Computer Bob's Attic
| DEBIAN 40r0 | UBUNTU |
| Fedora Core 7 | SuSE 10.3 |
| SuSE 10.2 | SuSE 10.1 |
| SuSE 10.0 | SuSE 9.2 |
| Deskside | Laptop |
| GRAMPS | Fedora Core 6 |
Computer Bob's Attic |
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As an aside, I tried installing Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) beta 64 bit version on the Fujitsu Notebook. Several key applications, such as OpenOffice 1.1.5 and RealPlayer did not run. End of 64 Bit experiment.
Epson 4490 scanner, and possibly other models, needs drivers from www.avasys.jp which was not responding in April 2009, but was back to normal in October 2009. See my UBUNTU file for details.
9.04 looks a LOT better 29 May 2009 than it did 30 Apr 2009!
WARNING!! DO NOT REMOVE PACKAGE "network-manager". DOING SO WILL REMOVE THE COMPONENTS WHICH OPERATE YOUR NETWORKS, COMPLETELY ISOLATING YOUR MACHINE FROM THE NETWORK AND ANY FURTHER USE OF SYNAPTIC, I.E. SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE OR UNDOING THIS ERROR!!
WARNING!! DO NOT INSTALL "kwin". DOING SO WILL REMOVE THE GNOME COMPONENTS WHICH OPERATE YOUR NETWORKS, COMPLETELY ISOLATING YOUR MACHINE FROM THE NETWORK AND ANY FURTHER USE OF SYNAPTIC, I.E. SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE!!
"WiFi Radar" looks like it will do the job but I have yet to test it with an accessible WiFi connection.
remind -q -a -r | xmessage -file - -nearmouse,
don't work at all and have no error indication, yet this works OK at a command
line.
On balance Gnome looks preferable to the new KDE, but I liked the old KDE a lot better!
top in a console window.
update-manager.
I have installed VMware in the Gnome U.I., it appears to run correctly.
WinBook's 1280x768 screen cannot be set to higher resolution than 800x600.
The "reign" of 915resolution is over.
The former technique of starting with 7.04, installing 915resolution,
and upgrading from there fails with 8.10.
Results with the Fujitsu N6470 are better, but strange.
adept_updater and companion notifier have disappeared.
reminder launcher no longer works, but
it's command still functions on a command line.
The companion message no longer appears in its own package, need to install
gxmessage to get it.
http://wmnr.org/listen.htm
which could be re-activated within Real Player.
In KDE4 trying to use this capability abends Real Player.
I have to make the connection through a browser every time.
/user/bin/foomatic_gui offered only laser printer drivers for the Epson
Stylus C88+ ink squirter, and abended with an error message if any of these choices
were accepted.
gvim and several other programs which produce gui's elicited an error
message that protocols were not available (where have I seen that before??), but seemed to
then work OK.
gftp, rup and rstatd all seemed to work normally.
adobe.com
has a .deb version.
Bottom line: WinBook cannot use 8.10, and it looks highly undesirable for the Fujitsu.
"Synaptic Package Manager" appears to install by default. On the WinBook laptop when booting from the distribution CD select "F4 Modes", then choose "Safe graphics mode". This will give an 800x600 display on the 1280x768 screen. After installing Ubuntu, use "Synaptic Package Manager" to install "915resolution". This will enable a 1280x768 display.
Unfortunately the following sequence fails 7 Jan 2009: updates to 7.10 appear to no longer be available on the net, though the 7.04 installation and initial update work.
Alternatively I was able to get 8.04 running on the WinBook by starting with a 7.04 boot and install, then upgrading successively to 7.10 and 8.04.
While the sound driver fails in 7.10 it's working again in 8.04 as of
10 July 2008.
Possibly one of the updates installed since April 2008 has cured the problem.
(Googling the problem had produced several reports of problems with the
Intel sound chip for both 7.10 and 8.04, and several cures, none
which worked on WinBook.)
Bottom line: looks like both WinBook and Fujitsu can stay on Ubuntu 8.04.
Based on lack of success trying to migrate the WinBook beyond Ubuntu 7.04 I tried this distribution. The short version is that a direct install once again resulted in no xorg screen display (except booting in safe mode gave an 800x600 screen, no networking, and no conversion to a 1280x768 screen).
Aha! thinks I, lets start over from a clean 10.2 install and install the upgrade from the 11.0 Beta-2 DVD. Oops! This process leaves the pre-existing "/" and "/boot" partitions dangling and disconnected (the installer boots and runs in memory), so it failed.
Try again with a "monolithic" disk layout, no separate "/boot" partition. This sort of works, though failures to update around 20 packages were announced. Ignoring these allowed the update to continue resulting in a working, if uncertain, system with a 1280x768 screen.
OK, lets take a closer look at what's going on.
After a bit of digging, the screen control files appear to use a base name of
xorg.conf in the directories /etc/X11 and
/var/lib/sax.
Copy these file sets from the working sequential upgraded system to the
clean 11.0 Beta-2 installation.
After two attempts to specify the 1280x786 screen using sax2
(through YaST) the desired screen display appeared!
Somewhere along the way connection to the speakers disappeared though,
and could not be recovered with YaST tools.
The proximate cause of 1280x768 screen display failure appears to be that sax2,
or whatever actually generates the xorg.conf files, creates no
Modelines for that screen size.
In the direct 11.0 Beta-2 installation, of all the xorg.conf* files in
/etc/X11 and /var/lib/sax only
/var/lib/sax/xorg.conf.first had any lines containing "1280".
A couple of reboots later sound is back!
But sax2 starts and does not open.
Attempting to start it from a command line results in a suggestion to start as:
sax2 -r "if your configuration has changed", so try that.
sax2 now starts normally, has monitor and display at 800x600 and display at 1280x768 (WXGA).
Change monitor to LCD -> 1280x768@60Hz (which forces display to
1280x768 (WXGA)) and test.
Test never recovers to viewable screen, so reboot.
After reboot, sax2 -r starts normally alleging a 800x600 screen and
display, apparently its defaults.
The screen in which this is displayed is 1280x768, verified by "kruler".
Once again changed monitor to LCD -> 1280x768@60Hz but didn't test.
Logged out and login splash screen never appeared.
Disabled 915resolution line in /etc/init.d/boot.local
and rebooted.
No xorg display at all.
Re-enabled 915resolution line and rebooted.
Still no xorg display at all.
Bundled working xorg.conf* files into a tar-ball in the /
directory and added a line to /etc/init.d/boot.local to re-install these
working files on each boot.
This, however crude, works.
Sound usually works, but may cut out randomly for no obvious reason.
Maybe I'll work on this later...
Next need to test robustness of this approach with another clean install.
After Ubuntu failed to fully use the WinBook's screen I revisited Debian. This distribution allows 915resolution to correctly handle the screen. New problem: it doesn't operate the sound system on WinBook. Debian also has little support for 3 tools I use: Firefox, Thunderbird, and Java SDK. It substitutes comparable tools with different names and locations, making standardization difficult.
Bottom line: Debian doesn't serve my needs.
The default package manager NOT "synaptic" is terrible! As soon as possible install "synaptic", which is not installed by default, and use it for all further package management.
8.04 wants to install Firefox 3, which may be OK, but if you were using any extensions they're dead. Reverting to Firefox 2.x is not so easy, since it's now named "firefox-2". You'll need to change any commands which use firefox.
Kubuntu offers a version with KDE4. This works with the WinBook's display if "Safe Mode" is selected. However, I could NOT find a way to get higher screen resolution than 800x600 on a 1280x768 display, so I didn't continue with it. 915resolution detected an incompatible video chip, which is most peculiar since 915resolution works correctly on the WinBook in Ubuntu 7.04.
Kubuntu with KDE3 will not install the Gnome desktop, which has several tools used in setting up the system.
Back to "standard" Ubuntu and try again... Ubuntu can install both Gnome and KDE3, but KDE3 is severely crippled, for instance could not find a way to get screen resolution higher than 1024x768 on the WinBook's 1280x768 screen. Curiously, the Gnome control selection "Applications -> Other -> Screen & Graphics" which appears when running the live CD does not appear in the installed version. This was the ONLY means I found to select 1280x768 on the WinBook. Making this selection produced a virtual screen in which the physical screen could pan, not a satisfactory result. Similarly, in the installed system on the WinBook the selection: "K-Menu -> System Settings, General Tab, Computer Administration" lacks the "Monitor & Display" choice.
On the WinBook the live CD must be started in "Safe" mode to get a working display, which is then 800x600 on a 1280x768 screen. This is a major improvement over 7.10's no screen at all, though there are a few seconds of scrambled screen before the driver settles in. Will 915resolution work it's magic in a full installation? It didn't, as noted above. In the non-KDE4 installations installing 915resolution would prevent the xorg driver from displaying.
CONCLUSION: on the WinBook, Ubuntu 8.04 beta is unusable. Try again with the released version.
On the Fujitsu laptop the live CD correctly detects screen size and installs a driver. Will Audacity work better in the full installation? Yes, it does, though some ALSA libraries need to be loaded to enable connecting Audacity to ALSA Mixer. I need to determine which are actually needed. The "native" xorg driver for ATI Radeon has a much lower CPU load than the proprietary driver needed for Ubuntu 7.10. However, distractions such as moving windows which use a lot of screen update CPU cycles will interrupt audio playback. Haven't tried recording yet. "jackd" was not needed.
SuSE 10.3 was released in early October 2007. I tried it first on my WinBook W245 laptop, using a spare disk. Everything looked fine until the system rebooted following installation, when the X-display never appeared. Later attempts to start Sax to directly setup the display also failed. Oops! Do I fight this or something else?
In Fedora Core 7 I discovered fairly quickly that the sound drivers for the laptop usually don't work. End of that.
UBUNTU was fairly impressive until time to rlogin from another system. I have not got that working, so on to another. (more to come...)
Debian 40r0 was even more impressive than UBUNTU, it has an immense collection of packages. rlogin works in both directions, and a user rlogged into the Debian machine can start and display X-application windows. However, the Debian machine has not yet allowed X-applications on another machine to open windows on it.
While UBUNTU and Debian appear to effectively protect machines connected directly to the Internet, they are anti-social on machines connected to a local net inside a firewall. The jury is still out on this change!
Back to UBUNTU for another round: significant goals are to get the following working:
All were accomplished! Debian should work as well based on what I learned with UBUNTU. Time now to stop testing and get some use of the UBUNTU system.
VMware 6.0 appeared today at http://www.vmware.com/. It installs same as 5.x, see instructions in: Install notes for VMWARE. Unfortunately the toolbars at the top of VMWare's window are now fixed, costing about 0.5" at the top. This hurts on a laptop!
Kernel 2.6.18.8-0.3 restores /proc/bus/usb
making USB available to VMware guests.
See SuSE 10.2 for details.
Before Linux I used 8-bit CP/M on S-100 Bus machines, then MS-DOS on 16-bit PC-AT clones (after one appeared which wasn't slower than my Z-80 system!). MKS Unix tools were a major help with the DOS machines. Windows 3.x was nearly unusable, so I never kept it installed. Windows 95 was the first version worth using. Meanwhile at work I was using UNIX machines, first at National Semiconductor's Datachecker Division, then at Sun Microsystems. I really needed something better at home!
I now run a small network of Linux computers.
Originally I used Trans-Ameritech Linux distribution on a single machine,
then shifted to Slackware.
While both of these were good distributions (and Slackware may still be)
I had to know more than I wanted to make and maintain an installation.
I tried Red Hat once.
One day I found SuSE 5.2, which had better installation and maintenance tools than I had ever seen before. Now I could spend less time being a hard-core system guru and actually use the computer to compute, etc.
In 1998, while installing SuSE 5.2 on a second machine (a Chembook laptop) I decided I'd better make a record of what I'd learned from installing all these distributions. Since SuSE looked like my distribution of choice for the future, I could make installations quicker and less painful with this collected experience.
Six years and many installations later, I decided to make a better looking,
HTML enhanced, and
more comprehensive set of notes for SuSE
9.2.
With this start, versions for
10.0
and
10.1
followed in turn.
8 Dec 2006 I found
10.2
at opensuse.org.
I have installed it and checked most of it against previous experience.
In April 2007 I tested some Linux software destined for inclusion in an upcoming release of the PA-SPAUG resource CD. A report from this testing should be included on the CD. As part of this testing I installed a recent version, Core 6, of Fedora. This is a vastly more useable distribution than the Red Hat one I tried several years ago. Like SuSE, it has it's own set of problems. See my (brief) report on Core 6 included in the above menu.
Be sure to look at this MAJOR resource for Linux help: http://www.howtoforge.com/.
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irqbalance which considerably smooths out mouse
dragging operations.
A most useful feature: the keystroke Fn-F4 shuts off the infernal
(oops, did I mean internal?) mouse pad!
You do have to do this every login- maybe there's a programmatic way?
This machine has good sounding speakers.
Though plugging headphones into the headphone jack does not silence the
speakers, AlsaMixerGui can independently mute speakers or headphones, making
the machine useable in a public environment.
There is also a front panel switch which cuts off WiFi.
The only disadvantage for my purposes to the sound system is that the
only analog input is the microphone jack.
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See the pattern here? About 4 years to obsolescence.I strongly recommend Micro Center at Mercado Center (3255 Mission College Blvd, Santa Clara, CA) in Santa Clara for their help with the next three laptops. The Acer was a really nice machine, but incompatible with the Linux distributions I use. Possibly other distributions would work better.
The WinBook W245 was almost as nice as the Acer, and (except for the usual Winmodem problem) was completely compatible with SuSE Linux 10.1.
| © 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Robert B. White | Updated 24 October 2009 |