vakkotaur | Entries tagged with xubuntu

Now longer back than I care to think about (which is only August) I ordered a Solid State Drive, figuring it'd be good to have in one machine and get some experience with SSD setup. I figured I'd have to do some special partitioning and filesystem tweaking, but it would mainly be a matter of "plug it in and it works." That's how it seemed to start.

The physical mounting of things went well enough. All the hardware fit. The cables reached and locked into place. The motherboard saw there was another piece of hardware. The old disk booted up and I could set up the simple partitioning. And then the "fun" began. The install CD wouldn't boot, or at least looked like it didn't. It worked fine on belgian but was useless on percheron. So A-Googling I went and found that this is Not Unusual and there is supposedly some weird interaction with IDE DVD/CD drives and *buntu in systems that also use SATA and it's as if the boot media can't be found once things get started from it. So I started looking at and for inexpensive SATA DVD drives.

Not much later a decent deal for SATA DVD drives came up on NewEgg and I went for it, and waited for the delivery. The physical install didn't go as well this time. The physical mounting went well enough, but it's still boggling me that I managed to not seat both the power and data cables and they both have a snap-fit to them. This was foreshadowing by Reality. Once that was sorted out, the Xubuntu not booting was NOT fixed. I'm glad to have replaced the IDE DVD drive all the same, so that wasn't a big deal. But that nothing else really changed annoyed me.

Checking to see if anything would boot, I found a recovery disk (both poorly and aptly named, RIP for Recovery Is Possible) came up just fine. This was as well as I'd be using it later to repartition the old spinning disk. But Xubuntu utterly refused. It didn't even give an error message. I got a black blank screen and if I was really lucky, a blinking cursor. More research. Perhaps it was time to ditch *buntu and try something else? I looked at a few things and rejected them for lack of sufficient 32 bit compatibility (Dangit, Linden Lab, go 64 bit already. It's not 2003 any more.) or rather old kernels. I figured I'd give Xubuntu one more chance and downloaded the "Alternate" install CD.

The good: It lets one set noatime during install (lowers wear on SSD) and was simple to set up. The bad: Now the system does just what the regular install CD did: hang with a blank black screen. More Googling commences. Aha! Grub can be triggered into showing itself by holding SHIFT down just as the machine beeps on boot. There is a sort of safe/rescue mode. I get there and.. don't see anything obviously helpful, but try a resume (not re) boot.. and things work. But only with that silly start up sequence. Fine, it's something. Oh, there was some talk of video driver issues - which I'd ignored before as I needed video (even text, but console wasn't there either) to do that. Time to install nVidia's own driver(s). A proper reboot is tried and it takes a bit longer than I'd hoped (not everything is on the solid state drive) but it does finally come up right. I spend the next hour or so installing the programs I expect to have and use, and recovering from the backup I'd made of the files I wanted preserved.

There was actually more to it than that. Though many, many reboots before getting anything working there were changes to BIOS settings, reversions to standard settings, adjustments after that. Matters of IDE vs. AHCI and the switching between them. And when things looked they were about to start working, more research to be sure of what partitions to put where. (SSD has / while the spinning disk has /tmp, /var, /home and swap - though swap might never get used, it is there just in case.)

Now I can relax, or try to, as I hope things don't find one more nasty surprise to throw at me. And I hope that when I eventually replace the old spinning disk (120 GB Western Digital that's about 8 years old and has been running nearly continuously all that time) that that change will go much more smoothly. Well, I can dream.

Current Mood: nerdy

I'd been using an old laptop in the kitchen wanted something newer. A while ago I saw that the Toshiba Satellite L755D-S5104 (15.6 inch 1366x768 screen, Quad core, AMD/ATI HD6520 graphics from the A6 processor, 4 GB RAM expandable to 8 GB, 500 GB HDD) could be had for a low price, but was just above Best Buy's 18-month no-interest threshold. I went for it, planning to make it the new caspian. And then ran into trouble as I couldn't get a Linux distribution that filled my requirements to run on it.

Each distribution had some issue and with many I simply didn't get any video at all. I wound up going to PCLinuxOS's 32 bit version for a while as that at least gave me video. Then I tried Pardus when a DistroWatch comment said that worked for someone with similar problems. Alas, Pardus gave me other headaches, mainly dealing with audio and rather random behavior. More researched revealed the problem many distributions had: The HD6520 video system was too new and the 3.0 Linux kernel did not handle it well. The 3.2 kernel could supposedly deal with the HD6520. Looking around, there was something that had that and looked like it would solve my audio problems: Xubuntu 12.04, which is still in alpha.

Xubuntu 12.04 (alpha 2) is better than I expected an alpha to be. Sure, it has a couple bugs but so far none that cause me real trouble. They were minor setbacks at worst and either had almost trivial work-arounds or simply didn't matter to me. The result? I have what I set out to have: a 64-bit Linux that gives me video and audio properly and can run Firestorm.

The old laptop? I'm not sure if I'll do anything with it. It is 10+ years old after all. However it does run, if slowly, and nothing is actually wrong with it. I have this feeling it should be doing something, but I've no idea what. There is a name available for it on the network: shan.

Current Mood: geeky

While dealing with things in Wisconsin earlier this month, Xubuntu 10.04 annoyed me for the last time. I wound up having to boot into Windows to get some things done since 10.04 just plain quit doing a thing or two I needed. That was, of course, the last straw. There was simply NO more reason to keep 10.04 around.

So a couple weeks ago I downloaded Xubuntu 11.10 and tried it as a LiveCD on andalusian. I still had to install the 32-bit compatibility libraries, but they worked - and the laptop's wireless hardware was recognized, which I consider a Big Win over needing to recompile the wireless driver at each kernel update as I did with 10.04. Another win was that once the wireless was set up, after the actual install to hard drive, the settings were retained. Maybe this was the case before, but not having hardware recognized by default meant I didn't encounter it. I left things sit for a while (been rather busy with various other things of late...) and only recently ran some updates. Another win: Upon rebooting I did not need to manually restart the local wireless connection as I did before.

I'd heard there were some issues with 11.10, but so far I've not run into them. I am considering updating belgian to 11.10 as well. While it is an improvement, I still hope to run PCLinuxOS. The 64 bit version of that is still in testing (not even beta yet, let alone Release Candidate...) though if 11.10 had given me trouble I was considering going to 32-bit PCLOS with the PAE kernel - a hack to let 32-bit software use 64-bit memory space after a fashion. Why PCLOS? Because after using PCLOS for a few years, *buntu, even with the improvements, still feels 'almost' to me.

Current Mood: good

I just updated the kernel for the desktop's Xubuntu install. I will not be doing that for the laptop. At least I'll have a fully working laptop that way.

When Xubuntu comes up, pardon, came up, it would offer a selection of boot choices with fallbacks for debugging and such. Those just disappeared. No, it was NOT an option I checked. Yes, I did do a 'grub-update' to attempt recovery. No luck.

That, by itself, would not matter too much on a system with only Xubuntu (currently) installed. But the SL client I use (Phoenix) and the one I expect I will eventually need to migrate to (Firestorm) are 32 bit... and while Xubuntu has 32 compatibility libraries that work fine - they work fine on -28 kernels and earlier. Everything after -28 has broken things. No, Google doesn't help. That tells me "the libraries are in the wrong place" -- except they can't be since booting with -28 works and anything after doesn't. Conclusion: Something is broken in everything after -28.

So? So before I had the option of booting into -28. Now I don't have any options at all. If I wanted Windows, I know where to look. I don't want Windows. I don't *buntu acting Windows-like at me. Naturally all this happens at the end of my "day" so I can try to sleep (and then not have things working when I wake up and want to use them) or I can lose sleep. Thanks, Ubuntu! Doesn't anyone test this stuff? Whose bright idea was it to remove choices??

I really don't care which bug is fixed or bypassed. If the kernel can do 32-bit compatibility right, no problem. If I can get to a kernel that can, no problem. Right now? Problem.

I can hardly wait for 64-bit PCLinuxOS. PCLinuxOS actually did all the stuff that *buntu tries to claim. The only reason I'm not already running it (and am using Xubuntu...) is that there is no released 64-bit version.

ADDENDUM: Evidently it's a (new to me) default misbehavior of grub2. If there is only one operating system, no choice is given unless one keeps SHIFT pressed from right after the POST. Why does it manifest now? I was always presented with that choice before, even on the initial install which had only the one OS and only the one kernel as such. I was still given a choice of the regular kernel and a failsafe version. I'd call this change a bug: It violates The Principle of Least Surprise.

Further, dropping back to -28 from -33 ~~reveals~~ confirms that -33 seriously broke video. Sure it would still make images, but the simple act of dragging a window across the screen result in weird stops & jitters that reminded me of Windows 3.x. That is not an upgrade.

Current Mood: pissed off

( Xubuntu, microphone, and a couple other things. )

Current Mood: good

I am not a fan of the Debian family of distributions, and it's not just because of the idiotic GNU/ prefixing. I had found that *buntu tended to "help" me too much by getting in the way. Even so, I am now running Xubuntu 10.04[1] on the laptop (palomino on the rare occasion I boot it into Windows, andalusian for Linux). Why? Salix had video issues I could not get around and Xubuntu is the lighter of the *buntu family (While I don't mind KDE, it is heavy and Kubuntu has long been the "red-headed stepchild" of *buntu. Gnome? The less said of it the better.) and it's available in 64-bit right now, it boots, it installs, and it doesn't have any video weirdness - although despite the Hardware Driver tool saying it might help, one must not install the fglrx ATI/AMD video driver. It actually makes things worse.

It hasn't been all automatic. I am really glad I had previous Linux experience before this. Getting the wireless working was an adventure. Realtek seems to only acknowledge Windows when one goes driver hunting, though they do have a linux driver. Finding it is a challenge. Downloading it is another challenge. I had to resort to much Google searching to find the right page to find the driver's exact name, then Google search for that and download it from a third party. Once installed, the only real trouble I had was at my folks' place and that was solved by re-setting the wireless router. There are a few wireless networks in the neighborhood here, but only one is wide open.

The Synaptic touchpad had the intensely annoying "tap-to-click" (which means, "bump to screw up focus") that has no simple GUI means of being shut off. Eventually I found someone else had the same issue and there was a post about how to disable tap-to-click. That bit of script saves much cussing.

Getting Phoenix running meant getting the 32-bit libraries (easy enough, ia32 in Synaptic) and disabling the hardware warning since it doesn't know the video is good enough without the lousy fglrx driver installed. Getting streaming audio involved editing the startup script since it disabled gstreamer if it found itself on a 64-bit platform and evidently doesn't play nice with ~~Fmod~~ OpenAL on 64-bit Xubuntu.

The rest, so far, has been installing the programs I expect to be around or finding things close enough in the Xubuntu repository, and tweaking the XFCE setup to also be what I've come to expect. There is more setup to do. This time, I am NOT simply copying over Opera config files, but slowly rebuilding the bookmarks and settings so they're clean. I might copy the config files back from the laptop once that is done.

I still need to figure out to get the internal microphone and camera to work (and how to be sure the camera is disabled when I don't want it on... there's always the surefire method: a bit of tape). I think those are the last of the hardware type issues.

And just as all that is going on, PCLinuxOS's Texstar announces that PCLinuxOS will be getting a 64-bit version, which had it happen earlier would have been the right answer, or at least a better one than *buntu. When it finally is released, I will be trying it. I will be surprised (and disappointed) if it doesn't work better than Xubuntu.

All that said, it's nice having having new hardware. Things are, as expected, fast. While running two sessions of Phoenix does push things (I think one needs at least n+1 cores to properly run n sessions of Phoenix), it doesn't bog down badly, though the CPU usage goes up to near if not quite 100%. The 'desktop' machine (now 7+ years old!) bogs down badly if I try that. And even though I am running Linux, I usually end up needing to reboot (not just restart X) after that.

[1] Yes, I know 10.10 is out. But 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" is Long Term Support and, unlike, 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat", runs and installs cleanly. I agree with ESR, "Ubuntu 10.10 is fucked up."

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: It's (Already) Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas - The Capitol Steps

I'm finally installing Wolvix 1.1.0 on the laptop, after getting the latest GParted beta and repartitioning the laptop drive. All that is going slow, but it is going. And the Wolvix LiveCD even found a neighbor's unsecured wireless network and connected without my having to tweak anything.

I also tried Xubuntu. Or rather I tried to try it, and found it wouldn't boot. Evidently I have the hardware that reveals a nasty kernel bug in the latest Ubuntu. So much for trying that.

But the real downer is that I went looking to see if anyone managed to get the Cisco Aironet 350 working with WPA under Linux. Nobody has. A few, at least, have tried. Including a network engineer who knows from Linux and Cisco. Evidently the Aironet can do WPA if it has very recent firmware. Firmware that evidently doesn't work with the Linux driver, but only with the @$&! Windows driver... which doesn't work under ndiswrapper. Which means the card is not sufficiently supported to be fully useful. It's good enough for hotels and such, but that's it.

Anyone know of a wireless card (PCMCIA) with the following characteristics?:

1. Works under Linux natively (no ndiswrapper games).
2. Does WPA right out of the box.
3. Is inexpensive.

It looks like I get to go hunting for such a thing.

Current Mood: disappointed

Last night I did a backup of the data on belgian in preparation for installing Kubuntu (7.04, "Feisty Fawn") on that machine. I didn't go farther than the backup last night, wanting to pause a while and be sure of things. This morning I figured it was time to actually do it.

Well, *ubuntu is not going on belgian. *ubuntu 7.04 ("Feisty Fawn"), is, as far as I am concerned too broken to bother with. Although I am running Xubuntu 7.04 on percheron right now, that matters not.

While 7.04 has a couple issues I am aware of, they are not show stoppers in themselves. GIMP relies on libexif for jpg files and the version that 7.04 uses is too old to work right for some image made by newer cameras, such as the one Jay now uses. I discovered that to get K3B to do normalizing of audio I'd need to compile normalize-audio myself. But the problem is not these nuisances. The problem is that 7.04 won't install:

I have tried booting the Kubuntu LiveCD and it stumbles and throws an error: /bin/sh can't access tty; job control mode off.

I've tried booting with a Xubuntu LiveCD and get the same thing.

I've tried several of the supposed work-arounds. They don't work.

I've downloaded the "alternate" Ubuntu install ISO and tried that. The text install gets farther but then says it can't find the network interface.

Just to check, I tried Xubuntu 6.10 ("Edgy Eft") and that came up just fine. There is nothing special about belgian's hardware. So Edgy works, but I'm not going to install a version behind and I'm not going to install a version behind and then hope an upgrade doesn't break things the same way the LiveCD fails. Since 6.10 just works, it's plain that 7.04 is broken.

So, I'm giving up on what should have been named "Flaky Fawn." That leaves me with a problem. What do I install on belgian? If Wolvix 1.1.0 was released rather than a "release candidate" (with known problems) I'd be seriously tempted to go with it. Wolvix has the most recent libexif so GIMP can handle jpgs made by new Olympus cameras, so at least that wouldn't be an issue. And even now Wolvix boots on belgian without any special hand-holding.

I could keep using Fedora for a while longer and hope that Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" isn't "Goofy Gibbon" in disguise and actually works. Or stay with Fedora and wait for Wolvix. Or even try something else entirely, expecting to change again within the year. Staying with Fedora isn't very appealing, but I'm not sure what I'd replace it with even if only temporarily.