California Dreams

It seems I will be writing about Ubuntu and laptops some more, but so be it.

My new work laptop, a nice Dell Latitude D830 arrived a few days ago, and I have been trying to cram the not-yet-officially-released version of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) into it. And mind you, the 64-bit version at that. It could be said a fair share of my problems seem to be due to using pre-release software, since after I got over the initial hurdles and upgraded, things are better. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

First I tried to use gparted 0.3 LiveCD to repartition the drive, but that did not work since 0.3 did not recognize the hard drive. I figured this was a good time to upgrade my gparted LiveCD so I burned the 0.3.6 version. Unfortunately that failed to grok the display on the laptop. I ended up using either 32-bit 8.04 beta or 32-bit 7.10 to resize the partitions. I divided the 160 GB, 7200 RPM drive as follows: 20 GB Windows XP (it shipped with it), 20 GB Ubuntu OS files mounted as /, the rest into extended partition which I divided into 6 GB swap and the rest mounted as /home. I chose ext3 for the OS and home partitions.

The 64-bit 8.04 failed in the installation mode because it could not grok the display. In LiveCD mode it eventually – after minutes of black screen – came up with a message saying it could not figure out a proper display. By manually configuring to Dell, 1600×1200 laptop and clicking the wide screen checkbox I thought I would be on my way. But the screen went black after that. After numerous tries I finally figured to try virtual consoles: Ctrl+Alt+F2 showed text login, 7 showed black screen, 8 showed dmesg and 9 surprisingly showed the LiveCD desktop! From there I was able to start the actual installation. The installation itself went smoothly until the 82% percent mark where it got stuck checking mirrors. Doing some searches it seemed like I might get lucky by waiting for 15 minutes, which is what I did, and the install eventually passed that and finished.

Rebooting after install still showed no splash screen, just blackness until login prompt. I decided to enable the nVidia drivers, which downgraded my effective screen resolution from 1920×1200 to something like 1600×1200. I got around that by installing nvidia-settings and using that to write a new xorg.conf. I also noticed that I was unable to connect to my home wireless, but after bringing all packages up to date that too started working. The splash screen also started working after all upgrades.

The remaining problems that I have become aware, compared to my D820, are that coming back from suspend I am greeted with white screen. Apparently this is an nVidia bug that happens with compiz. A workaround is to just blindly type your password, or hit Alt+S which will give a new login view. Occasionally after this the display is extremely slow: the workaround is to switch to another virtual console and back (Ctrl+Alt+F2, Ctrl+Alt+F7). Another minor problem is that the hardware wireless light is not working. The bluetooth light isn’t working, but it did not work in the D820 either. The synaptics tweak I explained on the D820 page was also needed for the touchpad.

The D830 also suffered from a serious problem that could trash the hard drive much sooner than expected. Turning on laptop mode and HD power management as described here solved the problem without needing to do the other hacks.

VMWare Server also proved to be problematic, since the new kernel in 8.04 is not compatible with VMWare. Luckily I found a fix for that too. First I installed xinetd, g++ and ia32-libs and then followed the instructions on the ubuntu forums.

I plan on writing a proper page listing all the hardware, and any tweaks needed, like I did with the D820.

Update: I finally wrote a full writeup.

My temporary work laptop is an Acer Aspire 5000. It has a 1.8 GHz AMD Turion 64 bit processor, 1 GB RAM, 65 GB disc, 1280×800 resolution display and Broadcom wireless chip. The screen is the bright glassy type, which has a horrible glare problem in almost any setting.

I first got an Ubuntu 7.04 installation disk, which installed fine. The display resolution was not correct, nor did the wireless work, but since I was going to do a dist-upgrade to 7.10 I did not worry about those.

The dist-upgrade to 7.10 also went fine. Still wrong resolution which I fixed by manually adding the correct resolution in xorg.conf, but now it recognized the computer needed closed source drivers for modem and wireless. I did not worry about modem, but I installed the wireless drivers. I was able to connect to a wireless access point, but it seemed like the wireless support was extremely flaky, so I ended up installing ndiswrapper and downloading the binary drivers from Acer. That seemed to get a solid wireless performance. But when I took the computer home and tried to boot it up, it hung trying to start wireless. So back to the drawing board.

Since this is a temporary machine I decided to give the 8.04 beta a try. Once again installation went without a hitch, and now even the correct display resolution was recognized. On first install it did not offer any closed source drivers, but after I brought it up to date with all packages, there was a wireless driver available. I installed that, but surprisingly wireless still did not work. I looked at dmesg, and it showed a URL from which I got instructions on how to install the needed drivers.

Now that I have used the 8.04 beta a few days I can say that it is generally working, but things are not as smooth as I have come to expect with my Dell Latitude D820. It seems the wireless might still sporadically disconnect and reconnect on its own, and seems to show weaker signals for access points compared to the Dell. While suspend and hibernation seems to work, wireless usually does not restore coming from those states, and all kinds of twiddling is needed, sometimes requiring a reboot. Almost every resume from hibernation results in a weird sound during boot and an error dialog about problem during hibernation.

I am also experiencing difficulties with VPN. My company IT department has source code for a Linux VPN client, but that does not compile on 32-bit 7.10 or 8.04 beta. I tried the Cisco-compatible VPN client in the Ubuntu repositories and that somewhat works with wireless connection, but it is pretty flaky. I am not sure if that is due to the underlying wireless flakiness or VPN problems.

Another area I have not yet fully researched is LDAP support. It seems LDAP is better integrated with Redhat, Fedora Core and SUSE (which is what my company seems to prefer generally) so I am a bit on my own with Ubuntu.

The Aspire 5000 has some special buttons that I don’t need, and I haven’t tested if they actually work. Most of the Fn key combinations do seem to work, though. The keyboard is a little unusual with Alt Gr, euro and dollar currency buttons, but the currency buttons don’t seem to work. Fortunately they can be easily typed with other key combinations. During installation I chose the USA international keyboard layout with Alt Gr dead keys, but I don’t know if this was the best match.

I should have blogged about this several months ago, but better late than never, eh?

I’ve been looking for a great News program. I currently use Thunderbird, but every now and then I find myself wishing for something more. When I went looking for replacements, I was hoping to find something written in Python. And I did find XPN. But it has it’s own issues, among other things no real SSL support. I did write a fix for that, though.

I then found Pan, which seems like a really capable News program. Unfortunately it does not come with SSL support either. It is possible to use it with Stunnel, of course, but this is an extra hassle that it would be nice to be able to live without. Last fall I actually started work on adding SSL support to Pan2. I did the GUI parts first, since I wanted to learn about GTK programming. It was quite easy, and I was pretty happy with the GTK documentation. Unfortunately I found that adding SSL would be more work than I was hoping for, and tedious with lots of debugging expected, and just haven’t felt like I’d want to do that (again, it turns out, since I’ve already done this kind of thing in Python).

I’ve been using Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my Dell Latitude D820 work computer for about a year. For the most part it has worked great, except suspend and hibernate have been pretty flaky. I tested Feisty a little bit, and could not get any major failures with suspend or hibernate, so I had high hopes for Gutsy. Well, Gutsy was just released so I decided to upgrade to it as my main OS.

So far, after about a day of use, most of the little glitches here and there have been fixed. After a little bit of twiddling, suspend seems to be working great. Hibernate, however, does not seem to work at all, which is a big disappointment.

I am documenting my Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on Dell Latitude D820 experiences on the OSAF wiki page, like I did with Dapper.

I finally got fed up with backing to CDs and DVDs and got an external USB drive. This being the first external drive I’ve ever used, and needing to use for both Windows XP and Linux, I decided to go with a modest device just in case it didn’t work. I first plugged it into a Windows system, and were immediately confronted with problems. It seems the Windows software that comes with it is really buggy. The installer of the Windows software did not start automatically. Once I launched it manually the install went OK. Pressing the OneTouch button seems buggy too, it very rarely launches the backup application like it is supposed to. The backup application has non-standard UI. I tried to move the window, and that always minimizes the window. Some other operations seem to minimize the window as well. Once that happens, there is no way to bring the window back up. You have to kill the program from the task manager. Eventually I did get it to start backing up, but when I went to look at some other settings I had a hard time finding out the progress of the backup. Turns out you need to “start backing up again” to see the current progress. Finally when that was done and I wanted to unplug the device, the remove devices notification icon was nowhere to be found. Had to use a cryptic command line trick to safely unplug the USB drive.

Then it was time to try Linux. Plugging it in to Ubuntu Dapper Drake immediately mounted it. Good. Except I wanted to partition the drive, so that Windows would write to NTFS and Linux to ext3 partition. So I launched GParted. And twiddled and twiddled and was stumped by not being able to resize NTFS partitions. What was going on, I have done this before? Finally decided to do it using the command line ntfsresize tool, which I had to install, and at that point GParted also got support for this. Doh! Ok, so I resized the NTFS partition and created ext3 without problem. Dapper automatically mounted the ext3 partition as well. Next problem was getting a user-writable directory there. Finally resorted to command line, as I was getting tired of finding the right GUI tool. Took me a minute to find where Dapper had automounted it, though. Right-clicking the disk icon on desktop, and looking at the last properties tab solved that problem. At first I just manually copied some files over, but I want to use a more automated system. I haven’t yet decided between rsync and Dar (or the KDar GUI).

Xephyr is a cool nested X11 Server. While I am doing Chandler development I can run Chandler functional tests in a Xephyr window where I don’t need to worry about the tests breaking because I happen to move the mouse or something. I can even minimize the Xephyr window while the tests are running.

Another cool thing I can do with Xephyr is to host a VNC session from it. OSAF remote people view and give demos using VNC, but I realized I could give a demo using this even while I am sitting in the same room as the others. As long as I have somebody else connect to the screen projector and running VNC client. That way I can work around the problems Linux has about projectors. I can even give a demo about Xephyr by launching another nested X11 session inside the first nested X11 session!

I’ve been saying for a few years that the next computer I get is going to be running Linux as the primary OS. Well, now I’ve done it: I got a new work laptop (Dell Latitude D820) and decided to put Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) on it.

The initial experience was much better than I expected; all the stuff that used to give me trouble before just worked: wireless, screen resolution and sound.

After using it for several days as the main computer now, and testing all kinds of things and peripherals, the picture is no longer so rosy. I can still get work done, but there are some major annoyances. The biggest one is probably the flaky hibernate-suspend support.

I practically never rebooted my Windows XP laptop (well, at least once a month when new security patches came out). But on this box suspend and hibernate fail so often that I am forced to do hard reboot just about daily, sometimes several times a day. And when suspend or hibernate “works”, some things break: occasionally sound stops working completely until reboot, usually wireless stops working until I twiddle with the settings – sometimes a reboot is required.

Another headache is that Fn+CRT/LCD does not work. This means that if I want to give a presentation or hook into external monitor I have to usually edit xorg.conf by hand and at a minimum restart X.
I am still going to continue using Ubuntu on this computer. I love how fast everything is, and don’t exactly want the Windows experience where everything degrades in performance over time. Using Linux also gives a nice feeling

You can read about my Ubuntu experiences here.