Today I did an upgrade to the newest version of Kubuntu Linux. So far I have been pleased with everything. Since the install of the last version of Kubuntu I have had sound problems. This was caused by a buggy PulsAudio implementation. It affected many, but not everyone. I guess they finally got it worked out because everything works so far.

The only issue I have run into is the wireless card was not recognized by default. I have to run a proprietary driver for the wireless card on this notebook. Now I just have to see if I ever documented how I got it working after the last few upgrades.

I downloaded the .iso file of the CD and burned it onto a DVD (I did not have any CD-R media handy). It worked just fine. While doing the install/upgrade I chose my drive partition for the install, but did not format the partition. This installed the new OS on top of my old install, but left my data intact. When doing this the old OS is erased and the new is installed in place. This allows a clean install, but again, leaves your data untouched. It also keeps all your old settings on your software configuration. There is one downside to this: if you had software that was configured badly before, it still will be. To get around that you can delete the hidden configuration directory of the offending software from your home directory.

This has been a much anticipated upgrade for me. I was disappointed in the last 2 upgrades of Kubuntu because previously working items became broken. So far, once I get the wireless running again, everything works as expected. I have not put it through its paces, but I don’t anticipate any problems.

Categories: Linux
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I have had a hate-hate relationship with PulseAudio on Ubuntu/Kubuntu over the last few months. Today I finally got fed up with a problem I was having and out of frustration just asked Google “why is pulse audio so stupid.” Without it being a serious inquiry I eventually made my way to a debugging page at the Ubuntu wiki that helped me out.

Here is what it had me do. Enter this command in a terminal window:

sudo fuser -v /dev/dsp* /dev/snd/* /dev/seq*

Anything other than “pulseaudio” appearing in the right column is the problem. Use the killall command to kill those other items. I ended up issuing a:

killall kmix

After that my sound started working as expected. I will now have to figure out how to keep kmix from starting at boot each time, but I at least know how to solve the problem quickly when it does come up.

If you are an Ubuntu (or variants) user it appears that PulseAudio is here to stay. I have read why it is supposed to be better, but don’t understand it or really care. I will let smarter people than me argue the finer points of sound servers. I just want the thing to work.

Categories: Linux
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A few months ago I had trouble installing a newer version of Linux on my computer. This is my main machine and houses the vast majority of our data. After the install failed I tried a different distribution of Linux. While most everything worked fine, there was one issue that haunted me. The hard drive partition that we have our photos stored on would not mount (I could not read from it). In fact as soon as I tried to mount the partition the whole machine would lock up instantly. Two other partitions on that drive worked without any problems.

I was hoping that the newer version of Kubuntu would take care of the problem. After installing it I was still getting the same behavior I had experienced with Slackware; instant lockup as soon as I tried to touch the partition.

In preparation for a new external hard drive purchase I decided to dig into this problem.

With the drive completely unmounted (even the partitions that were working fine) I ran an fsck check on the partitions. Since the partition is an ext3 file system I ran the following command:

sudo fsck.ext3 /dev/sdb2

Sudo gives me root privileges. fsck.ext3 is the fs (file system) ck (check) specific for ext3 formatted partitions. The /dev/sdb2 means that I ran it on my second drive and second partition of that drive.

After putting in my root password I got a bunch of output that said:

Free blocks count wrong for group #XX ...

It asked it I wanted to fix it and I replied yes to the couple of hundred requests.

Apparently the drive was not cleanly unmounted. By running fsck I allowed it to clean up the corrupted table that said where all the data lived. While my drive is a traditional internal drive, this is a good lesson as to why you should always eject USB drives, or any type of media, before popping them out of your computer. That is true for whatever operating system you are running.

I am pleased to have recovered the 28 GB of photos that I had on there. I have most of them backed up in various locations, but do not have a full backup in one place. Since today is Thanksgiving I guess I should say I am thankful for having finally gotten to the bottom of this and that tomorrow is Black Friday and I am able to pick up an external HD that will back up all the computers on my network with room to spare.

Now, where is that coupon code for those online backup solutions?

Tags: external,hard drive,kubuntu,Linux,slackware,usb
Categories: Linux
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My friend Gordon needed help installing Adobe AIR and Twhirl on Ubuntu. I just installed it on my notebook running Kubuntu 8.04. These steps should work almost the same on Ubuntu. I don’t know of any changes in the 8.10 release that would make this any different. But I have not tried it.

1. Download Adobe AIR from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air_linux.html
2. Navigate to the folder you downloaded AIR to. In Kubuntu you can use Konqueror or Dolphin, in Ubuntu you would use Nautilus. Right click on the downloaded file and select Properties. Select the Permissions tab and select the little check box that says “Is executable”, or “Allow executing file as program”.
3. Click the file to start the Adobe AIR install. It took a few seconds before the installation started on my machine, be patient.
4. Step through the prompts to install AIR. You may need to give it your user password at some point.
5. Download Twhirl from http://www.twhirl.org/ I clicked the “Download and install” link in the section that says “Manual Installation” instead of trying the automatic install.
6. Click (or double click) the Twhirl application that you downloaded to start the installation.
7. Install using all the default settings that AIR gives you.
8. Configure as necessary.

It really was that simple. I did it last week on my desktop and installed it on my notebook as I was writing this.

There are optional ways to set the permissions and install using the command line. That is the way I did it on my desktop. But since I was trying to write this in a simplified manner, I used the GUI the whole time and it worked just fine.

Categories: Linux
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I just heard about Google Sky which is a new feature inside of Google Earth. It gives you star charts for your current location along with some amazing photos from the Hubble. Just like in Google Earth there are articles you can read about different stars and points of interest. All the major stars and constellations have articles written about them. Very cool.

But it gets amazingly better.

There is a flight simulator hidden in the program! After you install it, you hit Cntl+A (in Linux), Cmd+A (in Mac OSX), Cntl+Alt+A (in Windows). Yes! It works in Linux too.

For those not familiar with flight sims (which would include me), there is a list of the keyboard commands you will want to know. You can navigate quite a bit with your mouse, but you will need the keyboard to get the most out of it.

Click on the screen shot to the right to get a full size picture. I chose LAX as my airport of departure for no real reason other than I had recently been there. You will see in the pic that there are 2 push-pins. I was shocked to see them while flying. Those are stores that I had mapped in Google Earth when I was in Long Beach. The flight sim takes into account all of your personal settings inside of Google Earth. Awesome!

I heard about it from Marco’s Blog. Check out his article for more details.

Categories: Linux, Unrelated News
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