Image via Wikipedia

I use linux. I prefer it over Windows for many reasons. It’s more resistant to viruses, less of a target, but that doesn’t mean that malware or other viruses are impossible. If someone were to trick me into running something and even worse, trick me into using my administrator password to install something system wide, it could be the same end result as a windows malware infection. To be fair Microsoft has improved their security over the years. They are still the most likely platform though to get a drive by virus just by visiting a site (with no user interaction.) That much said, Mac users and Linux users should avoid being smug. Why? They aren’t completely safe. No one is. Social engineering is the most common (and most effective) path to getting malware on a computer.

I’ve done computer service for a number of years. Mostly small groups, home users, small businesses. But sometimes at larger organizations. It has many times amazed me that people let me at their computer by explaining that I’m there to look at the computers and _________ sent me back. I many times remember Face from the A-team…. “Hi I’m billy bob and this is my assistant sparky – we had a trouble ticket filed about the _______ and need to check out your workstation.” I can’t think of any time that I ran into someone new that wanted to call and check with someone else. Not once in ~15 years.

Recently there’s news of Mac Shield a malware for the mac that resembles rogue antivirus software on windows. Apparently a popup appears claiming that your mac has an infection and your administrator password is needed to remove it. Once it receives the administrator password…. game over you NOW have malware and it’s going to serve up illicit content over a public webserver, it’s going to collect passwords, bank account logins, credit card numbers and who knows what else on your nice secure smug mac.

The key learning moment here should be that it’s the user that was vulnerable – not the system!

Smugness should step aside.

Now, if you’re a mid size company that hires outside computer help – do you have a procedure for making sure that the person showing up is who they say they are? if you are large enough for an in house it department – are there name tags and ways to know that this guy that says he’s “the new guy” in IT really IS with your company?

Unfortunately in most organizations you can’t have a quick look from an IT person everytime you have a popup claiming that you have a virus. So, it’s important to become familiar with the legitimate popups of your antivirus software so you can discern better what is authentic and what isn’t. Sorry, but even that is no silver bullet. The malware writers are clever and who knows they may find a way to mimic whatever is preinstalled on the system for antivirus.

It seems that things happen in clusters, sometimes it’s more of a chain reaction. My longtime working laptop lost the ability to backlight the display. Yes, the backlight is replacable with a couple hours tear down and rebuild. Of course, they’re fragile parts and although I’ve replaced them in the past. I’ve got to a point that I didn’t feel it was worth it. The laptop was a ~1Ghz single core PIII or PIV with 2GB of memory. It has had flakey wireless lately, sometimes the machine will wake up and the wireless isn’t working. It’s clone had died with a power switch issue that could have only been solved with a motherboard replacement. So, I switched to an older spare while I ordered a replacement from Dell.

On looking at the dell site I still had my dell financial services account and a credit line there. We decided that monthly payments would work out better right now, went through the order process and their 30 second credit reauthorization and the order looked good. It was an inspiron 15R I think customized. Not exactly what I wanted (really wanted linux preinstalled – but their options for that at dell are fairly limited – the place I had looked at was a good 400-600 more expensive,etc…)

So, I watched and waited for a week. The day before the laptop was supposed to arrive I had logged in to see if there was any change in the order status and…. It showed up as canceled. ?!?!? It was after hours so I dropped an email to customer support. They “must have called or emailed first”. was essentially what I was told. No voice mail messages, no emails from dell. It escalated through several customer representatives over a few days, but the bottom line was they canceled my order without an attempt to call me.

I have bought 3-4 computers from Dell for myself and others in the last 15 years or so. I can’t remember how many dozens I’ve walked through the process of buying through dells online store. Then there are the 50-100+ that I have suggested just go look at dell when they wanted to talk to me about buying a new computer.

I told them about it.

As I thought… I went to hp and found a better machine for about 200 more and ordered it. (Billmelater – gives a no interest 6 months and then payment like dell financing does.) I’m using that right now. I have officially bid farewall to Dell. I don’t plan to buy from them again.

So, I got a pavilion dv6z se (special edition). It has an aluminum case which I think makes it feel like the most solid and well built laptop I have ever had. (4 core – amd processor – 6GB memory.)

While the laptop ships with windows 7, my first task was to make a backup image of the original drive state (clonezilla). Then I installed ubuntu lucid 10.04 and haven’t looked back. To say that this flies in comparison to the old laptop is an understatement.

I hope the increased productivity that I’m going to find here will help me get back into a routine of posting here and other places so keep an eye out for more upcoming posts. In fact I would like to give coverage to a cloud backup service I’ve started using.

I can’t tell you how slow the old machine was in comparison. I have looked at my cpu usage and typically am keeping two cores busy with my work flow which says to me I was severely overtaxing the old machine.

When the laptop first arrived with the HP preinstalled Windows 7….. This was a 500GB drive and 50GB was already in use. There was the rescue partition weighing in around 20GB and then there was the windows partition with windows 7 at 30GB. I suspect there was also a metric ton of other junky software that I wouldn’t have wanted anyway. HP advisor or HP hoosit or whatever other “utilities” are sent along from hp these days. Trial antivirus from whoever, and other programs that I would have probably never used.

After my ubuntu install do you want to guess how much disk space was used?

Go ahead try….

5GB (and that was with some of my data already copied over and most of my preferred extra software installed over the base install.)

So in many ways it’s just as well they don’t do ubuntu preinstalled on these – they’d probably hulk it up with a lot of useless junk….

On the plus side – HP has been very communicative along the way with email updates when the laptop shipped. (Shipped from Shanghai on a Friday and was on my doorstep Monday at 10:55….. with free shipping…. ) I’ve had a followup survey through which I expressed an interest in ubuntu preinstalled models.

So, how does ubuntu 10.4 work on the hp pavilion dv6z se? Very well. Let’s see… I installed and have wireless working, 3d working pretty much out of the box…. There was the hardware advisor to get the wireless and 3d working.

My biggest annoyance was the special function keys (volume, media player controls) took precendence over the f1-f12 keys. A change in bios solved that. It’s not a linux issue – it’s a design decision on this laptop – they decided wouldn’t mind pressing fn+ the key to get a f12.

Right now the only thing that I can think of that isn’t working is the fingerprint reader. It looks like it’s a slightly newer model hardware than those that are currently supported. I suspect in a short time it will be supported. (By the time I upgrade to the next Long Term Support release it probably will.) Although…. I don’t really care that it works or not.

Camera and audio all work well too. No tinkering required.

Last night I was working with an older HP laptop and things hit the fan very quickly. I discovered I couldn’t write a file to disk and before I knew it the system had thrown up to a black screen and needed the power cut to reboot. I immediately realized that there was a serious hardware problem. Then I spent the better hours of the evening trying to salvage everything from the old drive to a new drive, only to have the new drive seemingly show the same symptoms. It is a laptop of course and so I assume it’s the bus for the drives or the cdrom. I pull out the cdrom and it seems to behave itself just fine. This morning as I was checking the last of the package updates it dawned on me how different things would have been if it were a windows laptop. The laptop runs linux and when the system froze I immediately assumed it was either the hard drive or the drive adapter to the mainboard. Why?

I’ve been using linux as my primary OS now for 10 years. I have supported windows through this time, but to be quite honest I haven’t seen a linux system freeze that wasn’t either 1) in the process of trying to do a new install (many times from invalid install media) or 2) from hardware failing. Windows though is another story entirely. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen windows spit out a memory dump and then spend hours researching the cryptic numbers that they spit out with their fatal exception codes. Only to wind up 3-4 hours on wondering if it was failing hardware or a software problem.

Don’t get me wrong, windows really has come a long way. I think the thing that drove me over the edge was Millennium Edition on my laptop. It lost a sound card for no good reason and ate up about 10 hours of my time trying to get sound back. Have I had problems getting hardware to work with linux? At times. Usually it’s a case of a piece of hardware either not being supported or requiring manual intervention to support. I can’t think of anything that’s just stopped working for no good reason due to the software or driver configuration. I can’t recall an update that screwed up sound, or a database, or …. well any of those software peculiarities that seem to be a fact of life of windows. The sad thing is most people think “that’s just computers for you”. True, computers are imperfect. Software and hardware, but you shouldn’t have to pull hair out trying to identify if you have a hardware or software issue.

You shouldn’t have an operating system that is so buggy that you can’t discern when hardware or software is failing.

For example. We have an openvpn server deployed. It’s a very special openvpn server. It sits on a little asus eeebox with a laptop hard drive and it acts as the hub for a vpn of surveillance cameras. There’s a lot of special sauce in the firewall rules of the vpn client router boxes for this, but that’s another story. (VPN addresses get mapped to the local LAN address of machines attached to the client vpn boxes – i.e. 10.10.0.34 gets translated to 192.168.1.34 for vpn communication.)

Anyway. It pumps lots of video 24/7. Lots – gigabytes a month. Sometime in the last month we had to service the box. One of the clients couldn’t connect to it for some reason. 4 out of 5 video streams were working just fine, but the 5th couldn’t log in. SSH dumped the connection as soon as I tried to connect. Booting from a rescue usb stick I found a file system that was literally crumbling. I don’t know why but the disk had numerous issues (we suspect it may have been dropped…) there were missing links to files, symlinks to the wrong places, some items that should have been files were flagged as directories. Hosed doesn’t begin to describe what it looked like. We backtracked to when the first problems showed up and it had been running around a month still like a zombie faithfully delivering those 4 video streams that were still connected. Many important pieces of the filesystem were gone and it was still doing it’s job. Amazing.

I remember once upon a time seeing a Dos install freeze at the command prompt in the midst of typing a command and I remember then knowing that the hardware was not well. Windows has done much to muddy the waters. XP was more reliable certainly than it’s win9x or winME predecessors. Vista was a disaster though and is in the same class as WinME. Windows 7 has been better by all accounts, but for me it is too long past due. I’m way past caring about the next windows release.

So, I’ve been looking potentially to replace a laptop.and have no use for windows. So, I’ve been using this good list of places that sell linux on laptops. Unfortunately the big names either don’t or don’t offer much variety (Dell – I’m looking at you – really a grand total of 3 choices last time I looked. I think one or two may have been netbooks. I don’t want a netbook – I want a true workstation.) Of course, I could pick out a Dell and buy, but then I’d be paying the windows tax for something I won’t really use.

I may not need to purchase one though yet. After pulling out the cd drive things seemed to work (in the logging I saw a lot of spurious ata errors – I suspect the drive may have been the source. I swapped it with the drive from another long dead laptop and it seemed to work just fine (plus that other one was an actual burner as well.)

By the way, this shows you how old the laptops I use are. My estimate is that one is about 7-8 years old. Has the current release of Ubuntu on it. Acts as a remote client for my mythtv server (think media center…) So, I can watch tv on it, nice big screen… of course, the latest firefox/openoffice/chrome/calibre/etc. Try that with a 7-8 year old windows machine (fully updated to the latest version of Windows.) Good luck.

Yes, I’ll probably need to look for a new laptop soon anyway as these are older. The one that I had an issue with last night is my spare at the moment. If I lose that or the one I’m typing on I’ll need to go ahead with a new one. When I do though I plan to look for one that I expect to last for another 7-8 years (if not more… with multicore machines we seem to be plateauing in the demand for processing power from most computing tasks.) Yes, I suppose I could upgrade every 3 years like microsoft wants me to so that I can run their newest version which has been optimized to be bloated and slow on older hardware. I can just imagine that Windows 8 will require at least 2-4 cores and 8GB of memory just to show you the bootloader.

Sorry … I digress.

To get back to the original point of the story. Last night I spent about 5 hours on the system. The drive failed, I booted and installed a new OS on a new drive, spent probably 3 of those 5 hours copying 60 GB of data from one drive to the other. The last two hours were spent trying to figure how to get the fool thing to boot from usb since I ran into problems with the cd booting. (A couple of the usb plugs strangely do not support booting, at least one pair does.) Then pulling the cd drive and testing again. Then finally letting it start installing all the packages that were installed on the old drive, which now has been reclassified from bad to “?bad? – test” since I’m now blaming the cdrom drive for the issues. To be honest if it had been windows after 5 hours I’d still be trying to figure out if it was software or hardware. (I would have had to use a linux boot media on another system to get at the data on there and copy it off.) Would probably not been able to get all of Xp’s updates installed yet – this system did ship with XP. I would likely have spent a good part of this evening on the fresh XP install and have found out tonight that it happened again. At which time I’d be looking at drivers for the hardware on the hp to see if there were any known problems/available updates (for the drivers or firmware.) Then by tomorrow night I probably would have felt as though the well was dry of ideas of which driver could be at fault and might have started into pulling out the cdrom drive. (Unless it had just obviously failed earlier.)

What’s interesting is the drive worked well enough to install from once, and boot up into the newly installed system and do a good amount of data copying and updates. If it were XP I probably would have spent some time looking at the recent windows updates as well to see if there were any horror stories there, running antivirus and antimalware (and antirootkit) scans to make sure the system was clean (assuming it would stay up long enough for them to run.)

Why would I have been off chasing software issues when it really was a hardware problem. Very simply, my experience with windows in the past 15+ years has been that squirrelly behavior is typically due to windows. Sometimes hardware. I’ve seen exceptions and I’ve seen some of the symptoms of those exceptions.

As I was thinking about that this morning I really renewed my appreciation for linux, ubuntu and the fantastic operating system environment I use. I dare say millions of man hours in developing (if not billions of man hours) have produced what I feel like is the best, most stable tool that I use daily.

You know I wrote not too long about about the doublemyspeed.com scam sounding radio ads. It really sounds like MyCleanPC.com is a scam in the sense that it promises a lot but doesn’t (or can’t) really deliver the miraculous results that they claim. Part of the idea is that they are a registry cleaner and claim that cleaning the registry will make your computer as good as new. For most people this really isn’t going to make an old slow pc into a brand new speed demon. From that aspect this is a scam. Over promising and under delivering.

Of course I’m not saying that registry cleaners are a bad thing. They can make a marginally noticeable difference. Although if your computer is dramatically slower now than it used to be there are really a lot of other reasons than registry cruft. Windows updates moving you up from Internet Explorer 6 all the way up to version 8 on a system that was marginally spec’d when it was purchased will probably make it slow today. 512MB memory for Windows XP is not enough today even though pre-SP2 is was probably okay for most uses.

You will not see as dramatic an improvement with registry scanning as with a proper memory upgrade (assuming you don’t already have enough memory.) The other concern with registry repair software is that if the registry is corrupted bad things can happen. If the registry is damaged yours system will not boot properly.

That much said there are some free utilities that can serve the same purpose that mycleanpc.com claims to do. I usually steer clear of programs that claim to solve your computer speed and stability problems because they typically never do. The best ways to increase system speed and stability are 1) remove unnecessary software, 2) check that all hardware is in proper working order (bad hard drive can cause slow system responsiveness) 3) upgrade memory if necessary.

Save your money to put towards a new machine if the three above still don’t make enough of a speed difference for you.

Sometimes you just can’t escape work. The other day on my way home an ad came on the radio for doublemyspeed.com It reminded me somewhat of the claims finallyfast.com (read my finallyfast.com removal). Anyway, I hadn’t heard of doublemyspeed so I thought I would check them out and see if it’s as much of a scam as it sounds. They suggest that you may not need to buy a new computer if yours is slow then proceed to give testimonials of people that installed their software and their pc ran so much faster than before.

Well, in stark contrast to the testimonials in their radio ad, the testimonials I’ve seen online accuse their software (Cyberdefender or Cyber Defender) of being adware, a rogue, next to impossible to remove from your system and a general pain in the ***. Yes, it seems that there are quite a few people with some choice words for doublemyspeed.com just as they were with ascentive and finallyfast.com (Surprise, surprise – installing a new software program is not all it takes to make your computer run fast…..)

The download on their web site currently is called Early Detection Center.

Here’s one complaint in particular that claims that the free version found lots of problems that needed to be fixed and refused to fix them until it was paid for. (Sounds like so many of the rogues we’ve seen.) Other software for them did not raise a red flag on the same issues. It pops up virus warning alerts encouraging you to buy and apparently did not uninstall via add/remove programs, kept pushing popus to purchase.

For close to 20 years now I’ve suggested that people avoid software that’s supposed to make their system faster or more stable unless it’s an operating system upgrade. I remember many legitimate products that claimed to improve system stability and speed that really were huge disappoinments and haven’t yet seen ONE that delivered on it’s promises. Some that I’ve seen have come from the more respected names in the industry but I have seen each and every one cause as much trouble as they fix. That’s not to mention the products that are more than likely scams.

If you have spyware or viruses or other malware on your machine removing that will improve the speed of your pc. Adding memory will likely improve your pc speed, uninstalling unnecessary programs or replacing heavyweight software with lighter weight applications will speed up your pc. It’s VERY unlikely that you can find any product that you can install that will magically double your comptuers speed. (Unless you replace Vista with XP or Linux….)

I’m filing this in the rogue security software category since they seem to have made it so difficult to remove.

There’s a rumor going around and a lot of unconfirmed information that a facebook application known as fan check is actually a virus. I’m seeing several claims that if someone becomes a fan of this facebook app (which the page claims is undergoing changes and currently unavailable)… well if someone becomes a fan in the meantime their friends will all be notified of the app, password on the account changed, etc. I’m a bit skeptical at this point because EVERYTHING I see seems 3rd party and I don’t see anyone claiming that THEIR account was compromised. What I DO know is that some of the top search results are known malware attack sites. For instance the second result (which was the top result a few hours ago….

Is eaves.ca/cgi/facebook-fan-check-virus.htm and the page it redirects to pushes the Personal Antivirus download. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Personal Antivirus but it’s one of those rogue antivirus applications that tries to push you into downloading and then buying with all sorts of trumped up virus and problem claims.

So, I don’t know if the fan check virus is legit or not, what I do know is that you need to be cautious with the search results. If you get something pop up offering to scan your pc for viruses close the browser window. Don’t download the scareware that they’re pushing and for heavens sake don’t pay a cent to the companies that push these scare and other slimy tactics.

Sorry for the vague title, but there are various thoughts floating around at the moment. The first is a big thanks to the support at Westhost for recovering my VPS over the last weekend. I had started an automatic upgrade of wordpress in one of the sites hosted in this vps, it hung… so I ssh’ed in and found the vps was essentially ruined – it managed to wipe out quite a bit. I’m not sure if it was a coincidence or if the wordpress upgrade was really the culprit, but it managed to destroy quite a bit. The support at westhost though had things back up within 24 hours. It wasn’t just a matter of the site and database getting deleted, but files in /etc were gone (mail configuration hostname resolution wasn’t working, scp wasn’t working…. it was trashed in a bad way.)

Anyway, I’ve still been tinkering with the free morse code mp3 ringtones. In particular I’ve been tinkering with the Text to morse code mp3 generator. I’ve been trying to add utf support. The backend generator does interpret morse for utf characters, I’ve managed to get a way to decode the url encoding if they’re placed in the text box, my big challange at the moment is the file name. I have to truncate the filename so that it’s not too long, but most everything I’ve tried to truncate counts bits instead of characters. Some, even if I tell it to count characters will assume that 1 character=1bit and I wind up with some of the utf characters cut short which gives unusual filename results. In the testing version of the script I’ve just decided to sanitize things by replacing an extended character with an x….

I may spend some time in the coming weeks here giving a peek behind the curtain at some of the scripts I’ve written for that site, or for some of those that I use myself to generate a morse code mp3 from an rss feed for instance. I’m a bit reluctant to get the code of the generator script out there though for concern that I haven’t dotted all the i’s so to speak.

I have noticed in the last few weeks that java updates on windows now clean up old versions of the java runtime. (At LAST.) Java traditionally left it’s old counterparts installed making you go through and manually remove the older version. Why remove the older version you ask? Well, the java runtime engine version can be specified by java code. The default is the most recent, but if someone wanted to do something mischievous, and take advantage of a vulnerability in an older release they could specify that release and if it was installed, then it doesn’t really matter that you’ve updated.

I did notice that it failed to remove something as old as, I think, update 5 of the latest version of the java runtime engine. (Current AFAIK is update 13.) So, it would be worth a check in your control panel/add remove programs to clean out the oldest ones and then in the future it should tidy up on it’s own. (THANK YOU SUN!)

I’ve got ideas for several fairly large pages here – collections of ideas in one place. For quite some time I was pretty fond of the blog post style of entries and for many things that makes sense, but…. there is also a place for collecting lot’s of information on a single topic on a single page so that you’re less likely to “lose anything…” Sometimes I feel like the blog posts are somewhat like a large and jumbled junk drawer and the pages are neat organized boxes with labels telling exactly what is inside. And to be able to sort things up with an online
journal or blog, you need to be well equipped with the right tools and the best blog host for your site. Because sooner or later, without you noticing it, you will have a bunch of files that even you can’t imagine how you were able to have had it.

I should also mention that this site will likely be on the move soon. My webhost provider is in the midst of transitioning away from their current vps model and it sounds as though things will be heading towards more of a shared hosting style setup. This (and many of my other sites) have become complex enough in their demands that I’m thinking I’ll be moving many to a Xen vps hosted environment. I’ve used the morse code ring tones site as a first experiment of my own hosting in that xen environment and among other things I’m blown away by the responsiveness. It will (hopefully) mean a performance boost if things work out right. I haven’t finalized plans yet, but I think that’s the direction I’ll be heading. It looks as though it’s going to be a cost increase for me though as much as 50% more for my overall hosting, so…. I’ll be looking for an overall improvement in speed/responsiveness if that’s the case to at least make it worth spending more.

It seems as though there are a few other notes I was going to write here, but at the moment I can’t recall what they would be….

I’ve been struggling off and on with an issue on my Dad’s computer the last month or so. He said that it would occasionally just shut off completely out of the blue. (He also admonished me not to spend much time on it. Unfortunately problems like this are usually the ones that take the most time to solve because they seem random and it’s hard to pin down the cause.) He runs Windows XP primarily (although we have an ubuntu install setup as a dual boot choice.) In the last year the power supply and video card have been replaced for similar behavior. Although it’s been several months since the replacement with little “misbehaving” since. One of the things I did was run a memory test, which came out fine.

The hard drive also tests fine. So, I tried a stress test of the cpu, cpuburn.

The system died and it took several minutes before it would restart. It sounds like an overheating issue.

I installed speedfan under windows so I could see the reported CPU temperature and sure enough when it came back up it was in the 50-55 degree celsius range. After testing a few online videos and observing the temperature (and a few online searches for the expected temperature range and auto-cut off levels) it appeared that it would shut down at around 57 degrees celsius (maybe 56) and then refuse to reboot until it had cooled well below the threshold.

So, we ordered a new cooling fan. Unfortunately it didn’t do much better than the initial fan. The temperature still hovered in that borderline high range of 53-55 degrees celsius. So, I looked in the bios to see if there was any way to adjust the auto cutoff. (At this point in time it was annoyingly frequent.) No way to adjust (bios on this by the way is identified as F15 revision (for the long string of GA – 7VT600 F15 that shows on system boot…. the revision date is 8/16/2004-kt600-8235……etc.etc. The processor is an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Socket A)

SO…. new cooling fan not being productive, no bios updates to allow us to tinker with the threshold temperature for cutoff… so I did the smarter thing which was add a second fan to the case. This fan was placed to blow air out of the back of the case from just behind the cpu heat sink. Since that fan has been installed I think the highest temperature I’ve seen registered was 51 degrees celsius (under heavy load – 10 minutes of an online flash video running fullscreen.) Most of the time it settles in the mid 40′s celsius.

My hope is that has at least bought us a few more months of use out of the system.

Recently I had the opportunity to work on an Acer Aspire One netbook. It’s rare that I get the chance to work on a linux desktop system for a client. Most of my desktop users that I support run Windows (although I primarily run linux on my machines.) I get to do a fair amount of server level work with linux variants, but this one, being a desktop install, intrigued me.

The issue was that the buttons on the trackpad didn’t work. She also indicated that she had tried a usb mouse and those buttons didn’t work either. As I looked at it, I had already spent some time browsing through bug reports getting ideas on what might be the issue. It behaved exactly as she described and so then the real fun began.

I looked at the xorg.conf file from /etc/X11/ – it looked normal (it was the default config file) I first tried doing some edits to clearly specify the trackpad device (cursor movement with the trackpad had been working though, it was just the clicks that weren’t registering.

So, after making changes I restarted gdm (the greeter) ( /etc/init.d/gdm restart ) and gave a try. Some things started working, tapping the trackpad substituted for the left click and the right click work. The external mouse worked with both buttons.

So, I chipped away a bit more. I verified that the files existed for some of the appropriate packages, some I reinstalled. I uninstalled compiz (having read a bug report related to that) I reverted to an older version of xinput-synaptic and came back to current. I tried mapping the mouse buttons with an .xmodmap file.

Nothing productive.

One thing that I did notice was that the right trackpad or both mouse buttons would work only when I had restarted gdm, not on a freshboot. So, I started looking at the boot process and the output in /var/log/Xorg.0.log to see if there was anything significantly different being reported there. Nothing useful.

I disabled the “dontzap” feature that’s new in jaunty. If you read the release notes they have disabled the ability to “kill off” the graphical interface with ctl-alt-backspace… I essentially re-enabled that option so it’s quickly and easily possible to restart the gui.

The bottom line of what I found was this. If you’re moving the mouse (trackpad) when gdm first starts, the mouse buttons will be usable (with the exception of the left button on the trackpad (!)) If you don’t move the mouse at the startup of gdm it get’s “stuck” in pointer mode… I can bring the cursor down over the “options” menu in the lower left corner of the greeter screen and it still holds it’s i-beam icon as though you are editing a text window, the options does not highlight on the mouseover and no right/left click/tapping will work until gdm is blown away and restarts with a ctl-alt-backspace.

After that everything works with the exception of the left trackpad button (although you can tap.) I tried reversing the buttons and it’s still the one on the left that doesn’t function.

Wondering if I was missing something I tried an experiment. I (using another computer) installed Jaunty 9.04 to a USB hard drive and brought it up to date with all the current updates. I booted this usb hard drive on three or four systems and it worked marvelously (hardware detection “just worked” on each machine.) The only one to exhibit any problems was this Acer Aspire One ZG5. Guess what the problems were? well…. if I didn’t move the mouse when the greeter screen first came up I wasn’t able to do any mouse clicking (the pointer seemed frozen in the i-beam cursor icon mode) and even if I did (or restarted gdm) the left button did not work.

I came to the conclusion that there were two different issues, one I suspected may be a software issue and an update could fix it (the initial boot problem with useless buttons.) The second problem (left click not working) could just be a hardware issue – since it only affects the trackpad and not an external mouse. As I think about it, I do wonder if the trackpad were faulty (left button) could it cause the other problem when it’s first initialized (?)

If I knew I would have access to the machine again I might have filed a bug report with Ubuntu to see if they could get someone to verify this as software issue (or not). SInce I won’t have access to it, I wouldn’t be able to follow up with more information if they needed it, so instead of a bug report I’m posting here.

The only way to know for sure if it’s Ubuntu 9.04 or the netbook is to have an identical model to test, which I don’t.

So, does anyone out there have the same IDENTICAL model netbook – with jaunty 9.04 – are you seeing a similar problem or does it work just fine? The updates on this machine were current as of June 1, 2009.

Comments are open in case anyone has some input on the issue.

First off, you should now that I like to study languages. I have studied Spanish for a good amount of time (and have a site related to learning spanish for beginners). I’ve also studied French and German and a smattering of other languages. In fact, you might even say that my interest in shortwave radio comes from that same fascination with other languages. Anyway, I have a good number of dvds that I’ve used to help in language learning. Since DVD’s support multiple subtitle and language tracks they can be a great way to practice either your (light) reading or listening skills in a language you’re studying. However, up until now I didn’t know of a video file type that supported multiple audio tracks on the pc. I can’t say that I looked too hard, but….

The last week or so, I’ve been playing with handbrake which is a cross platform video converter. It can be used to convert Video from a dvd into a file on your hard drive, or simply move video from one format to another. The default settings for handbrake seem to be very good. (The picture I’ve seen from the default encoding is fantastic.) I’ve been compiling a collection of files to load on the laptop to take with us on an upcoming road trip. We have a 7 year old and 1 year old and (especially for the 1 year old) the 5 or 6 hour drive is looking …. challenging. So, I wanted to get a few videos together to take with us without taking a stack of videos.

So, the defaults for handbrake is to output the video in an mp4 container format, which I hadn’t made use of before, but it appears that mp4 can support multiple audio streams. As I looked into it I found how easy it was to add to your ripping project the extra audio tracks. (On the tab for audio, just click the plus sign and then select the languages in the list below. I assume the first in the list will be the default audio when you playback the file.)

My rip of a scooby doo disc finished overnight and I tested this morning with vlc as my video player. In the Audio menu you can choose the audio track. They are even labeled correctly. Up until now, I have had separate dvd rips for titles that I wanted to watch in either language (waste of space.) Now, it should be possible for me to consolidate those. FANTASTIC!

Yes, I really enjoy trying to learn languages – I’ve even got a squidoo lens about learning new languages. For that matter I’ve even compiled a listing of places you can watch spanish television online. One of the nice things about having the discs available on the computer (or even the live streams) is that you can watch in your chosen language any time. (Now if only region encoding weren’t the obstacle to dvd-language studies that it is.)

This is a bit of a tangent, but I do wish that the production studios would realize the market that their catalog of shows/movies with foreign dubs could have if distributed domestically for language learning. I know most traditional language teachers would frown on this suggesting that you first seek out movies that were originally produced in the target language you’re studying. However, my argument is this: familiarity. For instance, there are movies that I have seen so many times in English that I know every word. Picking up new vocabulary via something that’s already somewhat familiar with in my native language should be relatively easy.

By contrast if I pick up a movie I’ve never heard of, in my target language the challenge is much greater. This doesn’t mean that I’m snubbing the culture of the target language, it just means that I’m not ready to cross that threshold yet. As I’ve studied Spanish I can’t tell you how many hollywood movies I’ve watched with the Spanish language dubbing and really never got into the original Mexican movies, but as my Spanish is better and I’m actually able to understand more, I find myself getting sucked into some of the late night “golden age” of Mexican cinema films.