customising life

I went back to Edgy.

Sorry for the misleading title.  I just couldn’t get anywhere with Feisty, and I’d had enough.
Down-grading was an issue-and-a-half too; a week full of frustration.

I went for my Ubuntu Edgy CD, but after installing was unable to log into a GNOME session, the screen froze before anything had loaded. I tried the same thing with my Xubuntu Edgy CD and was able to log into a XFCE session, but not a GNOME one.

After squeezing my home folder into some backup space, I re-installed this time starting with the /home folder fresh. This time there was no problem getting into GNOME so I assumed there was some configuration issue.

After copying back most of my /home folder, save any .gnome, .gnome2, etc folders, I proceeded to re-install all the programs I need, only to find the same freeze on starting a GNOME session.

Rather than re-installing (I was getting pretty hot around the collar), I worked my way through each configuration file; finally resting on my ALSA sound configuration file; .asoundrc.

I don’t know what’s wrong with it, as it hasn’t changed since I got my sound card working a while back. I do miss surround sound, but for now I’m just happy to have a working, non-freezing PC.

My problems with Feisty and it’s tendency to freeze on me, got to the point where I wasn’t prepared to sit on my butt any longer; I have to solve this.

Without re-installing (which may not work anyway)

Using the handy System Log(from the System -> Administration Menu), I found something disturbing in my kern.log

May 7 19:44:56 osiris kernel: [ 623.592000] BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#0!
…
May 7 21:21:20 osiris kernel: [ 6414.444000] BUG: at drivers/pci/search.c:270 pci_get_subsys()

One for each of the freezes I had that night. There’s more, if I could find somewhere to host the log.

I would love to know what to do with this. I’ve started looking through Launchpad, for a similar issue. I’ve come across many bugs that mention ’soft lockups’, so I don’t know where my issue stands in relation to them.

Following another Feisty Freeze saga, has given me at least one common element to investigate; NVIDIA card/driver.

Yay! Finally a post!

I was really looking forward to the release of Feisty, and leaving Xubuntu for good old Ubuntu. Having a decent PC meant that most of my previous Xubuntu installs eventually ended up just like Ubuntu so I decided to install Ubuntu this time round.

The installation of Feisty was painless but not worry free.

Everything was smooth sailing until the appearance of the new partitioner. I made my first mistake when I re-assigned a partition from /media/sda1 to /. I didn’t notice that the partitioner automatically resized the partition to just over it’s current usage.

Strangely for other, more full partitions, this wasn’t a problem.

The last strange part was when the installer moved to unpacking and installing the base install; the entire window was minimised to the smallest size, without the option to resize it. Not panicking I left it alone for around 20mins, where it changed into a dialog informing me it had successfully installed and wished to reboot my PC.

The next unpleasantry (though not of Ubuntu’s making) was upon rebooting where I was greeted with a Frankenstein looking desktop as some, not all of my previous configurations had translated from Xubuntu to Ubuntu. The background was as I left it, but the panels were floating in the middle of the screen and all jumbled up. Deciding it was time for a real fresh start I moved my Home folder to another partition and started from scratch.

Onto the good points, and there were some that really had me smiling.

Firstly the Restricted Drivers Manager was a great help. Even though I’ve done it many times, installing the NVIDIA drivers always seems to cause me pain. The Restricted Devices Manager did it all for me, and the Desktop Effects were soon enabled. A definite plus.

Network Manager was also looking up as it had detected my two wired ethernet ports as well as my D-Link wireless card, and even sussed out the local Wireless Access points.

Sadly my card uses the RT61 chipset, which Network Manager seems to only work with when using no key or WEP. I am hopeful that future releases can work better with this card.

But by far and away the best thing with Feisty, is it can get my sound card, a SBLive 7.1 using the CA0106 driver to play sound in 5.1 (which I got working back in Breezy) AND allow multiple applications to use the sound card at once, which I could do with Edgy but only with stereo sound. I only found out as I had some tunes playing and accidentally started a video in Firefox and to my astonishment, heard sound.

Sadly I end with one final and fairly major problem. Feisty seems to freeze on me, unexpectedly and seemingly randomly. Once it froze while logging on, once after opening the Trash, once while …, once while … I can’t work it out.

This may be the closest I can get to an explanation