Reilly2040's Blog

Wow, that was surprisingly painless.

I had tried to upgrade my installation last night, but the servers were clearly choked with people upgrading, and it was getting nowhere, so I figured I’d wait until this morning while America was still asleep.

I kicked off the upgrade this morning, left it to its own devices for an hour and a half, and when I came back (aside from asking me if I wanted to change or keep a few config files) it was ready to reboot.

I did then have the minor issue that it hadn’t replaced Mandriva’s boot loader, but that actually makes sense.  I booted into Mandriva and updated the grub config to pick up the new Ubuntu entries and rebooted.

I must say, so far I’m impressed.  As I’ve mentioned before, the hallmark of the 7 series releases was to kill my soundcard off.  This time my sound was present and correct on booting.  My Nvidia drivers, Compiz settings, internet settings, multimedia codecs all seem to have survived the upgrade.

Its easily the smoothest one I’ve done yet.  It’ll be interesting to play with it properly, but so far I’m very impressed.  This is definitely how it should be.

Well, I just got emailed that the new version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) has been released.

Previous upgrades have usually broken my soundcard, so hopefully this one will be smoother. I may not bother upgrading tonight though. I imagine the servers will be taking a bit of a kicking from everyone wanting to check it out.

Hmmm, not put up any new posts for a while.

The other weekend, I decided to finally do something with the spare partition on my Linux drive.

Since getting the new drive, the intention had always been to have a main Ubuntu setup, and a couple of other distros to play with. Since I’d been impressed with SuSE, it was the 2nd distro, but until recently the third spot had been free.

After some deliberation, I decided to install PCLinuxOS. According to Linux Format, its flavour of the month, and is fast rivalling Ubuntu’s popularity as an easy-to-use distro.

Sadly, it proved to be too much grief for me. There was something about my hardware it really didn’t like.

On booting up after the install:

Strike 1 – no sound. Well, in fairness Ubuntu has issues in that area as well (although seems fixed in the Hardy Alpha4 liveCD I tried – and in Ubuntu at least, its quickly sorted).

Strike 2 – no NVidia drivers. Well, some distros are funny about carrying them, so maybe I’ve just been spoiled by Ubuntu automatically detecting the card and asking me if I wanted to install them.

Strike 3 – No ethernet. This broke the camel’s back for me. Every other distro and live CD I’ve tried has had no problems detecting my Ethernet. Just two of these problems and I might’ve stuck with it, but no ethernet was really a killer. I didn’t see why I should spend time trying to fix something so vital when I had other distros sitting there.

So, I went back to the Linux Format distro heaven DVD and looked to see what else there was. Then Mandriva caught my eye.

When I was last into Linux. Mandrake was the distro of choice for many users, and that included myself. Having fond memories of it, I thought I’d give this latest incarnation a spin.

What a difference.

Everything just worked from the outset. On rebooting after the install, I was greeted with the NVidia logo with no prompting (although I appreciate that not automatically installing their drivers is a matter of principle with other distros like Ubuntu). My ethernet was up and running no bother, and my sound was clear as a bell (score one over Ubuntu).

While Mandriva may not be the big name it used to be, I must admit, from my first impressions its still an incredibly good desktop distribution. Its been the easiest to install and get up and running from the ones I’ve tried so far, and KDE’s as easy to use as you’d expect (although I’m still a GNOME man).

Definitely worth a try if you’re looking for an easy distro.

I do still find the PCLinuxOS thing a bit strange though. Given its glowing reviews, and the fact that its actually based on Mandriva, I’m really at a loss to explain the problems I had. I’m sure other people have had more luck than me with it, but as I say, first impressions – especially with a system that was for mucking about – didn’t give me much reason to stick with it.

So, over Christmas, I decided to re-jig the setup of my main PC.

I’d been getting back into Linux, and quite liked trying out different distros, however the current harddisc setup was quite restricting.

So, I went onto Dabs, and ordered myself a new 80Gb internal drive. Not huge, but Windows is always going to be my main OS (as a gamer), and its more than enough for my purposes (since all my main media files and the like will still be stored on the Windows drive.

So, I finally got it setup this weekend. I’ve now got an expanded 40Gb of space dedicated to Ubuntu (up from the previous 16 or so), and I’ve installed SuSE 10.3 (which I was quite impressed with) on a 20Gb partition. That still leaves around 16Gb for me to chuck on anything else that takes my fancy.

Of course, the only problem with starting from scratch was the inevitable setup issues. Ubuntu 7.x still hates my soundcard (a Realtek card using the hda-intel driver for Alsa), but fortunately I found this really good thread on UbuntuForums that sorted it easily.

SuSE was slightly more straight-forward, although with the 64bit version I couldn’t get the proper NVidia drivers running. So I fell back on the 32bit version and everything setup smoothly.

I must admit, I’ve tried going down the 64bit route a couple of times now, however I’m just not convinced its nearly stable or supported enough for me to switch at the moment. Hopefully in a couple of years it will be though, but for now I’m sticking with the 32bit OS, as third party applications seem to be a lot easier to get and run under it.

eSys Intel Celeron PC Base Unit

eSys AMD 3600 PC Base Unit

Wow. I really didn’t expect Tesco to be the next ones to jump on the Ubuntu bandwagon. Its great to see someone else start selling them though. These look like great low-budget PCs for people that just want to surf the web and check their email. I’m not sure how well they’ll sell (Dell can at least target businesses and techies), but I hope this is the start of a trend and we see other companies starting to stock the odd Linux PC as well.

Below I mentioned that I was having issues with sound under Ubuntu’s new release, Gutsy Gibbon. After some digging, it turns out that the module I need for my soundcard (snd_hda_intel) was moved to another package, which wasn’t installed during the upgrade process.

If anyone else has the same issue, then after doing:

sudo apt-get install linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.22-14-386

and rebooting, everything seems to be working again.

Its not been a great week with the tech stuff in my household. Inspired by my tales of podcasts (since getting my new Nano), my other half decided to install the Zencast software to use with her old Creative Zen Touch.

However, this in turn needed a firmware upgrade which nuked the contents of her player.

And then it wasn’t detected in the version of mediasource we had, necessitating an update of that.

Which still didn’t recognise the player, and I then realised it needed the appropriate plugin for her player to work.

So the software’s now setup, but she’s got the unenviable task of trying to re-setup over 20Gb of music on her player. Not helpped by the fact the software doesn’t seem to list what’s on the player in a way as easy as the older version. Plus it has a tendancy to lock the player up if you try and delete too much at once.

Meanwhile I noticed Ubuntu’s new release was out “Gutsy Gibbon”. And much like when I upgraded to Fiesty Fawn, my sound was automatically rendered dead. Fortunately it seems booting off of the generic kernel, as opposed to the i386 one makes all the difference. My Audacious audio player remains unable to play though.

Compiz is as neat as ever I love that desktop cube.

Well, tonight I decided to install the i386 version of Feisty Fawn over my AMD64 version, and despite people thinking I was nuts, I’ve got it all up and running

For those that are interested, there were various solutions to my problems.

Graphics

Instead of using the default version of the Nvidia driver, I used the Synaptec Package Manager to download the nvidia-glx-new package, and ran nvidia-xconfig from the terminal. Job done.

Audio

This proved a lot trickier. It came down to two elements.

There was no default configuration files setup for my soundcard, even though the card had been detected.

Running aplay -l confirmed that the card had been detected (in my case a VT82xx card). I then had to run asoundconf set-default-card VT82xx to ensure the config files were created.

Finally, the intel_hda driver that is being used to run the card needed the following added to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:

options snd-hda-intel model=3stack

Now that that’s all sorted, my Linux installation is up and running great.

A triumphant Linux evening for me last night.

After spending just less than a week trawling the web in general (and the excellent http://www.ubuntuforums.org) to try and sort my audio and visual problems in Feisty Fawn, I managed to get everything up and running. I now have a working AMD64 system, with audio playing happily, my Divx and other codecs setup, and Beryl making my window manager extra-spiffy.

My only thing now, is the package availability for the AMD64 version of Ubuntu. While there are loads of them available, some (like Adobe Flash for instance), aren’t. So my question now becomes, do I nuke it and install the i386 version (saving my alsa and xorg configs first, just incase), or stick to my guns, assuming that the AMD64 version’s support will continue to increase over the coming months.

I’m unsure really. On one hand, it’ll be nice to stick with a version that’s tailored to my CPU. On the other, I’ve installed Ubuntu largely to keep myself in practice with Linux, since my main job is Windows-based. So from that point of view, nuking and starting again, and seeing if I can get everything running more quickly now I know what I’m doing, is appealing.

Well, I’ve been trying all night to get sound working after the upgrade to 7.04. I’ve gone through all the posts on UbuntuForums.org I went through last time, and it still doesn’t work.

Now I’m basically trying to decide if I want to try a clean install of 7.04 or just reinstall 6.10. I’ll probably try the 7.04 install first though, since I’ll be wiping everything anyway.

Words can’t describe the relief I feel whenever I boot back into Windows and hear that startup sound though.