Updating to Intrepid: Notes

So I decided to update two machines to the new release of Ubuntu (8.10, Intrepid Ibex) today. One is a laptop that I have been running Kubuntu with KDE 4 on and is my tote-around machine. The other is my main desktop on which I am mostly running Xubuntu (but am considering changing).

Laptop (Kubuntu)

This was pretty painless, and actually I did it mostly asleep! I started downloading the update and went to bed, and then clicked through some dialogs when they popped up, always accepting the default answer.

It looks very nice and I only have ran into two problems, one extremely minor and one rage-inducing.

1. Extremely minor: I had to re-edit the settings to connect back to my wireless internet connection. That took about 1 minute.This barely registered to me beyond a

2. My bluetooth mouse stopped working. It appears that currently KDE 4 does NOT support bluetooth. Check out the bug report if your blood pressure can handle it.

<rant cut out here>

Anyway, I did a sudo apt-get install bluez-gnome and then ran bluetooth-applet and my mouse was working.

Desktop (Xubuntu)

Here is the fat daddy, my main machine and it’s all sorts of twiddled with. It’s mainly XFCE on top of the real-time kernel, but I have lots and lots of packages and customizations for various reasons – I also am using binary NVIDIA drivers. For these reasons, I’m pretty forgiving of technical difficulties.

Getting and Installing the Update

It took about 3 hours to download the update – I have a wimpy DSL connection, and my speed was nearly maxed out the entire time – and about 45 minutes to install the packages.

I tried to make a list of about confirmations I had to do, there were about a dozen. The vast majority were asking me to Keep or Replace “modified” files somewhere in /etc/. Most of the files I don’t think I ever customized, although I know I did a few (like /etc/security/limits.conf). It was a bit annoying to see files like /etc/cups/cupsd.conf pop up here, because I’m pretty sure I’ve never customized that.

Another thing: I was watching the terminal output and at least 20 times there would be these lines like:

Unknown media type in type ‘all/all’
Unknown media type in type ‘all/allfiles’
…
…

Unknown media type in type ‘interface/x-winamp-skin’

What is that all about?

Anyway, this was fairly uneventful and went smoothly. Since there is a new kernel in 8.10 (2.6.27-3), I was already prepared to re-install the NVIDIA drivers.

About those drivers…

So I automatically to the driver re-install thing, but I get an error when trying to start X. Something about “Primary device is not PCI. No devices detected. No screens found.” And X dies with a Fatal Error or two for good measure.

I diddled about, and finally ran across this thread in the Ubuntu Forums dealing with the issue. Here’s what fixed it for me – commenting out the “Files” section in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

#Section "Files"
#    RgbPath         "/usr/lib/X11/rgb"
#EndSection

Who in the world would have guessed that?

Minor Keyboard Issue

I quickly noticed my keyboard stopped working right. The quote key (and a couple others) were acting funky, like you had to hit it twice to show the character.

This is some problem with how X detects the keyboard or something. I knew that much from seeing the problem before. You can ‘fix’ this by doodling about with the Keyboard settings in Settings Manager, which is good enough for right now.

Silence is not Golden

I lost audio in the upgrade, probably because I always selected to Replace files instead of Keep when given the choice.

In this case, I needed to disable my on-board sound and use my external USB audio, something I was already familiar with so I only needed to make a couple of edits to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:

# autoloader aliases
install sound-slot-0 /sbin/modprobe snd_usb_audio
#install sound-slot-0 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-0
#install sound-slot-1 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-1
...
options snd-via82xx-modem index=-2
#options snd-usb-audio index=-2
options snd-usb-usx2y index=-2
options snd-usb-caiaq index=-2
# Ubuntu #62691, enable MPU for snd-cmipci
options snd-cmipci mpu_port=0x330 fm_port=0x388
# Keep snd-pcsp from beeing loaded as first soundcard
options snd-pcsp index=-2

…and I could rock out again!

Lost Windows

So, I go to play a game – a fullscreen OpenGL game, and afterwards all my windows disappear. None are visible, not even the panel.

However, middle-click or ALT-TAB shows them, but they do not become visible.

This is something to do with xfwm I think, because if I launch compiz, they become visible. I have an on-again-off-again relationship with compiz. I really like most of what it can do for me:

• maximize to one monitor in a multiple monitor situation
• nice window decorations (this is really emerald I guess, but still)
• I like the alternatives to ALT-TAB
• Yes, I like wobbly windows

However, the performance factor on full-screen gaming is a worry and I don’t like to toggle compiz on and off, even with fusion-icon, because it always seems to end up with a half-dozen instances of compiz and compiz.real running.

For now, I guess I will turn compiz back on because the “lost windows” in not acceptable. This is just a cover-up, though – I need a real solution for this.

Mighty Mouse

Another thing I noticed in-game and with compiz running is that “3 button emulation” was running on my mouse. What this means is that if you hold down both the left and the right buttons, it acts like you were pressing the center mouse button.

Since I have a center mouse button this is pointless in normal use (and downright dangerous in a video game). Furthermore I explicitly have this disabled in my xorg.conf!

As it turns out, in 8.10 there is a new way to handle hardware and some of the xorg.conf stuff is ignored. For my purpose, it turns out I need to disable this “new way” (HAL):

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option         "AutoAddDevices" "false"
EndSection

The other approach is to use the new way to do the same thing, which is sort of documented here. Please check this part out, under “Input Configuration with HAL”:

Beginning with Ubuntu 8.10, input device configuration is done through HAL rather than in your xorg.conf. The syntax for HAL fdi files is a bit different than xorg.conf, and editing XML is only marginally better than editing xorg.conf… but on the plus side configuration changes don’t require an X restart – just replugging of the device.

<sarcasm>Right</sarcasm>… because something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
  <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.mouse">
   <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">mouse</merge>

    <!-- Logitech tweaks -->
    <match key="@input.originating_device:usb.vendor_id" int="0x46d">
     <match key="@input.originating_device:usb.product_id" int_outof="0xc50e;0xc518">
      <merge key="input.x11_options.RelHWHEELOptions" type="string">invert</merge>
     </match>
    </match>

   </match>
  </match>
 </device>

</deviceinfo>

Is so much “better” to edit than something like this:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Logitech MX1000"
        Driver          "evdev"
        Option          "Name"          "Logitech USB Receiver"
        Option          "HWHEELRelativeAxisButtons" "7 6"
EndSection

Hello?! XML is not easy to read. That’s not what it is meant to be. Why do people keep acting like XML is good for human-editable config files?

Not to mention the tons of xorg.conf-based configurations found around the net are now useless under the new system.

In summation, this is another “feature” like Pulseaudio from last release: the only thing I am interested in is how fast I can disable it.

HP Tray Icon

I don’t know why but all of a sudden I had an “HP Device Manager” icon in my tray. This is just exactly what I do not want – a dozen shit-tacular tray icons eating up all my resources. If I wanted HP icons in my tray I would be running Windows.

I bet anything this was the three python threads that I killed off earlier that had my CPU pegged at 100%.

In any case, you can remove this with sudo apt-get remove hplip.

After, that I got a pop-up that a printer was added and it had a “find driver” button. I walked through a few windows and printed a test page. It prints just fine. Why then, is HPLIP needed?

VirtualBox

Apparently, you need to re-compile the kernel module for VirtualBox? Sort of like the NVIDIA drivers, I guess?

I used: sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Everything worked fine after that. The old Gutsy package works just fine as far as I can tell.

uvesafb

Here is another new “feature” that doesn’t work (count now up to 3). On booting, I kept getting messages like this:

uvesafb: failed to execute /sbin/v86d
uvesafb: make sure that the v86d helper is installed and executable
uvesafb: Getting VBE info block failed (eax=0×4f00, err=-3)
uvesafb: vbe_init() failed with -22
uvesafb: probe of uvesafb.0 failed with error -22

After a LONG time of goofing around (and with much help from this bug report), I finally found a solution:

1. sudo apt-get install v86d
2. Find a valid mode for your machine:
   1. At GRUB screen, press “ESC” and “c” to get GRUB command prompt.
   2. Type vbeprobe to see valid modes. Pick one.
   3. Type reboot.
3. Create /etc/modprobe.d/uvesadb with appropriate info. In my case: options uvesafb mode_option=800×600-16
4. Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer and add blacklist uvesafb.
5. Edit /etc/modules and add uvesadb.

Wow. I bet I rebooted a dozen times before all that got straightened out. Now I have the splash screen! That’s a lot of work for very little payoff. I usually disable the splash anyway.

To be honest, I would like a splash screen that has a little “Terminal” option like the package manager and other GUI apps. So you could view the output if you liked.

Flash! Ah-Ah! Defender of the Universe!

For some reason Flash was crazy slow to load and die after the update in Firefox. I re-installed it (according to the script here), and it seems back to normal.

Summary

That takes us up to about 2 days of twiddling after the update. There are still some problems I have not yet worked on:

1. Ubuntu will not shutdown. I have to REISUB every time or press the reset button. I’m almost sure this is a networking issue, because I can’t sudo ifconfig eth0 down either. It just sits there.

I’ve found some reading on this and will be working out it soon enough – just tired now.

2. USB device troubles. I always get: “hub 1-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 1″ when booting. This delays the boot like 15 seconds or more everytime. Everything USB seems to work. Again, lots of reading on this.

3. Lots of minor things I won’t bother to list seperately here, as this entry is more than long enough as it is now!