Ubuntu Hardy Screen Resolution Hell

Ubuntu Thinktank: "How can we make Ubuntu easier to use?"

Satan: "Well, you could completely automate screen detection so people don't have to manually configure xorg.conf. In fact, you should just stop using xorg.conf. You might also get rid of the Screens and Graphics tool replace it with a single dialog box that allows the user to view his screen resolution and pretty much not do anything else. After all, an automated solution that works for all is the best solution."

Ubuntu Thinktank: "Interesting... but should we really believe that our one solution will work for every hardware scenario? I mean, easy is great but what about the people for whom it doesn't work right, won't they be..."

Satan: "SILENCE FOOLS! ONE WAY FOR ALL IS THE WAY AND IT IS MY WAY FOR I HAVE SPOKEN! (Just make sure it works on my Compaq laptop or there'll be HELL to pay. Hehe, I kill me.)"

-----

So this morning I boot my Ubuntu Hardy machine and behold: 640x480 awesomeness. No real reason for it that I can think of. It's kind of odd because I have a similar problem with my Vista machine "forgetting" it's screen settings, but at least in that case I can CHANGE THEM BACK.

Seems like this is a common problem. Here are a couple reference threads: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=766879 , and http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=771810 .

I have a Geforce 6200 video card in the machine and a pretty basic 1024x768 LCD. Not an abnormal configuration by any means. I'm using the proprietary nVidia driver.

I installed nvidia-settings and ran it, but guess what? It's not usable at 640x480. How about that! To all you designers at Gnome who thought: "hmm, is there any way that we can make buttons and stuff like that bigger?", go to hell.

I manually edited xorg.conf to add a line forcing the display to 1024x768, and the display came up at 800x600. That was pretty awesome.

Finally I read a post about adding "Screens and Graphics" back to the main menu. Apparently they didn't get rid of it, they just hid it because the devil made them do it. Running Screens and Graphics I was able to change my monitor type and get back to 1024x768. (Note that if you add Screens and Graphics, it will show up under "Other", and if you run the menu editor at low resolution you'll have to use the tab and arrow keys to move around because the mouse will just scan around the virtual screen instead of clicking on what you want to be clicking on)

Oh, I should note that you can edit your menu by right clicking on it and choosing Edit Menus. I believe it should be the Applications menu that you right click on, but I can't remember. My menu is just a little Ubuntu icon because I couldn't stand all the space the default menu took on the panel.

As I wrap this up, I'd like to offer a bit of advice to the Ubuntu Thinktank:

There are two things that I need more than anything out of an easy-to-use graphical operating system:

1) The ability to enter stuff into the computer with the keyboard and mouse.

2) The ability to see the stuff I entered.

Any sort of screwups in those regards are showstoppers. Don't take away the user's ability to easily make changes to his configuration. You want to automate things? Cool. Do both.

Installing Dell OMSA and SNMP in Ubuntu 8.04 on PowerEdge R200

This is going to be a simple step by step as I go.

Go!

1) Become root:

sudo su.

2) Edit /etc/apt/sources.list to include the following line:

deb ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara

This is an unsupported repository that has the dellomsa package.

3) apt-get update

4) Install snmp daemon and tools:

apt-get install snmp snmpd

5) Install openipmi service (I'm not sure if this is necessary, I had already installed it):

apt-get install openipmi

6) Install OMSA:

apt-get install dellomsa

7) Enable snmp in OMSA. Note: this will automagically make changes to your snmpd configuration.

/etc/init.d/dataeng enablesnmp

8) /etc/init.d/dataeng restart

9) Verify that you can connect to http://YOUR_IP:1311 . You should be able to login with a local system user.

10) IF YOU HAVE AN SAS6IR CONTROLLER DO THE FOLLOWING

10.1) Install mptctl driver:

modprobe mptctl

10.2) To load the driver at boot, edit /etc/modules and add the line:

mptctl

10.3) Initialize new driver with OMSA (or something like that):

/etc/init.d/instsvcdrv restart

10.4) Reconnect to https://YOUR_IP:1311 and verify that you can see your storage subsystem.

11) Ease up snmpd security so that you can actually use it.

Edit /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf and change:

com2sec paranoid default public

to:

com2sec readonly default public

12) Now we have to make some changes to the way Ubuntu starts snmpd. Edit /etc/default/snmpd and change:

SNMPDOPTS='-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -I -smux -p /var/run/snmpd.pid 127.0.0.1'

to

SNMPDOPTS='-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -p /var/run/snmpd.pid '

I don't know why removing the smux stuff works, but it's necessary. Removing the localhost IP address will allow snmpd to bind automatically to all interfaces. If you don't remove 127.0.0.1, you'll only be able to talk to snmpd from the local machine.

13) /etc/init.d/snmpd restart

14) /etc/init.d/dataeng restart

15) Verify that the following command spits out a whole bunch of stuff:

snmpwalk -OS -v 1 -c public localhost .1.3.6.1.4.1.674.10892.1

These should all be Dell-specific.

16) Verify that you can perform the same query from a remote machine (change localhost to the IP of the server we're setting up). Check firewall settings (UDP 161)!

17) Configure the system to start the OMSA web service when the system boots:

update-rc.d dsm_om_connsvc defaults

18) User management.

It appears as though OMSA wants you to login to the GUI via root to become OMSA Admin. To enable your root account in Ubuntu you have to do a sudo passwd root and give root a password. To disable the root account later, do a sudo passwd -l root .

To make a user a "Power User" in OMSA, you have to add them to the root group.

Installing JDK in OpenVZ VPS

I started playing with OpenVZ today because I'm getting terrible performance from QEMU+KQEMU and various Java applications.

I had some trouble installing the JDK inside my VPS, and the problem cost me about an hour so I figured I'd share. I'm running OpenVZ from a pretty bare Ubuntu Hardy server, and the VPS was created from ubuntu-8.04-i386-minimal.tar.gz which I downloaded from the OpenVZ site.

When I'd try to install the Sun JDK or OpenJDK via apt-get, I'd get the following error:

Setting up sun-java6-bin (6-06-0ubuntu1) ...
Aborted
dpkg: error processing sun-java6-bin (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 134
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of sun-java6-jre:
sun-java6-jre depends on sun-java6-bin (= 6-06-0ubuntu1) | ia32-sun-java6-bin (= 6-06-0ubuntu1); however:
Package sun-java6-bin is not configured yet.
Package ia32-sun-java6-bin is not installed.
dpkg: error processing sun-java6-jre (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of sun-java6-jdk:
sun-java6-jdk depends on sun-java6-bin (= 6-06-0ubuntu1); however:
Package sun-java6-bin is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing sun-java6-jdk (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
sun-java6-bin
sun-java6-jre
sun-java6-jdk
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Turns out it's just a resource problem. If you're getting this error, check /proc/user_beancounters and see if you're getting any failures:

cat /proc/user_beancounters

101: kmemsize 625164 1720287 11055923 11377049 0
lockedpages 0 0 256 256 0
privvmpages 1173 129807 131072 139264 2

As you can see I was having problems with the limit on privvmpages. I doubled the default twice before it worked, resulting in a barrier of 262144 and a limit of 278528. You can change these values like so:

vzctl set 101 --privvmpages 262144:278528 --save

Sigh, Goodbye OpenSUSE

So I had to ditch OpenSUSE 10.3. It doesn't come as any surprise, really. I've never been able to break out of the Linux installation loop:

1) Install new distro
2) Work out various hardware kinks
3) Try to configure new distro to my liking
4) Try to use new distro for a few weeks
5) Hit a brick wall on some necessary feature; or distro simply breaks
6) Goto step 1

I had OpenSUSE 10.3 installed on both my Thinkpad R32 laptop, and on a standard desktop machine (Asus Mobo, Athlon XP, Geforce 6200 video). In both cases I ran into a dreaded KDE Freeze Bug. Unfortunately the KFB has like 80HP and does 20+2 (freeze) damage, which is a formidable enemy; even though I'm dumping all my skill points into Linux Tinkering and have several Potions of Diet Pepsi in my inventory.

Screw it. I might put more effort into battling the Freeze Bug, but OpenSUSE 10.3's package manager is absolutely atrocious. There have been so many times over the past month that I've thought about searching for software and decided that it wasn't worth it to wait for the package manager to start up. Even if I had that kind of time I'd still just end up fighting RPM dependency nightmares.

I realize that OpenSUSE 11 is just out and has a substantially better package management system. Unfortunately, they said the same thing about 10.3. If the package manager in 10.3 offered "dramatically improv[ed] speed," then I can't imagine how terrible it was previously. And even if package management is twice as fast in version 11, it would still be too damn slow.

So I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on both machines. So far so good, although I ran into the same old nVidia driver problem on the desktop and the laptop won't shut down properly with my PCMCIA wireless card installed. The nVidia driver issue was easy enough to fix (again), and when I figure out where to tell Ubuntu to eject the PCMCIA card on shutdown I'll update that blog post.

It's nice to be back on Ubuntu even though it uses the ever-ugly Gnome desktop and lacks a proper control panel. The Debian package management is really where it's at. I've decided not to try anything fancy with the laptop either - defaults all the way. We'll see how long this all lasts.

Oh, here's a cute one: when I successfully wake my Thinkpad from hibernation, the Hardy Heron informs me that the laptop was unable to hibernate. Thank goodness for the guy who put the "don't tell me this again" checkbox in that dialog.

FUbuntu

Goodbye Ubuntu. I sampled your Freaky Frog and poked around in your Greasy Goat and even noodled around with your Horny Heron for a few days. Es bunku.

For being the best supported community Linux distribution with the biggest desktop install base (I'm making that up), Ubuntu has its canonical thumb up its canonical arse when it comes to hardware support. I have no idea what that means, but I'm not good at clever insults.

Case in points: many wifi cards (specifically in my case anything with an ralink or hermes chipset) and some ATI video cards (namely mobility Radeon).

Ok, so really I'm just pissed that your Ubuntu sucks on my Thinkpad R32 laptop and completely drops the ball when it comes to drivers for my Linksys WUSB54G wifi adapter. When I came to realize that support for my adapter actually worsened in the Haggardy Heffer beta, I decided to kill this retarded installation.

Interestingly enough, I wiped Ubuntu from my laptop the day I got a new wifi adapter that would have worked with it. Why me so krazie? Well, because I'm just not terribly impressed.

My Ubuntu 7.10 (and 8.whatever Beta) experience:

1) Terrible installation process.

2) Poor performance with default software load installed. Very poor, actually. In your defense I didn't give it enough memory, but I've seen much better performance from other distributions.

3) It's damn ugly. A stock Gnome installation straight out of 1995. You want bling? Be prepared to manually install drivers and edit your xorg config if you've got ATI video. You want something besides a solid color panel? Break out the terminal.

4) Where are the features? There is no centralized management interface that I can find, just a bunch of disassociated applications stuck to a start menu. It's very difficult to remember where to find various settings. The printer management is horrible. HORRIBLE! The themer is easily broken beyond repair and features from some themes just don't work. Network management is a joke. File sharing is more painful than it need be.

From my perspective, Ubuntu brings exactly two things to the table: 1) Automatic updates and 2) a network applet in the panel. Those are the killer apps that are year-of-the-Linux-desktoping the world. wow. Oh, and thanks for the links to "non free" codecs and drivers. A little silly to have deliberated over this one for ten years though, don't you think?

Ok ok, it also has a very large repository which is a plus. No complaints there.

Is this the best that the free Linux desktop world has to offer? I sure hope not.

I replaced Ubuntu with PCLinuxOS 2007 (real clever name there fellas) which installed in minutes from a LiveCD and seemed to setup and use all of my hardware correctly. Yay! But not so yay. After doing nothing but configuration via the GUI control center, my sound has stopped working completely and I no longer have a graphical login. Oh, and installing Kismet broke some dependencies. And most notably, it's been installing updates for over 70 minutes and i have no idea what the hell is going on. Kubuntu? Fedora? I'll blog my little heart out about all this later. You can't wait.

Soon I may end up putting Windows back on this machine because in the long run, really, I've got some shit to get done. (no I don't, I'm just trying to stir some shit up)

Automatix2 Infinite Poop

Ah, how very clever of you! I discovered this little flaw a few moments ago when running your Automatix 2 program. (here's an idea: how about user-defined filters / sets in Synaptic? Too simple?)

When installing some fascist DVD codecs, Automatix prompted me to insert my Ubuntu CD. Ok, CD inserted...pressing enter...ah yes....ahh...crap.

Something somewhere doesn't like my CD :( No worries, I'll just eject the CD and pop it back in. Or not, the CD tray is locked.

Not a problem, of course, I'll just hit that big ol' Cancel button in the Automatix wizard thingy:


Ahahahahhahah cripes. I can't cancel the install until I insert the CD. I can't get at the CD without canceling the install. Not a terribly new or clever way of hurting me, but painful nonetheless. You win this time.

*** Update

Not only can I not exit this application via normal means, I can't kill it via the GUI! Oh how very Windows 95 of you! Out comes that damned shell again. Double points for you.

Ubuntu 7.10 Power Management Gripe

Oh heavens, a gripe?

Yeah, take a look at this and tell me what's goofy (aside from the blank splotch in the image (being considered for gripe #2!):


Eleven minutes? Perhaps your 1-key was sticky when you developed this work of art?

What if I want my laptop to suspend after say, five minutes? And here's a crazy scenario: what if I wanted my display turned off after 2 minutes, and suspend after 10? And what if I want it to hibernate instead of suspend after a certain amount of inactivity? Why? Because suspending the computer drains the battery, that's why.

Ubuntu 7.10 vs. Linksys wireless

Ok, Ubuntu 7.10 Glorious Goiter is finally installed. This is just wonderful, I can't even tell you. Damn that brown is hot.

Why no exclamation points to convey my ultimate excitement, you ask with an evil grin? Well, something is wrong with your wireless networking. I can see wireless networks, and I can try to connect, but the connection always fails. Unsecured, WEP, WPA, YMCA, doesn't matter. It tries to connect, the little light on my adapter blinks, but no connection.

Hm. The adapter I'm trying to use is a Linksys WUSB54G v4. I think it has the Klingon RT33019993322911933 chipset. It's a pretty standard unit, and part of Linksys's standard "G" product lineup. Linksys, you know, like one of the biggest consumer-grade network product manufacturers in existence? Recently purchased by Crisco? Perhaps you've heard of them?

I don't believe this crap.

Fine fine fine. Let me put my google goggles on....

Oh dear, this doesn't look good. It seems like you've completely missed the boat with this particular card. Coincidence that it happens to be the one I use? I think not.

Oh wait, here's how to fix it. Aw hell, why didn't I think of this? *slaps forehead* I just have install the linux headers and build environment, then grab a new driver from a monkey. Then it's as simple as untarring, compiling, installing, blacklisting the existing driver, restarting, setting up a manual connection, restart, edit my interfaces file, and finally restart one more time. It's like Windows ME, but with more typing.

Ok ok, I kid. After the procedure things were definately ok. It didn't work of course, but hey, I didn't expect you to give up that easily anyhow.

Here's an awesome idea, I'll install Wicd and remove network-manager. Wicd, as you can tell by its name, is a network manager that isn't dependent upon any particular desktop, aside from the fact that it uses gtk. "network-manager," as you can tell by the name, is a network manager
specifically for gnome.

Alright, all I have to do is add a new location to my sources list, good good, click click cut paste. Installing Wicd automatically uninstalls network-manager and its cronies, that's good... adding Wicd to my system tray or whatever it's called and restarting.

Ok, so there's a space for the Wicd icon on the task bar there, but no icon. Odd. Ok, let's fire up Wicd from the start menu clone and see what's up. Looks good. It sees my Ethernet connection, and that's awesome. But alas, no wireless networks found.

Its about this time that things get a little funny. The system starts getting unresponsive, applications start locking up, notably Wicd, and I'm forced to wait...and wait...and wait. Sweet, a dialog asking me if I want to "force quit" my application. Sounds familiar somehow...hmm... Ok, everything's gone to shit now. When in doubt, restart - a lesson from 1995 that still seems to apply.

Alright, this is where things get real weird. I'm enabling and disabling and refreshing and configuring the crap out of everything network, and finally I can see my wireless connection in Wicd. I'm getting an awesome single bar even though I'm three feet from the router (which is a Linksys, btw). Anyhow, same exact problem as before. I can see the network, but I can't login to it. It pukes waiting for an IP. I guess that's not so weird, just different. No, not different, just more of the same.

So whatever, let's ditch this Wicd stuff and go back to network-manager. This works, but my wireless networks don't show up in the network-manager icon thingy. None of my networks do, but I can connect via hard line.

This is retarded. I would kill for an "update driver" button.

Next option seems to be using ndiswrapper, and I'm totally looking forward to that hack fest, let me tell you.

If that doesn't work, I've heard that the card works in SUSE for whatever reason.

"Hey crabby pants, why don't you just go buy a new network adapter that's supported by Ubuntu? Don't you RTFMs??"

Hey nerd-with-dumb-ideas, go fork() yourself.

****UPDATE****

I am successfully running the WUSB54G v4 on Ubuntu 7.10 using the ndiswrapper. Even WPA works! It's a quick procedure. See this guy's blog entry. (However, you do not need to download and manually install ndiswrapper, it's available through normal Ubuntu channels). Note, there is another non-ndiswrapper tutorial out there -- I initially tried it -- but it doesn't seem to work if you need WPA.

Man, this is so easy, I'm gonna send my Grandma an Ubuntu CD for Valentine's Day!

Ubuntu 7.10, "Gutsy Gibbon" (or some shit)

I'm already running your "Ubuntu" operating system on one of my machines here. Actually three, but only one is a desktop. I think it's running Fickle Frog. I don't use that machine too much, but for the most part it works fine. At any rate, I'm not a Linux novice, but I'm definitely not advanced. In addition to Ubuntu, I've run various other flavors over the years, unable to stick with any.

This time it's different. You've got all the kinks worked out. It's polished, stable, and kicks the ass of all other operating systems (except Mac OSX, the geeks concede, but only because it's got some BSD). Anyhow, I can feel it, this is My Year of the Linux Desktop! Fuggin a.

Installing Ubuntu is usually easy. Well, that's what I figured. I'm putting on this here IBM R32 laptop, which unfortunately only has 256MB of RAM.

"Dood, RAM is like fifteen cents a spigabyte these days, just go buy some more!"

Stuff it, geek-who-has-yet-to-reproduce.

Ok, boot from the LiveCD, no problem...a little slow...but.......ok.... sandwich time.... ok... ok it's done. Sweet, everything seems to work. I'm psyched.

Thank you for the nice install icon, that's handy. Lemme just give it a clicky poo....

Wait a sec here, what's happening? A whole lotta nothin! The installer takes about a minute to load up, as is extremely unresponsive. I can get right to the spot where I choose my time zone, an ever-so-important task, and then it just seems to freeze up. The CDROM drive is going crazy. I let it run for about half an hour. Something is happening, but what I have no idea.

Ok ok, scrap that shit. Hm. Maybe the CDROM drive in this machine is all warn out. Let's try to install from USB.

A little google here, a little google there, some rebooting, some command-lining, and voila, I've got a bootable USB stick of the Ubuntu LiveCD. Plug it in to the laptop and fire this baby up.

D'oh. A little BIOS tinkering here and there. Ok, let's fire this baby up.

What the butt? I have the exact same problem with the USB stick. I can get the installer to the time zone panel but then it locks up while the USB stick blinks like crazy (yea, I got me one of those blinky ones, bling bling).

Google, here I come. What do I search for? "Ubuntu 7.10 installer no worky?" I dug around for a while and finally found a forum post where somebody said that the LiveCD installer needs two hundred and fifty SEVEN megabytes to work properaly. Oh man, I was so close.

Your installer doesn't have the courtesy to not puke all over the place because it doesn't have enough room to work in (about 130MB, I checked), but the only tears on my face are those of rage.

Ok ok already. Let's try the alternate CD and install from there. Downloading...downloading ... internet sucks tonight .. downloading. Done! And we'll burn this bad boy to a CD and..... cripes, I'm out of CDRs.

Ok, next day and I crack open a fresh spindle of 50 blank CDRs and make a CD from the alternate iso. Plug that baby into the ol' R32 AND!........ no operating system found. Hm.

What were the instructions for making a bootable USB stick again? Oh yeah, ok... it won't take long... just you know, like 15 minutes of my life... no biggie...

Alright, let's boot from my awesome new Alternate Ubuntu 7.10 Greasy Goat bootable USB installer stick! Ok, that works. Starting the install process.....

"Sorry, but I've been programmed to not know where the hell your CD is, especially since you're not using one. If you'd like to specify where the installation files are, please download Slackware."

Ok...now I'm starting to get a little peeved. You're getting to me, you FOSS SOB.

Alright, maybe I should try to make another boot CD. After all, I don't think that my CDROM drive is bad. I'll burn one at a slower speed: NO LUCK. I'll burn one with different settings (chosen at random, of course): NO LUCK.

CRAP! Oh hey, what's this? A single blank CDR that I'd forgotten about from my last batch. What the hey, I'm out of ideas. Burning alternate installer to CDROM...success... now let's try it here...

IT WORKS! Oh my blod, I've got a bad batch of CDROMs! I know it's not Ubuntu's fault, but I blame you anyhow. That's just how my brain pathways happened to grow. Sorry.

Oh man, it's working. In less than two or three hours I'll be running Ubuntu 7.10 Giggling Grasshopper. I'm stoked. Finally my machine will free, truly free! Like the Declaration of Independence we the people (or processors) kind of free! My computer has been waiting for this its entire life.

I win. It's smooth sailing from here..............