One Step Forward and Two Steps Back

Added the new Serial Card and the bus termination card, fired up the TTA8. The TTA8 built in test programs work but the system is a bit unstable. Unfortunately the serial port on my laptop did not work. Checked it with the old serial card, same problem. Checked Arduino and the same problem. Rebooted the laptop and the same problem.

I had just got the laptop back from the repair shop! Okay, reset the permissions for the ports. Now it talks to the Arduino. Okay lets check the firmware for why the serial echo program did not work last time. Yes, found the problem, tried to recompile and the spreadsheet macro is missing! What happened to my laptop?

Find an old version of the macro, as now I know that macros are stored in a configuration directory (and it is not there), they are not stored in the spreadsheet (nasty). Okay, update the macro for firmware changes. Updated the firmware. Fired up the TTA8. Erratic behaviour? Okay remove the bus termination card, that seems to have fixed it! Still the firmware is not 100% working as it should. This is going to take time to work out.

Okay, find an old firmware that has a working serial echo program. Test it on the new serial card and success. Okay, the compiler will have to wait until tomorrow. I will take the win.

Now I do not understand what happened to my laptop. How were the various security setting reset? Without the passwords the repair guy should not have been able to change anything even accidentally. Perhaps he reinstall Mint but kept the home directory. He does not need passwords for that. And it may also explain why I had to reinstall the "ezxdisp" library. A puzzle?!

Okay I need to check the compiler and rebuild the firmware step by step to get back to where I was.

A Puzzle Solved

I now understand what happened. Because my laptop was out of action for so long (nearly two weeks) I forgot that I reinstalled Mint and was still in the process of setting it up.

The problem with LibraCalc is that the macro is not stored in the "ods" file but in one of the  "~/.config/?" directories. So it was lost upon the reinstall. I did not back up the hidden files.

AlanX