Survived an Install (Kubuntu 7.10)

[jglen490]

Lots of good news and some differences and a few headaches along the way.

Let me start with the good news. It's pretty, smooth, and my wifi card fires up at every reboot with me doing any "daily" configuration. The trip was worth the destination, even though the trip was like riding a mule downhill with a rock wall on one side and a bottomless pit on the other.

As to the differences. What? No inittab? And just what is "upstart"? Ndiswrapper didn't get along with my wifi card, but see the "good news" part. I didn't need it afterall once I found the fw-cutter package for my Broadcom 4318 based Buffalo card (or buffalo chip, at least for a little while). The differences are - so far - just differences and nothing bad.

The A, #1, top shelf, all-time-greatest, gobs of Tylenol headache was the fact that on my IBM T20, Kubuntu's installer refused to respect the physical fact that the screen is not and never will be a 1280x1024. In fact, on my first try, I ended up going back to 6.06 LTS. When I tried again, this time I made a copy of the xorg.conf file from the Dapper installation, installed Gutsy, rebooted to recovery mode under 7.10 and copied that xorg.conf to /etc/X11 and rebooted - this time to a perfectly useful 1024x768. The fact that ndiswrapper would not/could not load the .inf/.sys driver data for the (at that time) buffalo chip took another bottle of Tylenol. I did all the usual steps: blacklisted bcm43xx, ran ndiswrapper -i with the .inf/.sys files that worked pretty well under Dapper, ran ndiswrapper -m, rebooted. And after getting no love under the reboot, I just chased rabbits. Well, see the "good news" and the "differences", above. After discovering and running fw-cutter, the buffalo chip's lights lit up like searchlights and the Buffalo card was reborn!!

My only remaining headache - and it really isn't a headache, just an pebble stuck in my shoe - is that the Kubuntu splash screen shows up in 1280x1024 badness and shutdown doesn't completely work; I have to push the power button.

All in all, Gutsy is a very likeable distribution and I'm looking forward to the next Long Term Support version for Kubuntu!

[toad]

Re: Survived an Install (Kubuntu 7.10)

Well done, mate! Never had a T20 but am interested to hear that not all is well in the IBM Linux world. My T41 purrs along on Kubuntu without tweaking anything!

As for your splash - I'd get rid of it completely! It is not really informative in any case and I prefer to see the boot messages as they appear. To do so get rid of the "splash" and "quiet" options on the "kernel" line of your system in your /boot/grub/menu.lst

If you want to keep it you need to adjust the "vga" setting in the same line to reflect your screen parameters. A quick google for "vga codes" will fill you in or go here http://manual.sidux.com/en/cheatcodes-vga-en.htm

Not shutting down properly? So what happens when you try? Do you see anything?

[jglen490]

Re: Survived an Install (Kubuntu 7.10)

Thanks for your assistance!

I turned off splash and set vga=788, so I could see what goes on. I've tried several things to get the machine to turn off completely, but not quite there. In System Settings -> Login Manager -> Shutdown tab, I set shutdown to /sbin/shutdown, /sbin/poweroff, and then to /sbin/stop. /sbin/shutdown and /sbin/stop both got as far as "*Running local boot scripts (/etc/rc.local) ... [OK]", and just stared at me with the hard drive still spinning and the wifi card still lit. I hit the 3-finger salute, and the sequence went on to "*Will now halt" followed by an error message "halt: Unable to iterate IDE devices: No such file or directory" followed by "[1701.404000] System halted". The wifi card and drive were silent, but the fan and screen were still on. /sbin/poweroff went completely through the sequence, but still ended with the halt error message and the screen and fan still on (but the drive and wifi off).

So I've left it at /sbin/poweroff and me pushing the button. I looks like the halt program can't work completely. Sure don't know how to proceed now.

My T20 has always been very reliable, and it still is. The shutdown process has never failed with other distros on this machine, it's probably a configuration problem.

Any help or suggestions will be welcomed!!

UPDATE: I've started a bug (#193125) at Ubuntu on launchpad. I suspect this is something more than a simple tweak. But I could be wrong!!

[toad]

Re: Survived an Install (Kubuntu 7.10)

Hm, sounds like we need kubickle's help here as I am not all too familiar with xubuntu runlevels anymore. Failing that I'd have a look at

man halt

I'd now try a simple

sudo halt -w

and study /var/log/wtmp

A

sudo halt -n

though not very elegant, might help you in your quest. Let us know how the system responds...

[jglen490]

Re: [SOLVED] Survived an Install (Kubuntu 7.10)

I tried aal the inputs you listed.

man halt was informative, but basically stated that the kernel manages closing stuff.

halt -w didn't seem to do anything. I looked at /var/log/wtmp, but it's a binary file that I couldn't read, but seems to be written to upon boot.

halt -n brought the system down without a poweroff. There were some notices listed by Networkmanager about sending some info to dbus but dbus was closed. It's sounding more like a "timing-is-everything" kind of thing. Perhaps a process is being terminated before it's needed, or some other process needs to be terminated sooner. But that's just a guess.

Anyway, I appreciate the input. I hope the bug I started will come back with something useful, too.

UPDATE: Based on a response to this problem on the Ubuntu forum, I added this to /etc/modules:

apm power_off=1

This results in a complete power down when selecting Turn Off from the menu. It doesn't completely clear up the problem with the system as the "halt: ..." notice still displays. That something the folks at Ubuntu can deal with via the bug I filed.

Thanks for the help again, again !