After having Ubuntu upgrade leave my netbook useless (I had to re-install), and - since this happened on the road when I really could have used my machine - I was determined (after doing a clean-install of Ubuntu 9.10) to have alternate boot options on my netbook.
At least I'd have a way to keep working.
I also wondered if any of the existing installs would properly manage the touchpad (that is, allow disabling while typing).
I decided to install a small image of the original windows, an Ubuntu and a Fedora.
I set about to create various test live-images on USB so I could test what worked well, and then work out the backup and installation sequence I would need.
I started from a Fedora boot on my desktop. Fedora images are created by Live USB Creator. I could create other test images from Fedora with UNetBootin.
I had been using UNetBootin for a while - it seems pretty nice, automatically downloading a distro (or taking a path), and being pretty smart about selecting the USB it would configure.
I worked back and forth between Live USB Creator and UNetBootin. At one point, I was testing a release candidate F12, and quickly used Live USB Creator (after using UNetBootin for the last several creations, including some USB ones).
Ach! Live USB Creator picked a disk with my home directories, and DELETED user areas before I realized what it was doing. VERY NASTY.
Beware!
Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade quashes audio
The other night, as I usually do, I accepted a slew of Ubuntu updates. My audio was gone afterwards.
After some searching, this thread proved helpful: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449 but I did need to figure out what an appropriate ASLA driver would be.
The soundcard list on the ASLA site showed two options; I went for the HDA one, since
I followed the instructions on the ubuntuforums link to build from sources, compiling the snd-hda-intel driver with the help of module-assistant (building couldn't have been easier).
The volume control panel has trouble opening (I'm not sure if this is because of the debug build). Basic sound works, but my Logitech headset is no longer seen, and so my skype is out of commission (does not make me happy - my phone of preference suddenly was made inoperable!).
UPDATE:
It appears that the generic 10de NVIDIA HDA (OSS mixer) sound device, if selected from the volume control hangs the volume control - and you can (?) never get back to it. The applet is gnome-volume-control: and when it hangs, you can't even select another window, do anything at all. CTRL-ALT-F1 to get to a normal terminal login allows you to find and kill that process. Then you can get back to the X-Win screens (CTRL-ALT-F7).
I tried installing from the Ubuntu distribution (as per the Ubuntu Forums); I tried building from the alsa sources from Ubuntu; I tried building from the ALSA latest sources (all drivers) from the ALSA-Project. I tried both before, and after (repeatedly) removing pulseaudio. I tested, looked thru the lsmod list on my netbook (Ubuntu 9.10) install.
As one last ditch, I'm going to try to remove what the Ubuntu Forums suggest, get it back to distro with apt-get, and then build the entire distro ASLA sources, and see what that gets me.
It looks like pulseaudio doesn't know what to do. I have rhythmbox playing music through speakers, while I try a test call with skype. I can initially succeed in having the outputs separate, but I get no input through the skype app from the headset microphone. If I try, the music shifts into the headset (out of the speakers) and, on a song transition, back again.
Finally I'll try what I posted here in the first place about removing pulseaudio:
UPDATE:
Well, I have restored Skype (more fundamentally, usb Logitech headset recognition on this installation) - this seemed to be accomplished by building / installing _all_ the sound drivers.
For future fallbacks, I can (still) use skype on my netbook (Ubuntu 9.10), or my Fedora-11/64 install.
This was way more work than I would ever want a normal system update to cause me. Perhaps its time to think of a simple mercurial versioning of update actions, perhaps limited to the last 10 revisions (or so) - a rollback system like, for example, Windows has.
Anybody up for designing this for the Linux community?
After some searching, this thread proved helpful: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449 but I did need to figure out what an appropriate ASLA driver would be.
The soundcard list on the ASLA site showed two options; I went for the HDA one, since
lspci -vshowed HDA from the NVIDIA driver on my ASUS board, that is to say I needed the snd-hda-intel driver. Not intuitive, but it worked... sort of...
I followed the instructions on the ubuntuforums link to build from sources, compiling the snd-hda-intel driver with the help of module-assistant (building couldn't have been easier).
The volume control panel has trouble opening (I'm not sure if this is because of the debug build). Basic sound works, but my Logitech headset is no longer seen, and so my skype is out of commission (does not make me happy - my phone of preference suddenly was made inoperable!).
UPDATE:
It appears that the generic 10de NVIDIA HDA (OSS mixer) sound device, if selected from the volume control hangs the volume control - and you can (?) never get back to it. The applet is gnome-volume-control: and when it hangs, you can't even select another window, do anything at all. CTRL-ALT-F1 to get to a normal terminal login allows you to find and kill that process. Then you can get back to the X-Win screens (CTRL-ALT-F7).
I tried installing from the Ubuntu distribution (as per the Ubuntu Forums); I tried building from the alsa sources from Ubuntu; I tried building from the ALSA latest sources (all drivers) from the ALSA-Project. I tried both before, and after (repeatedly) removing pulseaudio. I tested, looked thru the lsmod list on my netbook (Ubuntu 9.10) install.
As one last ditch, I'm going to try to remove what the Ubuntu Forums suggest, get it back to distro with apt-get, and then build the entire distro ASLA sources, and see what that gets me.
cd /usr/src; sudo tar xjvf alsa-driver.tar.bz2; cd modules/alsa-driverI thought about removing a little more than the Ubuntu Forums say - e.g. libasound2 and libasound2-plugins - but apt-get pulled far too many libraries into the mix with that - close to 300. For now, I'll just try the standard thing the forum suggests:
sudo ./configure --with-kernel=/usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r) --with-cards=all --with-isapnp=yes --with-sequencer=yes --with-oss=yes
sudo make
Next, I'll install the ASLA driver as I built it over this:sudo apt-get --purge remove linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils
sudo apt-get install linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
and reboot...sudo make install
It looks like pulseaudio doesn't know what to do. I have rhythmbox playing music through speakers, while I try a test call with skype. I can initially succeed in having the outputs separate, but I get no input through the skype app from the headset microphone. If I try, the music shifts into the headset (out of the speakers) and, on a song transition, back again.
Finally I'll try what I posted here in the first place about removing pulseaudio:
killall pulseaudioIt looks like this works. There is a bit of a caveat: the pulseaudio server seems to be running; I had to su (sudo was not sufficient) to stop it (pulseaudio --kill). It looks like I'd created a .asoundrc file which started up pulseaudio; if you have one, you will want to comment out any pulseaudio lines in it, or (as in my case) remove the file (pulse was the only stuff in it). Everywhere in /etc it is set to NOT start on startup, but it is there, and can run, for example, when fired by the menu item Applications->Sound & Video->PulseAudio Volume Control. It may be useful to remove these applications
sudo aptitude remove pulseaudio
sudo aptitude install esound
sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio
UPDATE:
Well, I have restored Skype (more fundamentally, usb Logitech headset recognition on this installation) - this seemed to be accomplished by building / installing _all_ the sound drivers.
For future fallbacks, I can (still) use skype on my netbook (Ubuntu 9.10), or my Fedora-11/64 install.
This was way more work than I would ever want a normal system update to cause me. Perhaps its time to think of a simple mercurial versioning of update actions, perhaps limited to the last 10 revisions (or so) - a rollback system like, for example, Windows has.
Anybody up for designing this for the Linux community?
HP mini 311
I wanted long battery life (something I could write with on trips, the train), and something to run Linux on. Most of the netbooks out this summer (2009) had screen resolutions which didn't suite them for making presentations at meetings, conferences, etc. Even worse, they seemed to be most usable with so called "Netbook Remixes" of Linux (e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora) which tried to make presentations more readable on the small, low resolution screens.
The 311 offered an NVidia chipset, an HDMI output port, and better resolution, while still holding reasonable battery life (and - at least for my preferences - the HP had a usable keyboard).
To save money, I got a basic, in-stock version from Amazon (no shipping costs, etc. made that the best cost option).
I had a Hitachi Travelstar 7200 320G drive, which happens to be conservative for standby power (better than the 160G drive that came with the 311). I added 2G RAM, which brought the total RAM up to 3G.
Access to the drive and RAM areas couldn't be nicer - see http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/HP-Mini-311.htm for some nice pictures.
I started out with a clone of my Ubuntu 9.04 system (a dd copy) - it seemed to work and update fine, but the touchpad would not be recognized by the mouse driver. What I mean is the touchpad worked fine, but there was no "touch" controls in Ubuntu, so that tap-to-click was always active, and made any typing a significant challenge (as the cursor would jump about quite readily... really, it's a great touchpad). In Windows, I was able to disable the tap-to-click feature, and then could both navigate and type usefully.
I tried all the "regular" suggestion on the web to get the touchpad recognized, but to no avail. On one trip, I let Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) "upgrade" overnite, hoping this might help. It made my system totally unusable (wouldn't even boot - no keyboard; a real disappointment on a meeting trip!). When I got home, I did a "fresh" install of Ubuntu 9.10, and that is what I run now - it worked fine, but did not help with the touchpad.
Finally, I found a workaround here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1316361
I added these aliases:
The above mentioned thread seems to now have some working / hacked version of psmouse (with added hardware identifier), so no doubt there will be better solutions soon. For now, the aliases give me the control I want, without any worries about upgrade conflicts or problems.
The 311 offered an NVidia chipset, an HDMI output port, and better resolution, while still holding reasonable battery life (and - at least for my preferences - the HP had a usable keyboard).
To save money, I got a basic, in-stock version from Amazon (no shipping costs, etc. made that the best cost option).
I had a Hitachi Travelstar 7200 320G drive, which happens to be conservative for standby power (better than the 160G drive that came with the 311). I added 2G RAM, which brought the total RAM up to 3G.
Access to the drive and RAM areas couldn't be nicer - see http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/HP-Mini-311.htm for some nice pictures.
I started out with a clone of my Ubuntu 9.04 system (a dd copy) - it seemed to work and update fine, but the touchpad would not be recognized by the mouse driver. What I mean is the touchpad worked fine, but there was no "touch" controls in Ubuntu, so that tap-to-click was always active, and made any typing a significant challenge (as the cursor would jump about quite readily... really, it's a great touchpad). In Windows, I was able to disable the tap-to-click feature, and then could both navigate and type usefully.
I tried all the "regular" suggestion on the web to get the touchpad recognized, but to no avail. On one trip, I let Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) "upgrade" overnite, hoping this might help. It made my system totally unusable (wouldn't even boot - no keyboard; a real disappointment on a meeting trip!). When I got home, I did a "fresh" install of Ubuntu 9.10, and that is what I run now - it worked fine, but did not help with the touchpad.
Finally, I found a workaround here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1316361
I added these aliases:
alias touchoff='sudo modprobe -r psmouse'This successfully disables the touch-pad altogether, but leaves USB mice working fine. I added a little IOGear Bluetooth 2.1 USB Micro Adapter (model GBU421; I got mine at CDW). My favorite mouse worked right away.
alias touchon='sudo modprobe psmouse'
The above mentioned thread seems to now have some working / hacked version of psmouse (with added hardware identifier), so no doubt there will be better solutions soon. For now, the aliases give me the control I want, without any worries about upgrade conflicts or problems.