modprobe xen-blkfront
exit

Then after it’s booted:

root@ubuntu:~# echo "xen-blkfront" >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
root@ubuntu:~# update-initramfs -u 

Source.

Also look at this post.

-bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (nl_NL.UTF-8)

This breaks things like scp or bzr via sftp. To fix it, I followed this advice:

cd /var/lib/locales/supported.d
cat /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED|grep -i nl > nl
dpkg-reconfigure locales

It’s not really pretty though; it shouldn’t give an error at all when a locale is missing. I mean, this way, I have to generate every possible locale to support logins from all over the world…

Just a quick link to my bugreport about this and a report filed against an earlier kernel.

My youngest sister has retired her big-ass (17″) Acer TravelMate (model 7513WSMi 7510) with a more modern offering from Sony. That was last year. Now, she thought it’d be a good idea to donate it to our oldest sister. But since the thing has always “run” like a pig with Windows Vista, her girl-geek instincts thought it better if I’d equip the old monster with Ubuntu Linux instead.

AMD 64bit

I’m also considering upgrading my own laptop to 64 bit. (They’ve told me that, really, the 32 bit age is over.) So, the first thing I’m trying to find out (now that I’m getting on the 64 bit train) is if this thing supports 64 bit. I can’t really think of a quick way to find out, so I’m just going to create a 64bit installation CD and see how that works.

…

Or, I could have just popped open the hood to see the “AMD Turion64x2 Mobile Technology” sticker.

Installation

After changing the boot order, the installation CD (burned from my T61 using “wodim -data ubuntu-10.10-desktop-amd64.iso”) seems to be booting despite the worrying sounds that seem to indicate that the laptop is trying to rip apart and eat the disc.

I’m surprised how good the current installation program looks and that it asks me if I want to “download updates while installing” and “install third-party software”. Nice.

Great idea to ask all the annoying questions (timezone, etc.) during installation instead of after! I’m amused with how much I’m behind the time if I see all the promotional screens for new and improved software which is meant to keep me inspired during the installation process. “OpenOffice.org is fully compatible with Microsoft Office[...]” Am I really that much behind with the times? Nah, I can’t imagine. I must still have some very, very nasty Excel sheet lying around somewhere, gathering dust. If I feed that monster of a thing to OpenOffice, then I’m pretty sure… Yeah, that’s going to be fun.

Post-installation configuration

I had expected to spend at least an hour or two hunting around forums to find solutions for obscure driver-related issues and other nuisances. But no issues popped up. It just worked. Ubuntu is very compatible with the Acer TravelMate 7513WSMi!

So, I spent some of the time saved on setting a user pic and a few other niceties, but I refrained from doing anything fancy, because I’ve figured out a new sister support strategy that I might blog about later. (It involves a four-hour work-week…)

[For my own reference, I started on the first draft of this post on Januari 14.]

lspci|grep -i vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 771/671 PCIE VGA Display Adapter (rev 10)

I solved the problem by manually installing a replacement driver that I found through a blog post that I found through another blog post that I found through a forum post.

Or something like that. Who cares? The point is that I’m uploading the files I found here so that I don’t have to jump through MegaUpload hoops again (and sit through MedaAnnoying ads):

• xorg-driver-sis671-0.9.1-fixed-build.zip
• xorg-driver-sis671-0.9.1-fixed-source.tar.gz

Installing the binary driver wasn’t too difficult. (I just always cringe when something happens outside of package management.)

mkdir sis; cd sis
wget http://blog.bigsmoke.us/uploads/2011/01/xorg-driver-sis671-0.9.1-fixed-build.zip
unzip *zip
sudo cp sis671_drv.* /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers
 
#Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and set `Driver   "sis671"` on the "Device" Section
[ -z $EDITOR ] && EDITOR=/usr/bin/vim
$EDITOR /etc/x11/xorg.conf

Restarting the X server after that was a bit difficult, since the upgrade to 10.04 also fucked up the console (that damn framebuffer) and because Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is disabled by default. I had to reboot. (Ok, I hate to admit: it’s not that it’s difficult, it’s just wrong.)

Anyway, after the system restart, it worked just fine again. The X log agrees:

(II) SIS: driver for SiS chipsets: SIS5597/5598, SIS530/620,
        SIS6326/AGP/DVD, SIS300/305, SIS630/730, SIS540, SIS315, SIS315H,
        SIS315PRO/E, SIS550, SIS650/M650/651/740, SIS330(Xabre),
        SIS[M]661[F|M]X/[M]741[GX]/[M]760[GX]/[M]761[GX]/662, SIS340,
        [M]670/[M]770[GX], [M]671/[M]771[GX]
(II) SIS: driver for XGI chipsets: Volari Z7 (XG20),
        Volari V3XT/V5/V8/Duo (XG40/XG42)
(II) Primary Device is: PCI 01@00:00:0
(WW) Falling back to old probe method for sis671
(--) Assigning device section with no busID to primary device
(--) Chipset [M]671/[M]771[GX] found
(II) SIS(0): SiS driver (2006/10/17-1, compiled for X.org 1.7.4.0)
(II) SIS(0): Copyright (C) 2001-2005 Thomas Winischhofer
 and others
(II) SIS(0): *** See http://www.winischhofer.at/linuxsisvga.shtml
(II) SIS(0): *** for documentation, updates and a Premium Version.
(II) SIS(0): RandR rotation support not available in this version.
(II) SIS(0): Dynamic modelist support not available in this version.
(II) SIS(0): Screen growing support not available in this version.
(II) SIS(0): Advanced Xv video blitter not available in this version.
(II) SIS(0): Advanced MergedFB support not available in this version.
(--) SIS(0): sisfb not found
(--) SIS(0): Relocated I/O registers at 0x9000

Then, to also fix the console:

grep vga16fb /etc/modprobe.d/* || sudo sh -c "echo blacklist vga16fb >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf"
 
sudo update-initramfs -u
 
sudo reboot
 
# pray 

I had two other issues that popped up after the upgrade the 10.04. I was inclined to blame the first on the new video driver, but I solved it by disabling “Hardware Acceleration” in the Flash plugin preferences. [source]

Another problem that confused my mother was that the volume control icon had gone. [solution]

To fix it, you can install exim4, but configure this line in /etc/default/exim4:

QUEUERUNNER='queueonly'

My sister didn’t have a printer yet. I was surprised that installing it on her Ubuntu machine was simply a matter of selecting the printer type from a list. I wonder: is this thanks to CUPS? Can I expect this to work in all distros that include CUPS these days?

Anyway, the printer works and the scanner too (of which I forgot to jot down the type). The scanner was supported by Xane without requiring any configuration. When it comes to hardware configuration, open source operating systems often beat those from Redmond.

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
nl_NL.UTF-8 UTF-8

Then run locale-gen to generate the locales.

Set the following environment vars (in profile or something) to let everything behave properly:

export LANG="nl_NL.UTF-8"
export LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_COLLATE="C"

I don’t know anymore why I chose this specific configuration. I guess this means that everything, from thousand and decimal separators to dates is Dutch, and messages are English. I don’t know, however, why the collate is C. I vaguely remember something about it otherwise not including some characters in the sorting, causing weird sorting in words with dashes and such.

For those who want to truly stay on top, just pointing Firefox to Google Reader occasionally isn’t good enough. (I know: I’m slow. I like it that way.) I had heard of various Firefox add-ons to aggregate your RSS feeds in the sidebar, but the sis had thought of this already and didn’t like to have something permanently filling up space at the left. Ok, I can understand. I thought there must probably be some Firefox add-on to move the whole damn sidebar to the right and of course there is; it’s called RightBar.

Screenshot of the RightBar Firefox Addon

The extension is so simple that you could achieve the same by adding a few lines to the userChrome.css file in the chrome subdirectory of your Firefox profile directory:

/* Change the sidebar's position */
#browser {
-moz-box-direction: reverse;
}

(If the file doesn’t exist yet, create it from a copy of userChrome-example.css.)

What’s left now is to choose which feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox to use. So far, I’ve only tried Sage (based on a five-star rating and familiarity with the name). It seems to work quite well, although, really, I still prefer just visiting Google Reader every once in a while. I mean: I’m a man, I don’t multi-task, I can hardly single-task.

I’m going to forward these suggestions to my sister, probably just to see them ignored for one crucial oversight: the sidebar doesn’t look very different. One of the things she liked about the Google Desktop, she told me, is that it looked very different from the rest of the stuff on her screen, causing a minimum of distraction. Probably I’ll end up recommending some kind of gDesktlet. (Or is there something better-looking these days?)

I was a little surprised by her move. The first computer my mother learned turning on was this computer back when I was still using it. Of course it was running Linux at the time. Before I gave it to her, I replaced Gentoo Linux with Ubuntu Linux, and, honestly, she never had any problems with it that were not hardware-related. (Ok, there was that one time when there was some junk stuck in the print spool without a user-friendly path to getting rid of it, but you could argue that this was really due to a junk printer. (On the subject of print spools: my friend Wiebe complained to me a while ago that when the queue in their WorkCentre Pro 232 gets stuck, Xerox engineers have to come in to replace the whole damn control board; apparently, just plugging in a terminal with shell access isn’t possible.)) She was comfortable with and used to Linux. But, alas, she’s in love with someone who is less than comfortable with Linux and there’s always that male ego thing.

But, then, who cares? It was good news for my sister. With her having gone through a rally of shitty old machines in just a couple years and this still being an ok-enough machine, I asked her if she’d like a “new” machine running Linux when she called me about one of those typical Windows problems that had just taken out her previous wreck of a machine. Yeah, sure, she’s was more than willing to finally get rid of Windows.

I was glad that my sister didn’t feel the need to inflict the pain of Windows on this poor old machine. This meant I only had to upgrade and reconfigure i a bit. Upgrading Ubuntu to version 8.04 went pretty seamless, because it was a relatively fresh installation where all dependencies where actually marked as “auto”. After moving away some old – uhm – aesthetic imagery, ill-suited for big-sister-eyes, I brought the machine to her place, plugged in her peripherals, connected it to her screen, and tried to boot.

It booted, but GDM wouldn’t start. I had just swapped a Matrox G400 with a noisy GeForce 4 which I had previously assumed to be broken. This assumption actually goes all the way back to before I realized that the screen was broken. When the screen started complaining of “Not Recommended Mode”, one of my first diagnosis was that the GeForce card was borked. This diagnosis was arrived to after first blaming the screen, plugging it in elsewhere, seeing that working, plugging it back in, seeing that working too, then seeing that stop working again, resetting the screen in increasingly complex sequences, seeing it work again, seeing it stop working again, swapping the DVI connection with a VGA connection, and then, finally, swapping the GeForce racehorse with the old Matrox workhorse. Of course the problems returned, but not before another fun round of swapping parts and peripherals because the machine had started crashing. The crashing led me to replacing the power supply, only to find out later that the CPU’s cooling block had someone loosened dangerously. So, with all that in mind, I had now put back to GeForce plaything before I took the whole concoction to my sister. Now, GDM wouldn’t start. (The GeForce graphics worked fine before I moved the machine to her.)

Admittedly, I hadn’t exactly tried booting with the GeForce. (I’m not the rebooting type.) After swapping the card, not being able to use the binary nvidia and an hour or so of messing around, I found that the nvidia kernel module was actually missing. (I hadn’t noticed this because a “find /lib/modules|grep -i nvidia” did show an nvidia entry; had I looked better, I would’ve seen that it was a directory and not a .ko file.) So I performed a reinstall of the appropriate linux-restricted-modules package and—voila!—the files where there (in /lib/modules/2.6.24-21-generic/volatile/).

So I’m at my sister’s and I’m surprised that X won’t start. I try to find the module in /lib/modules/; it’s gone. Then, after reinstalling the package and an extraneous reboot to see it gone again, it dawns on me: what did volatile mean again? (I should really not be telling you this, because it’s fucking embarrassing. ) Yes, the volatile directory is a tmpfs mount point. When I realized that this was probably due to initramfs, I realized that I know jack about initramfs, except that it makes Grub’s configuration incomprehensible to me.

I tried updating the initrd.img by issuing update-initramfs -u. When this didn’t work, I added the module name explicitly to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules. When that didn’t work, I changed the MODULES option in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf to MODULES=dep and pulled update-initramfs through grep to find out if the module was added appropriately: update-initramfs -u -v|grep nvidia. It was outputted and it was the right initrd.img too but still, after booting, the module was missing from the volatile directory.

So, fuck this! I was getting inpatient: cd /lib/modules/2.6.24-21-generic/volatile; mv nvidia.ko ../kernel/drivers/video; depmod -a; reboot and GDM started nicely.

Now I just have to find out why the bloody eth0 interface isn’t ifup’ed at boot. The configuration seems fine to me (although I’m confused by all this new-fangled GUI stuff and by where everything is stored. ) For now, I just dropped a script on her desktop called Darn, the network doesn’t work:

#!/bin/bash
gksu ifup eth0

Pure sophistication, isn’t it? I’ve yet to encounter an operating system where solving such problems has any resemblance to anything I’d call user-friendly… For all the polish they add these days, if you can’t go below the hood and bang away at the shell, you’re basically screwed. That’s why I hate Windows so much, because I know nobody who can get under its hood.