Author Archives: Ruben Sanchez-Garcia

Linux Horror stories vol II: Automatic drivers update

As promised, I will tell you about another Linux Horror Story: The Nvidia driver automatic update that breaks your machine. This is a recurrent problem that I have suffered so many times that I tend to disable all Nvidia updates just to avoid it. Unfortunately, I forgot to do so on my new laptop, so it happened once more. 

It all started when I tried to connect my dual monitor to my laptop, as I have been doing for the last 8 months. But the SO did not recognize the monitor. After unplugging and plugging my monitor a few times and rebooting my machine several times, I started thinking that it may be a drivers-related problem, so I just executed the command nvidia-smi to check if the GPU drivers were working. A familiar error message confirmed my fears: 

NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn’t communicate with the Nvidia driver. 

 Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

If you are lucky enough, this is a consequence of the driver update and rebooting the machine will make it work again. Unfortunately, it was not my case, so I started the process of uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers. To do so, in an Ubuntu machine, you only need to use the following two commands.

Continue reading →

Command-Line Interfaces (CLIs), argparse.ArgumentParser and some of my tricks.

Command-Line Interfaces (CLIs) are one of the best ways of providing your programs with useful parameters to customize their execution. If you are not familiar with CLI, in this blog post we will introduce them. Let’s say that you have a program that reads a file, computes something, and then, writes the results into another file. The simplest way of providing those arguments would be:

$ python mycode.py my/inputFile my/outputFile
### mycode.py ###
def doSomething(inputFilename):
    with open(inputFilename) as f:
        return len(f.readlines())

if __name__ == "__main__":
    #Notice that the order of the arguments is important
    inputFilename = sys.argv[1]
    outputFilename = sys.argv[2]

    with open(outputFilename, "w") as f:
        f.write( doSomething(inputFilename))
Continue reading →

Linux Horror Stories and Protection Spells (Volume I)

Don’t get me wrong. I love Linux. After many years of using it, I ended up appreciating how flexible, potent, and even beautiful it is. However, using Linux has never been a bed of roses and every single Linux user that I know has had to deal with many problems since the very beginning. Indeed, I still remember how frustrating installing my first Linux machine was, especially after realizing that my network card was not working. Had I given up, I would never have written this post.

Although many of the problems that I faced while using Linux are related to updates and drivers (how painful NVidia drivers updates can be, I will write another post about that in the future), I must recognize that on many other occasions I was the only one responsible for such problems. Consequently, I want to warn the reader against a couple of those mistakes I made in the past and provide some tips about how to deal with them.

My worst nightmare: rm –r * 

Continue reading →