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.

The newest release in the Ubuntu Linux series has escaped into the wild today. If you recall the last Ubuntu release was a long term support release and this one is intended to be a bit more “edgy” or in this case “intrepid”. Download from Ubuntu, or read a review from linux format. It has, of course, the newest releases of the major desktop packages as well as improved networking support. They are trying to focus on making mobile connectivity even better in this release. There is new artwork as well. There is a new mobile USB install option which is a download image that can be written to a USB drive for installing on the netbook class of machines. Judging from Linux Format’s review it’s looking like a solid release.

Also, news came out today that Canonical is not “cash flow positive” according to comments by Mark Shuttleworth. It’s interesting to see that he says 1) he has no objection to supporting it for 3-5 years more and 2) he thinks if they focused on the server version only they would be profitable in 2 years.

Update—

It’s look as though this release is comparing favorably in tests against vista in install time, boot time, ease of setting up wireless (!!) and Geekbench benchmarking (considerably better marks for Ubuntu there!)

Sometime back I setup my home server running Ubuntu Linux (6.06 – Dapper Drake LTS). I used two pairs of drives to do raid cloning. Two IDE drives were for the main system structure and two SATA drives for Audio/Video storage as well as CDimages and other large file sharing on the local network. Well… I noticed the hard drive light was on solid and sure enough one of the two SATA drives had failed. (I didn’t get my status email because I’d done a network structure change and didn’t update my local mail setup…) Anyway… replacing it was a pain in the neck only for the physical access to the box. Everything else worked as it should.

I had made a file with the contents of the partition table when I first set things up which helped…

So from another pc (with the new drive attached as a usb disk) I ran…

sudo sfdisk /dev/sdb < partitiontable.sda

(sda was the one from the old setup that had failed.) Then I logged in and removed the failed drive from the arrays.

sudo su
mdadm /dev/md2 –fail /dev/sda6 –remove /dev/sda6
mdadm /dev/md1 –fail /dev/sda5 –remove /dev/sda5
mdadm /dev/md0 –fail /dev/sda1 –remove /dev/sda1

(Remember those long –’s are really a double hyphen – wordpress is funny that way and interprets them differently.)

I shut down the machine in question and carefully pulled it out where I could work on it. (Those front loading hard drive trays would be REALLY nice for my home setup.) I figured out which was sda according to the system board, disconnected it and tested the bios to make sure. Sure enough I had pulled the correct one.

I shut down again and removed the old drive entirely, replacing it with the new drive and hooking up the cables. Then I powered back up to check bios again. All is good. I powered things back down to put the cover on the case and move it back into it’s cubby hole.

All booted up just fine – doing a “cat /proc/mdstat” showed just one drive for the raid drives of md0, md1 and md2. So, I just did the following…

mdadm /dev/md2 –add /dev/sda6
mdadm /dev/md1 –add /dev/sda5
mdadm /dev/md0 –add /dev/sda1

and checked “cat /proc/mdstat” again to find that they were in process of syncing and all looked healthy. The syncing process will take a while (these are 400GB drives) especially if there’s is change to the content during this proces, but once that’s done it should be a perfectly healthy raid array again.

While I was at it I ordered a pair of drives to start rebuilding my desktop system with a raid array for the primary system file structure and the home partitions. I like the redundancy that simple software raid gives. (I’ve talked before about even adding a third drive in temporarily as a backup drive. USB may be a bit slow for doing that frequently, but as a snapshot it’s not a bad approach from time to time.)

I’ve talked about Clonezilla as a remarkably good an fast disk cloning utility previously, but there’s more to the clonezilla project than just rescue imaging of drives. There’s also a thin-boot server as well…. (diskless remote boot loader?) Anyway, This tutorial talks about how to setup clonezilla/drbl on a recent ubuntu install.

Of course, there’s no need to install the drbl server to a machine if all you intend to do is save disk images to it. Clonezilla supports copying disk images over the network through a variety of storage protocols.

Many times I’ve used Ubuntu’s livecd to test out an ailing system, but more than once I’ve wanted to add a utility, yes you can apt-get install from the live cd, but that assumes the system has a working internet connection, it’s sometimes better to just build the cd yourself with the tools YOU want. Using the tips in this forum thread and this page, with help from this google search, I remastered my own custom version of ubuntu (with smartmontools among other things.) I consider the ability to make your own custom tools priceless when it comes to tech support.

Here’s a twist – make a cd from your ubuntu install with remastersys.

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.

One recent task was install opengroupware on a dapper drake 6.06 install in a virtual machine. I followed the instructions found here and ran into a slight problem. The default install from Ubuntu does not have apache in the enabled repositories. (Apache2)… following the intsructions given I first added opengroupware’s (debian sarge) repository

to /etc/apt/sources.list ( deb http://download.opengroupware.org/nightly/packages/debian sarge trunk )… then installed apache2 instead of apache *(as apache is not in the default package repositories) and then postgresql-8.1, and libapache-mod-ngobjweb, then opengroupware.org opengroupware.org1.1-webui-theme* and
opengroupware.org-environment… /etc/init.d/opengroupware seemed to restart with no problems, but the install was not accessible via the http://localhost/OpenGroupware address.

So, being in a VM, I restarted from scratch quickly and enabled the universe and multiverse repositories and installed apache and so on down the list and things worked. I did see that apache2 has two modules disabled by default that opengroupware relies upon, a quick test of that in the first setup didn’t seem to resolve the problems and I didn’t have time to troubleshoot the how’s and why’s.

So… the bottom line – use apache instead of apache2 for a quick and easy way to get opengroupware.org up and running on ubuntu server.

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

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.

It seems silly with multiple machines to download the same file multiple times. At some level it’s not THAT inconvenient. It really depends on your connection speed and the size of the files in question. For Ubuntu and other systems based on the .deb package format and apt-get there is a nice option for setting up proxy’ing to allow a single download of deb files for install on multiple machines. That option is called apt-cacher. There’s a good wrietup here on the setup of this cache -ing software.