobe’s yum repository.
  • Both are running the 64-bit version of Google Chrome from the beta download page.
  • I had run mozilla-plugin-config -i to create the 64-bit wrapper on both computers after updating Flash. (A security update came out yesterday.)
  • Flash works just fine in 64-bit Firefox and Opera.

I looked thoroughly at my home computer last night and came up empty. This morning I took another look at my work computer — the one where Flash actually showed up — and I think I’ve found it.

Chrome is using nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so according to about:plugins. The actual file is in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/. This system has two symbolic links to that file, one in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ and one in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/. IIRC Only one of these was present on my home computer.

So I think this will fix it:

ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

Run the command as root or using sudo.

I’ll check back tonight and update this entry to show whether it worked.

Update: Yes, it worked!