Acer 4530 and Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10)

Karmic has been out for a week now. Finally got over my insecurities and opted for the complete distro upgrade in the update manager and let it run overnight. By morning it was almost done, just cleaned up a few packages and fixed menu.lst and we were done.

But a reboot showed that it wasn’t to be a smooth transition. There were 2 kernels installed, 2.6.31-14 and 2.6.28-16. Trying out the first one caused my boot up screen to flicker and it didn’t even reach gdm. The flickr even prevented me from logging in. I think it was around the point when the console read “Starting consolefont and terminal yada yada” when it started doing it.

A search on the forums suggested that the problem might be because of the nvidia drivers. Which was exactly the problem. As per my earlier post, since I had installed Nvidia drivers manually, the updated didn’t install the drivers.

So, to fix it, I booted into the recovery kernel and dropped into a root terminal with networking. But for some reason the wifi wouldn’t work so I couldn’t connect to the net for synaptic to install the correct nvidia drivers (yes, they’re using 185.18.36 now, which is slightly later than the one I installed). But fortunately, I still had the drivers in my home directory. So kicked it off from the command line (no need to sudo since I was root).

But then the nvidia installer complains saying I need to be in init mode 3. So I quit the installer and ran telinit 3 (as mentioned in the installer itself!) and I was given a nice little login prompt.

Logged in and then ran the installer as sudo and waited for it to complete. Rebooted and everything works now.

My desktop works fine, and my MacOs ubuntu theme is intact.

my desktop

PS: Initially, since I was having problems with kernel 2.6.31-14, I booted using 2.6.28-16 which actually worked and was able to log me in via gdm. But the touchpad wasn’t working. This seemed like a really strange issue. So I searched the forums for this and found this post. The touchpad started working after putting it in the options file and rebooting.

But with the new kernel, after fixing the flicker issue,  it was causing the mouse to be a bit sluggish and the scroll wasn’t working either. So I tried commenting it out and rebooting and the mouse is working fine now.

Ubuntu Jaunty: Error authenticating packages partial upgrade

Was getting this error when trying to do a partial upgrade in Ubuntu (I didn’t select ‘Partial Upgrade’, it brought it up on its own). Then checked in Synaptic->Repositories->Authentication. Apparently, http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty was not authenticated.

A quick google brought me to this post. Looks like I’m not the only one with this problem. I followed the instructions left by one of the users and that fixed the authentication problem.

Then tried running the Partial upgrade again and it worked!

Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04) on Acer 4530 – nvidia drivers

Using the default recommended version of the nvidia drivers (180.44), I found that while running compiz-fusion and AWN my screen would hang every now and then for no reason. It would hang if I played around with the wobbly windows for too long or sometimes even if I just minimized firefox.

The only way to reproduce it seemed to be to use the j2ee version of eclipse ide 3.5 (Galileo) and click on Windows->Preferences. The screen would hang for sure and only way to fix it would be a hard reboot.

After a post on the compiz-fusion forums it looked like the problem was because of the driver I was using. Also, on the nvnews forums, I found this thread which showed that a lot of people were having trouble with the 180.* version of the nvidia drivers.

So, I installed envyng from synaptic and downgraded the drivers to the next recommended version i.e. 173.14.16 which made my browser fonts look like crap and slowed everything down. Atleast it stopped hanging, but I couldn’t bear the slow crawl of the display.

So, I finally bumped into this blog post which explained how to manually install the drivers on Ubuntu.

DISCLAIMER:

1. I presume you are already using the nvidia drivers but are having frequent performance problems because of the &%#@ 180.* drivers. If you do, then you can use the existing xorg.conf with your new drivers and it’ll work just fine.
   
2. I don’t know how to uninstall the drivers. I know the driver installer from nvidia has a –uninstall option, but I haven’t tried it. If you did and it worked for you, please leave a comment.

These are the steps I followed:

1. Download the latest nvidia drivers. I downloaded NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.31-pkg1.run from the nvidia site. It’s available under GeForce 9Mobile series and Linux x86.
2. Install envyng-core from synaptic. The text version will be all you need.
3. Go into console mode using Ctrl + Alt + F1. Before that copy all these steps into a file in your home directory so that you can read them when you’re in console mode. Before going to the next step if you need to get back into X, press Ctrl + Alt + F7.
4. Login using your username and password
5. kill gdm/kdm using sudo killall gdm or sudo killall kdm. You cannot uninstall/install drivers unless you kill X.
6. Use envyng to uninstall the drivers: Type envyng -t and select uninstall drivers.
7. Backup your existing xorg.conf using:
   sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_good_backup
   I would highly recommend this step so that you don’t lose your good working xorg config. You will need it after you install the new drivers.
8. cd to the location where you’ve downloaded the latest nvidia drivers.
9. Give execute permission by typing:
   chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.31-pkg1.run (or whatever your version is)
10. Run the drivers using:
    sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.31-pkg1.run (or whatever your version is)
11. Follow instruction on the blue screen.
12. After completing installation, copy your old good working configuration of xorg.conf using the following command:
    sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf_good_backup /etc/X11/xorg.conf
    This is assuming you already had the ubuntu recommended drivers installed before this. If you didn’t then you will probably need to do some poking around to get your xorg.conf working properly.
13. Reboot and enjoy your new slick and better performing compiz-fusion!

After doing this, I downloaded the jee version of eclipse 3.5 and clicked on window->preferences and it worked fine! Looks like it’s working great!

It has only been a few hours since I installed it and haven’t seen any problems yet. If I do find anything, I’ll update this post.

iPod Ripper

I’m finally done with the iPod Ripper. Easy enough to be done in a week, it took me more than a month. Thank you very much procrastination! Any case, I’ve been able to finish it and uploaded it to www.mediafire.com. Follow the link at the end of the post for the iPod Ripper’s page. Bugs/comments/issues/questions/feedback – please leave a comment and I’ll try to answer them.

Click here to go to the iPod Ripper page

c25k (Couch to 5 Kilometers)

Thinking about running, exercising, doing some physical activity but don’t really want to? We’ve all been there, me more than most people. If, like me, you feel lethargic and lazy all the time, here’s some inspiration:

I first saw it over here.

The c25k is a program that was originally devised by the nice people at Cool Running. It’s a program that’s devised to get people who’ve been slacking without any exercise to running upto 5km at a stretch in about 9 weeks (~3 months). I tried this program once and gave up since it was very boring. But I recently found this thread on the Cool Running Newbie forums where a bunch of people decided to start the program together. This sounds like a really good idea since people will be able to provide inspiration to each other and also keep up the pace. I’m sure there are a lot of such threads where people keep each other motivated to ‘Just do it’!

I didn’t realise that c25k is such a well known accronym. A google for c25k shows a whole lot of sites for this. You have podcasts, resources, communities and even an app for the iPhone/iPod touch which helps you complete the course.

I hope I’ll be able to keep up with this program. Given the long weekend that’s coming up, and the trip that I’m making, I’ll need to try a little harder to keep up with everyone else on this program.

Picasa 3 – For Photographers?

I must admit, I’m very impressed with Picasa 3. The features, the ease of use and the absolute simplicity by which you can quickly edit your photos and upload them. It may seem a little surprising that someone can recommend Picasa of all the things (photoshop, lightroom, gimp) for photo editing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t recommend using Picasa if you’re planning on submitting your photos in a competition. If it’s just one or two photos that you’re trying to edit, Photoshop/GIMP is the way to go.

But what do you do when you’ve got about a hundred photos and can’t really batch process them all. You’d need to look at each and every photo and move the levels, saturation, contrast sliders, create new layers, rotate the image, crop it and finally save it as a JPEG max for storing on your computer and a web JPEG to upload to Picasa/Flickr/other online album. I’ve done that quite a few times and I get tired of it very quickly. It’s fun to do it to one photo, but when you’ve got a 100 of them, it becomes very tedious and repetitive to do the same things to all the photos.

The ideal way to do it would be the way Ken Rockwell does it – in the camera. Try to get the settings on your camera right and minimise the effort in post processing. But this doesn’t happen unless you actually plan your photos and are extremely careful. I frequently find out after taking some pics that I’ve left the ISO in auto, white balance was left to whatever it was previously, my aperture is very narrow etc etc etc. These pics do need the colour adjusted, the brightness altered and so on. That’s where Picasa comes in handy. With just a few clicks and moving around a few sliders, you can perform most of the  basic editing functions very quickly. The pics below show the equivalents of levels, brightness and saturation that you would find in photo editing software.

Also, when you edit a file, Picasa saves the original (in a hidden folder I think in the photos folder) so that you can restore to the original pics at any time.

After editing each pic, you can “pin” it using the pin icon and create a new album with only the pinned pics. Picasa then lets you upload them online to your picasaweb account and keeps your album on your desktop in sync with the one online. This is a lot of functionality that makes the life of a photographer that much more easier.

Granted, Picasa really can’t compare with Photoshop/GIMP. Nor is it meant to be a replacement. A better comparison would be with Lightroom, but I haven’t used Lightroom enough to be able to compare their features. But here’s something to tip the scales in favour of Picasa – Lightroom costs money!

Acer 4530 and Ubuntu 9.04 – Perfect!

It’s here ladies and gentlemen … the perfect match. Ubuntu 9.04 appears to be well and truly tailor made for Acer 4530. Absolutely everything works. I’ve got the wifi working, sound playing, nvidia graphics working seamlessly with compiz-fusion.

The best part is, it’s working off a windows NTFS partition with write access to all the NTFS partitions, thanks to Wubi! And the entire installation took a little over 5 minutes. That’s even less than what it would have taken if I had installed a full blown Ubuntu installation.

My biggest concern was about the Atheros wifi card which has always been a problem in Linux because of the bad drivers. But Ubuntu 9.04 works out of the box. My laptop uses the ath9k kernel driver which is working great.

I feel everyone should give this a shot, windows users included. I’ve been dying to get rid of the vista home premium that came bundled with my laptop and along comes ubuntu 9.04 with it’s amazing compatibility. I’ve been a die-hard gentoo user for the past 5 years and now seeing how convenient ubuntu is, I finally feel Linux has arrived!

Edit:

Ok, here’re some more details:

This is my laptop: Acer 4530-6823 which has AMD Athlon XP 64bit QL-62 processor. I’m using the 32bit version of Jaunty and the default Gnome desktop.

Of course, I would say that this distro, although miles ahead of the others, isn’t without some bugs. The audio port for headphones/speakers doesn’t work out of the box. Neither does the built in mic. But I think this can be fixed by updating/configuring alsa.

But the webcam works fine. I’ve tried it with Ekiga and it’s working.

I did try installing Ubuntu 8.10 on my friend’s Acer 4530 which was identical except for the memory and HDD and I gave up after spending a miserable few hours struggling with it. Same was the case with Suse. But the ease with which I could get Ubuntu 9.04 up and running is amazing. If you’ve got this laptop, I would highly recommend this version. Also, if your laptop has got an atheros wifi card. This is the first Linux distro I’ve seen which has got it working out of the box (I couldn’t get it to work in any of the others even after struggling with them – Ubuntu 8.10, OpenSuse 11.1, Gentoo!).

Edit2:

Ok, got the headphones working. Followed the instructions in the post given by Asif over here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/360181/comments/1

Acer 4530 Standby Hibernate problems – Solved

My friend recently bought an Acer 4530 laptop which is quite decent. But it seemed like it had some issues with Standby and Hibernate since it would just hang when we clicked on them. The only way out was to hard reboot the system. I was using WinXP+sp2.

I got an idea that the problem might be because of the drivers. So installed sp3 on the same thing and tried it out. Works like a charm now.

Down for the count

Been suffering from diarrhoea since yesterday. Skipped work today. Went to the doc this morning and got some medicine, hopefully should feel better by tomorrow.

KDE and QT

Have always been a linux user. But just recently felt the need to contribute to the open source community as well. Being primarily a java developer, C++ doesn’t come very naturally to me. But I’m willing to learn and am going through it one step at a time.

I did find the following tut for C++ for Java devs:

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~hasti/cs368/CppTutorial/index.html

But for now, I’ve installed KDevelop and going through the following tut I found on the dev site for kde:

http://www.beginning-kdevelop-programming.co.uk/

http://www.kde.org/getinvolved/development/

KDE effectively uses QT libs from Trolltech.