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.

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.

I’m tempted many times to setup an asterisk system at the house – and use VOIP for additional lines. Here’s an article on asterisk the easy way., telaisp has good deals on residential voip service.

In ubuntu/debian linux software installs, there are such things as “metapackages” which is a package that just describes what OTHER packages it “needs”. For instance in ubuntu, the kubuntu-desktop package is just such a package – when choosing it, it installs everything necessary for the kubuntu desktop/customizations to install. So, I was hit with an idea while I was apt-getting 30-40 odd packages…. everytime I “provision” a new ubuntu system I have a list of packages that I want to make sure are installed, why don’t I just create a single metapackage and be done with it to make life simpler…. But how could I do this?

This article has the essentials…. make an empty directory structure….

mkdir -p package/DEBIAN

and create a control file….. *(single text file, named control in the DEBIAN folder)

example from above site…

Package: iandefors-metapackage
Essential: no
Priority: extra
Section: metapackages
Maintainer: Ian Defor
Architecture: i386
Version: 1
Depends: abiword, gnumeric, xchat-gnome
Description: Iandefor’s Metapackage
Iandefor’s preferred packages

Customized of course to your preference….

And then dpkg-deb -b package name.deb

It might be worthwhile to break your metapackages up into a couple of “thought” groups… internet / multimedia /etc… but if you’ve got several systems and want to make sure you quickly and easily install the same software on each this could be a good shortcut for you.

For years I’ve been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I’ve absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I’ve had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an email from my server claiming that a drive was dying and had time to replace them rescuing the data. (Although the first one was falling to pieces as I copied.) If I had not know until I NOTICED a problem I would have likely lost a good amount of data and had a long rebuild process from various backups.

One of my LONG standing frustrations with Windows is the lack of useful command line tools (including the ability to email from the command interface which, to me, is CRUCIAL when scripting.) But on studying the smartmontools documentation I found reference to blat blat is a simple command line emailer for windows. You install it to the path (Windows\system32 is a good choice), then from the cli can install it to use a default mail server and sending address and then you’re in business. All that’s needed then for your windows boxes to email smartmontools distress calls is to edit the smartd configuration file to do routine tests, add the -m option and address to mail to (you can also have a message box popup too).. Then install and start the smartd service and you’ll hopefully have a bit earlier warning on those hard drive failures.

Sometimes drives fail quickly, but if you can have a 12 hour heads up that might be the difference between a quick and easy drive cloning and a long and tedious rebuild.

I thought I had already posted this, but I looked the other day and didn’t find the article, so I’m posting it now… if it’s a duplicate, sorry… I’m still using Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake 6.06(.1) as a base install for many things… the Long term support idea fo rthe server “stuff” is somewhat reassuring and I don’t want to be chasing minor revision upgrades every 6 months. But, there is another reason, a lot of the installs I’ve done have been a base for VMWare server and there are some very good (and clear) how-to’s in that arena….howtoforge has a good walkthrough that I’ve used as a starting point….

After all is setup and installed with the base operating system they recommend logging in and doing sudo su (to avoid having to sudo everything else…)

Then they suggest installing openssh-server (which in most of my setups has been a near necessity…)

Here are the other required packages…

libx11-6 libx11-dev libxtst6 xlibs-dev xinetd wget linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential gcc binutils-doc cpp-doc make manpages-dev autoconf automake1.9 libtool flex bison gdb gcc-doc gcc-4.0-doc libc6-dev-amd64 lib64gcc1

After that they suggest creating /var/vm for your virtual machines – where you put them is really up to you….

and then download and run through the installers from vmware. That section is really fairly easy if you’ve already got the above packages setup. (build-essential and linux-headers-`uname -r` are especially nice to have installed (even in an ubuntu virtual machine guest for the purposes of building the vmware guest tools.))

There is a problem with the httpd.vmware startup script – the directory it looks for is missing on reboot, so you will want to edit /etc/init.d/httpd.vmware and add the following after start)

mkdir -p /var/run/vmware/httpd
chown www-data:www-data /var/run/vmware/httpd

as referenced in this pdf

In the last few days, I had to set up something a bit unusual with apache. Basically the goal was to have apache listen for connections on two different ports (the standard port 80 and an alternate port 85). The problem was that I wanted different content at each port. Port 85 was to be an .htaccess redirect for another domain (with some port forwarding magic at the firewall.) Port 80 was to remain an internal intranet page. So…. this was all done with vhosts (virtual hosts.)

The previous setup had been apache for port 80 and thttpd for port 85, but there were disadvantages with that setup (thttpd didn’t support .htaccess redirects that I could see and that solution had to resort to a redirect in an html page which wasn’t as clean a redirect.) On the Mandrake based server it was fairly simple…. in /etc/httpd/2.0/conf/vhosts/Vhosts.conf I had to setup the virtual host settings (default directory/address/port to bind…)

NameVirtualhost 192.168.5.20:85
<VirtualHost 192.168.5.20:85>
Servername myserver2.lan.net
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/redirect
</VirtualHost>

And in /etc/httpd/2.0/conf/httpd2.conf, I had to add port 85 to be listened to (and uncomment the include of the Vhost file…)

Include conf/vhosts/Vhosts.conf

<IfDefine !APACHEPROXIED>
#Removed by Apache 2.0 — Port 80
Listen 80
Listen 85
</IfDefine>

There’s a good writeup at apacheweek on virtual hosts and configuring them based on ip address and port.

This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that would allow supported linux distributions to install software (open source or commercial) with as easy a process as possible (visit web site, browse, click). Well, today Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) and Linspire have announced how some of this will look and then some. For starters, Freespire and Linspire are going to be based upon Ubuntu in the future (instead of directly based on debian linux.) That is a fair enough shift. The other part of the news is that as of the release of Fiesty Fawn (The Ubuntu Linux release due in April), Ubuntu users will be able to access Click N Run. So what does this mean?

The most impactful meaning is… new Ubuntu users will have a very quick and easy way to LEGALLY install proprietary video codecs and DVD playback software, as well as yet another way to install the plethora of free software available for linux. Additionally this opens up the possibilities of delivery channels for proprietary software for linux. I know, some people convulse at the thought of proprietary software running on linux, but…. ultimately freedom is being able to choose either open source software or proprietary.

This does NOT replace the current ways of installing software in Ubuntu and from the sound of it will not be preinstalled (i.e. no NON free software preinstalled – it’s up to the user.) But it sounds as though it will make getting the proprietary drivers and codecs much easier for the end user.

What this means for linux in general…. as we see CNR supported on more distributions this could be HUGE for greater software industry support for linux. The current environment is as follows… if I’m a big company making computer software I look at people pestering me for linux software support and say, which distro should I support?… some use deb binary packages, some use rpm. I DON’T want to distribute MY source code…. There is the loki based installer approach that codeweavers uses (and Google?), but I see CNR opening some doors there that may make for wider software availability for linux, which translates into more people willing to try and use linux as their base OS.

This could be disastrous though for those that take pride in the exclusive feel of running an OS that most people consider foreign or “too hard” to use…. but… if it can get us to a point where there is greater software portability for various operating systems AND data formats are treated as client software independant… computing may be much better for it.

Here’s the desktoplinux.com summary of the story, and a FAQ on the agreement.

As a side note, one of the things that linux distributions have been sorely lacking is good marketing savvy of putting out press releases to keep their names and the concepts of free software associated with desktop use in the publics awareness. Hopefully with backers like Canonical behind linux distributions we’ll continue to see better utilization of media press releases to “advertise” the presence of a Windows alternative.

In the US and Europe and many more developed parts of the world we take our internet connectivity these days for granted. (And some go into panic attacks when it’s not available…) In some parts of the world though internet connections are not as wide/broad and peak usage times can make for very slow viewing, or can interfere with other vital communications. Linux excels at SO many things and this is something we could use linux to help with…

In some of my web browsing, I came across this script… http://www.ituprising.com/malawi/blog/jon/offline_web_browsing which takes advantage of cron or atd scheduling and wget. It can give you a few options for compression, but ultimately can download a website for offline browsing.

This could also be handy if you’re going to be without connectivity for a while. (Although many database driven sites like wikis (i.e. wikipedia) would prefer you just download a static version of the database instead and may block your ip if you do heavy wget’ing…….)

By the way, the blog referenced is written by a fellow based in Malawi and covers quite a few interesting topics. Many of the tech topics are Ubuntu/Debian related.

Haven’t had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I’ve been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a linux install. (But why oh why would you do this?) For many that do web design it’s a tremendously good idea to test what a website looks like in multiple browsers because they all have their own unique …. quirks. Of course, there are other reasons…. sites that refuse to work with anything but IE. (Blue Cross/Blue Shield for instance has some web apps that will not work with anything else.)

Well… now Internet Explorer 7 is supported by ies4linux….

This news is about 2 weeks old, but I wanted to make sure I had it on my site so I can find it when I’m ready to add IE7 to the installed IE’s on my desktop. Here’s the ies4linux site. It should be noted that you are supposed to have a valid windows license before installing IE on your linux system. One of the REAL beauties of running linux is you have the choice of keeping MULTIPLE versions of MULTIPLE browsers installed side by side without virtualization.

Oh… you’ll need ies4linux 2.5 beta to have a choice to install IE7 and they still recommend that you not use IE for browsing but instead use firefox….