Mountains under those hills

 Since my last post I was working with Vulkan and Mac, which had a few problems that didn't seem that hard to fix. That didnt turn out that way, turns out Vulkan has bugs of their own that affect us. There is also a sound problem that seems to be only happening on one of our remote machines, this turned out to be a thread related problem so I backed off  from that ticket and moved to work on a Linus Mint ticket.

At the end of last week, I was working on a system event problem that is found on Linux Mint OS. Starting off on this problem was slow because I had to read up on the X11 library (not to be confused with DX11). From there I had to figure out how the code was being worked in our project. 

The main problem of this ticket was that no event seems to be being reported when the window is maximized(everything else is being reported when not maximized). Thats because property_notify is not the flag being returned when we try to minimize the window. 

The reason for property_notify not being returned is because when you minimize, the resolution stays the same as before you minimized so the system doesn't register a change to the window. 

I did find that map and unmap notify were being returned when I did something to the window(minimize and restore/expose). My plan is to somehow detect if the minimize button is pressed through the map/unmap notify and then change the windows resolution property. From there we go into property notify if we can and run that case.

I was doing my testing/coding via remote machine and ran into a problem where my terminal would sometimes act weird. It might have been because of the project itself not displaying output.

To resolve this someone suggested to install Mint and dual boot. I finally got Mint installed but not the way I want it. The process is usually easy I would assume, but I was installing it on a second internal ssd. The problem was that I could not find a proper tutorial as different tutorials would leave out some small information, do things a different way or chose a different option when setting things up. Another problem I ran into was the actual dual boot process. After my first install my computer would use Grub(Linux boot launcher) instead of Windows. From there I logged into Windows and noticed some of my computer settings were off like my resolution and my time was incorrect as well. I tried changing the boot order via BIOS but in doing so the Linux OS was unavaliable(not showing on list). After all that I looked into getting dual boot to work but it turns out the Mint installer has a bug where it installs the boot loader to the first efi it finds, the one way to bypass that is to unmount the internal drive you do not want Mint on. I chose not to do this because I am using a laptop. With that said I will bite the bullet and just use the Grub booter for now until i have the time to properly set up Mint the way i want.

 

Well, besides the problems that got elevated to out of my reach, I think things are going well. I believe that I am learning quite a few valuable things. For example documentation! Finding help for X11 can be sometimes rare and the X11 docs can be frustrating as it is not really up to par compared to other documentations. While I was going through the X11 documentation there are a lot of places where they don't really tell or show you how something works, it would just give a description and a list of things that are related to it. Other than that I think i gained more knowledge and experience working outside of the Windows OS and about BIOS.