I thought I had written about this once before, but when I searched the site to find the solution I had come across before, I couldn’t find my post…. so, sorry if this is a duplication, but I’ve run into this on some AMD 64-bit based system boards. The most recent was based on the nvidia nforce4 chipset. Essentially in booting from either the alternative install cd or livecd for Ubuntu/kubuntu/edubuntu/xubuntu…. there is a freeze in the boot process. It goes for 30 seconds or more looking as though it’s hard frozen, but it does eventually manage to load the installer.
Tag: Ubuntu
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PDF printing in Ubuntu
One of the things I have a tendency to do is save licence key – web confirmation pages to a pdf by printing. It gives a good capture of the document and saves me from actually having another paper to find a place to file. But, ubuntu (dapper) doesn’t seem to be setup for pdf printing by default. Fortunately, it’s not too hard to set up…. install cups-pdf (apt-get install cups-pdf), navigate to System -> Administration -> Printing and doubleclick to add a new printer… no pdf printer is detected… there must be work to do (click cancel). As root (“sudo nautilus”) navigate to Filesystem, then /usr/lib/cups/backend – right click cups-pdf and select properties and check “set user id”. Now, try to add a printer again and you should see PDF Printer, add it with the Generic, Postscript Color Printer (Rev 3b) driver, name it PDF-printer or something like that and now you should have PDF’s dropped into a folder in your home directory named PDF.
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Mail command missing in ubuntu by default
Not really, news, but I was reminded again this evening that mail is not available at the command line in recent default installs of Ubuntu (or kubuntu /xubuntu). If you’re like me and make use of this for scripting notifications…. you’ll need to sudo apt-get install mailx (and a MTA like postfix.) Mailx requires postfix/sendmail/qmail and that’s why it’s not installed by default so users don’t have an MTA sitting on their system for no good reason.
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Firewire/USB card and ethernet incompatibilities on Ubuntu 6.06
I’ve had a machine for quite a while that I’ve been working on as a “backup server”. My goal with it is to have a RAID1 setup with two 250GB drives and I also wanted USB2/firewire functionality so that I could even add a USB drive to the array for the purpose of having a hot-swapped spare drive that could be taken offsite. Well, the biggest frustration I’ve had has not been with software raid, or any of the rest of the software setup, but that something about the firewire/usb card didn’t like the built in ethernet. I FINALLY got things working… let me document what I went through.
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Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 out…
The newest Ubuntu (K/X/Edu as well) is out, Edgy Eft 6.10 is finalized and will be supported for 18 months. (Longer support/users seeking stable proven base should stick with Dapper Drake…) One of the biggest changes I can see from reports is the init process replacement. It sounds like they’ve yielded some good bootup improvements and I’m looking forward to downloading and trying it out. I found it interesting to see that the plan for the 7.04 release of Ubuntu is to include native support for Autopackage which is another approach to making “just any” old program trivial to install on any linux variant.
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Software raid under linux (Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake)
First, I should disclaim that this is going to be a brain dump of the resources and experience of a quick setup of Ubuntu 6.06 on a software raid based storage system. This may be less than ideal, but is doable and seems relatively solid as a system. First off, what is RAID (redundant array of independant/(*inexpensive) disks) So, several cheap hard drives put together in an “interesting” way. Now, increasing storage size isn’t something I’m too interested in, after all there are myriad other ways of expanding storage in a linux system (not to mention huge drives getting cheaper by the day.) My goal here is redundancy, I want to be able to lose a drive and still have the data, so RAID1 is what I’m setting up. We won’t get sidetracked into the other types.
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Mandriva 2007 download now available
Several days ago there were announcements of the release of Mandriva 2007, only thing was, the download wasn’t available yet. Well, today the download appears available. I haven’t looked to see what differences there are between the free and the powerpack download (powerpack can be downloaded by club members as well.)
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Flashplayer 9 on linux
Macromedia Flash player 9 running on linux? Impossible? No… many things that seem impossible, well… aren’t This morning there’s a good writeup at how-to-forge about installing flash player 9 on linux. It involves wine and the how-to is specific to Ubuntu. However, the first two steps (sudo apt-get install wine and sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts) are the only ones that are ubuntu specific. For your given distribution, install according to your distro (urpmi/etc.)
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Skype and linux audio issues
One of the things I didn’t mention in my first skype post was the “getting skype to work with linux” bit… The version available via urpmi in Mandrake was 1.2, so I installed it (before I had the usb audio phone) and gave a try. It gave consistent errors trying to access the audio device (/dev/dsp). I looked and it seems that the older 1.2 version used OSS exclusively for this and had LOT’S of problems. I did find that version 1.3 that can use either OSS or ALSA seemed to work flawlessly on the three systems I tested. (Two of them Mandriva 2006 and the test box Ubuntu 6.06.1) The testbox didn’t have a sound card prior to the usb phone, the other two had built in sound and that is what was tested.
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Dapper Drake update
It looks as though Ubuntu has released the first maintenance release in the Dapper Drake life cycle. So, now 6.06.1 can be downloaded. (In analagous terms this might be considered the first service pack). Many updates have been incorporated into the bootable install cds which should cut the amount of download updates a new install would need right out of the box. http://releases.ubuntu.com/6.06.1/ (Ubuntu), http://releases.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/6.06.1/ (Kubuntu), http://releases.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/6.06.1/ (Edubuntu), http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/6.06.1/release.1/ (Xubuntu).