SubscribeUbuntu 8.10rc1 - NetworkManager WTF?!
Monday, 27 October 2008I tried upgrading from Hardy Heron to Intrepid Ibex this weekend. Big mistake. If I disregard the total dpkg meltdown that I, as usually, had to resolve manually there still remains this recurring madness called Network Manager.
I'm an engineer. I have a masters degree in computer engineering. I have worked professionally with GNU/Linux since 2000 and been a die hard user of it since I left OS/2 behind in 1996. But come on! Why does it take a software engineer to perform a simple upgrade? Even worse, why do I have to be a network engineering specialist to figure out why simple wired ethernet doesn't work out of the box?
Network Manager fails completely to:
- Select wired network over an open Telia hotspot
- Distinguish between my primary and secondary wired interfaces
- Completely loses my /etc/resolv.conf all the time
Sorry, but that is completely inexcusable! Network Manager, you suck! "Pain-Free Networking", my ass! :-P
No Wireless LED on ThinkPad T61
Saturday, 19 July 2008I've got a ThinkPad T61 with Intel iwl3945 wireless chipset that I installed fresh with Ubuntu 8.04. Everything worked flawlessly out-of-the-box, except for the useless fingerprint scanner and the wireless LED. Don't get me wrong, the wireless network worked fine, but the LED wasn't on.
At first I thought there was something wrong with the LED itself, but a couple of searches later I found that it was a known limitation of the 2.6.24 kernel included in 8.04. A driver upgrade was scheduled for 8.04.1 and after a couple of months it was shipped. Silly me thought I'd get the upgrade automatically, but it turns out that both the iwl3945 and the iwl4965, as well as a bunch of other wireless drivers, are tucked away in linux-backports-modules-hardy, which will not be installed by default.
So, if you have some wireless issues in Ubuntu 8.04, try installing this (meta) package (that depends on a suitable version specific kernel) and see if it helps.
Suddenly Compiz is not Working Anymore...
Thursday, 17 July 2008So weird. I usually rearrange my desktop every two weeks, often when I am bored. Sometimes I want a quick lean, smallish desktop and other times I want the whole shebang, all possible animations, SVG icons, mouse gestures — you name it and I will already have tons of it!
Today I wanted to enable Compiz again and it just wouldn't start. After a couple of tries that turned out to be dead ends I finally got this:
/usr/bin/compiz.real (core) - Error: Could not acquire compositing manager selection on screen 0 display ":0.0"
Some more digging around Google gave me the answer: Metacity and Compiz fight to be "compositing manager" ...
...as soon as I disabled /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager I could enable Compiz again!
Missing Sound in Firefox?
Monday, 14 July 2008In Ubuntu 8.04 I recently discovered that you need to install the libflashsupport package if you get no sound in Firefox while running flash application/video. Oddly enough this is not a "required" or "supported" package in Ubuntu proper.
Suspend/Resume Nightmare on Ubuntu
Saturday, 23 February 2008I've had my ThinkPad T43 for a while now and I'm really pleased with it, everything just works! It took some pleading and, I admit, begging to persuade my boss and the IT department to buy it since they usually only buy from Dell or HP. This was mainly due to care packs and payment plans that these suppliers offer companies. My ThinkPad they had to actually pay for straight up. So if I were a Lenovo sales person, that was something I would fix to boost my sales.
This post is however not about sales, brands of laptops or how the cat ate my homework ... well, OK, almost. Ubuntu/Gnome ate my resume!
When I initially installed the laptop, early 2006, I went with Ubuntu 5.10. Ubuntu is great Linux dist! Ubuntu is to Debian what Mandrake was to RedHat in the beginning: RedHat + all the tweaks you usually had to apply.
I remember the first install, it was a Breeze! All features and extras of the laptop was of course not working so after some digging I found a few pages detailing what to do to get things like susped, hibernate and such working. A couple of hours later everything was working! Cool, that had to be the first computer where I actually bothered setting it all up.
Now, two years later I run 7.10 and I am less than happy. All upgrades have made this laptop a complete mess. Each upgrade has failed to integrate the necessary changes I made and simply installed the new default settings from each package. OK, I can live with that. But I was starting to really miss having no suspend, so the last four months I have been working on fixing it all again.
It turns out that if I run the script /etc/acpi/suspend.sh manually from the prompt suspend and resume works fine, even with X. But when I press Fn-F4 from within X or select "Suspend" from the Gnome "logout" menu the machine happily goes to sleep but always fails at resume. I always get a black screen!
Why is it so complicated? I really don't understand. What is it doing?
OK, so I started digging. The Fn-F4 button didn't work in the console so that seemed like a first thing to investigate. I started acpi_listen and pressed Fn-F4, bingo! It returned a key press. A grep later and I had found it in /etc/acpi/events/ibm-sleepbtn, alright! Simple syntax, seems it looks for the ThinkPad sleep button and then sends another new combination $KEY_SLEEP, wtf?
I changed the action to call /etc/acpi/sleep.sh, restarted the ACPI stuff and, yes it works! At least from the console, not from X/Gnome. Aha, so we have a Gnome app that does magic things, HAL + gnome-power-manager.
I didn't get any further. Removing gnome-power-manager fixed my problem, I can now press Fn-F4 from Gnome, close the lid, come back the next morning and sucessfully resume when opening the lid again.
So, the question is, wtf is gnome-power-manager doing and why do I have to learn this stuff all over again every time I upgrade?