…after I installed Kubuntu 11.04 beta, everything was going smooth, wireless worked out of the box, (unlike 10.10 where I had to install some freedom hating broadcom driver) I had the awesome kde 4.6.2, seating on top what has been tagged the most significant Linux kernel release for desktop users in a long time kernel v2.6.38 (with the magic patch and all). Life was good.

Then it happened!

Trouble started when I wanted to send some files to my phone from laptop via the bluetooth. (You see I happen to be among the unfortunate set of people who have the same button for enabling wireless and bluetooth.) I tried enabling the laptop’s bluetooth when the whole system came to a standstill. I did a forceful shut-down after which my install never saw the light of the day again. Everytime I tried booting the PC, it always got stuck at the boot process. The scary part was even the the Kubuntu 11.04 Livecd stopped Booting at all! Only Kubuntu 10.10 was able to boot (from Livecd).

Searching for Answers

The most frustrating part of my Nasty Natty experience (pun intended) was trying to determine the root cause. How to explain how an OS installs fine, then crashes and not only does it become unable to boot, even attempts to do a clean install also hits a dead then. Here were a list of my suspicions

Corrupt system Memory (I know from experience that the best way to test if a system has bad memory is to load in a Live cd, this was ruled out by the fact that I was able to load on Kubuntu 10.10 on Live cd without issues)

Then I thought maybe a bad system Bios (I really wanted to pursue this option and upgrade the system BIOS via windows. Thankfully windows won’t install, complained about some partition issues)

I also considered a badly burnt media (but checked its integrity and it was said to be ok)

Kde 4.6 bug? (Xubuntu 11.04 had the same problem) kernel bug? hmmm

Light Bulb Moment…

Came while talking to a friend about the problem on irc and he suggested it was most like kernel problem probably some bad module. This got me thinking, I remembered the last thing I was doing (or wanted to do) when all this started was enabling bluetooth (shares the same button as the wireless)

I then decided to go into the system BIOS and disable the wireless / bluetooth radio. Fired the LiveCD of Xubuntu 11.04 and Voilà Xubuntu booted successfully, no hangs or freeze. But also no wireless.

Work Around

After I was able to get Xubuntu to successfully boot. I proceeded to install it. (for testing purpose I enabled the wireless radio from Bios and had the issue the freshly install Xubuntu 11.04 freeze at login screen (again) disabled it and everything worked fine (But no wireless)

Here is what I now did to fix the issue on my laptop. I did not have this issue on 10.10 mostly because that version of Kubuntu did not ship with the opensource broadcom drivers. I had to use the binary only driver from broadcom, hence the idea was to revert back to that setup.

first I installed the broadcom-sta-common (It provide a binary only closed source driver for broadcom)

sudo apt-get install broadcom-sta-common


Once installed, I edited the following file /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf

NB its always a good thing to backup before making any change to config file.
backup with this command

cp /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf-orig

In case things gets jammed up and you want to revert, you can easily do so with

cp /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf-orig /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf

kdesudo kate /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf


NB gnome user should use gtksudo gedit in place of kdesudo kate (and if you are like me, you can use ever reliable vim )

Anyway I blacklisted the brcm80211 open source broadcom driver by adding this line to, /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf blacklist brcm80211 Before the last line. When done, everything looked like this

# wl module from Broadcom conflicts with ssb
# We must blacklist the following modules:
blacklist b44
blacklist b43legacy
blacklist b43
blacklist ssb
blacklist brcm80211
install wl /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install wl $CMDLINE_OPTS

I saved the file and then edited this file /etc/modules (again backup before editing)

cp /etc/modules /etc/modules-orig

By adding the module for the closed source (freedom hating but stable) broadcom driver so it is loaded at every system boot

I added lw to the end of /etc/modules so the file looks like this

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.

lp
lw

Saved the file, exited, and rebooted this time with the wireless on to test if the issue as been fixed. The laptop rebooted fine, no issue, but still no wireless. Then I started the Kubuntu additional driver tool or kdesudo jockey-kde (from commandline on Kubuntu) or gtksudo jockey (from commandline on Ubuntu) which searched and informed me I needed to activate some proprietary drivers to make the wireless card work properly. I enabled them, It did its magic and voilà the wireless card came on. I was able to enable and disable it without the system kernel panicing.

I rebooted my laptop and there was no problem at all, everything worked just like it did on 10.10.
I explained the same step to some dude on irc having similar problem and my solution worked for him so I decided to share in case anyone is having such problems.

I hope someone finds this useful.

Artha is a free cross-platform English thesaurus that works completely off-line and is based on WordNet. It is released under the GNU General Public Licence version

Source

Features

Although a gtk app  it has very little gnome dependencies (So KDE fans dont have to worry -much. Yeah yeah I know its would have been better if written in Qt but then “what can we do”  :(  ) However Artha has tons of features to make anyone (Gnome, Kde, whatever floats your boat) Drool.

• Offline : Unlike most dictionaries which can only be used if you are online. Artha works completely offline. So if you like me are not completely bought up by all this cloud computing craze and live in Africa where Internet sucks. Then Artha is a no brainer for you.  (Even if you are lucky and have highspeed internet Artha is also a no brainer )
• Regular Expressions Search : OK lets say there is a word you  vaguely know or you are unclear as to its meaning or spelling. (Happens to me a lot ) you can speed up/narrow the search using regular expression to locate the particular word they have in mind.
• Suggestions : Say you mispelled a word Artha can give you near matching suggestions (I also love this)
• Relative to Sense Mapping : Artha doesn’t just give you the meaning of words. It so includes words like Synonyms, antonyms. When you Select a relative its corresponding definition is scrolled and highlighted for easy comprehension.

The Awesomest  Feature that rules them all : Yeah I saved best for the last.  For me the feature of Artha which kills every other Dictionary software out there is its support for Notifications.  Here is how it works – Lets say I was going through my RSS reader and I found a word am not familiar with I just need to highlight the word, press the keyboard combination Ctrl+Alt+W (Which can be changed to any key combo that suits you) The meaning of the word gets displayed as a Notification Bubble .

Hence I can easily check the meaning of the word without having to launch the application window.

The notification feature of Artha is supported system wide and works with just about every application which support text highlighting.

Installation

Ubuntu / Debian : Although Artha is available in the Ubuntu / Debian Repository The version there is quite dated. However the latest version has been compiled to .deb and can be downloaded from   here

Fedora (Leonidas/11 or above) :  Artha can be installed with

yum install artha

Note* The version in the Fedora Reposittory is 0.9.1

Other Linuxes : If a binary package is not available for your distribution, you can easy download the source code from here and follow this installation instructions on how to compile from source.

Configuration: After installation, the rest is easy. When you start Artha Its minimizes in the Notification area of your desktop.  From the application window you can easily set you keyboard short cut by clicking on the settings. The default keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Alt-W.  By default the Notification feature is disabled but can be easily enabled by right clicking on the notification area icon. The rest is easy.


I found Artha to be very useful and goes a long way to enhance my workflow and user experience.  I hope someone find this useful.

When Jaunty alpha6 was announced with many folks on identica claiming it to be very stable i decided to make the switch. I have since been running Ubuntu jaunty jackalope on my laptop. People say that the grass on the other side is always greener,well that was how running jaunty on my dell m1330 turned out. It wasn’t perfect and although i noticed many improvements from intrepid ibex like faster boot, better notification system, better support for suspense and hibernation, they were also some huge show spoiler like the Intel graphic regression which seem to affect the Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c) graphic chipset the most, causing the system to hard freeze requiring me to have to manually power down the machine. This issue got really bad that i had to downgrade to ubuntu hardy heron (which ran perfectly on my system) while i waited for walk rounds to the problem.

Then Dell released their custom image for ubuntu jaunty jackalope with some customization of their own that fixed issues many dell laptops had with ubuntu jaunty jackalope (mostly audio issues) and i decided it was time to give jaunty another try.

I downloaded the dell image from here

The good thing about this dell image for ubuntu is that unlike the previous ubuntu images released by dell were the user didn’t have a say in the partitioning process of the system. This image actually allows the user to partition the system to their taste. So its possible to dual-boot between windows and linux on this version of dell ubuntu reinstall image, a thing which was impossible with previous versions.

After installing the dell installing the dell jaunty jackalope image am happy to say that ubuntu jaunty jackalope is shaping up to be one of the best ubuntu i have ever used. very smooth and solid as a rock. It still has some nagging issues out of the box, but most of this issues have simple fixes and work around which when applied made ubuntu 9.04 rock on my dell m1330.

NB: I would recommend that anybody intending to install the ubuntu jaunty jackalope on their dell xps (or in fact any dell should consider using the dell-jaunty-reinstall-iso which can be downloaded here you can read more about the advantages of the dell-reinstall-image over the vanilla ubuntu from this post

what works
Intel core 2 Duo T5850 (2.16GHz/667Mhz FSB/2MB cache)
Just works

Standard Display with 2.0 Megapixel Webcam
Just works

Speed: 320GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) with Free Fall Sensor
Just works

Integrated 10/100 Network Card
Just works

Modem
Not Tested

CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW Drive)
Just works

High Definition Audio 2.0
just works (had issues with recording on vanilla ubuntu but the dell reinstall image works fine out of the box even with pulse audio)

Intel® 3945 802.11a/g Mini-card
Just works

56Whr Lithium Ion Battery (6 cell)
Just works

Biometric Fingerprint Reader
works (not out of the box)

Built-in Bluetooth capability (2.0 EDR)
Just works

Standard LCD
Just works

Internal mic
Just works

Memory card reader
Just works

Issues

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope is by no means a perfect out of the box experience on my m1330 i had serious issues with stability and general usability.

where are some of the issues and how i was able to get round them

Issue 1

X freezes due to regression in the Intel graphic driver for jaunty.
This was a huge show stopper for me. it just made my laptop unusable. I usually experience a like 10 freezes in a day, and each time the best way to get out of it was to manually power down the machine. The problem with the Intel graphic driver is upstream and not an ubuntu specific problem. and unfortunately the hardest hit is the Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c) which is what my laptop uses.

Walk around
I was able to get round the frequent X display crashes by enabling something called greedy mode in my xorg.conf file. Doing this is very easy.

first we backup our xorg.conf its always a good idea to do this so we can always restore back to default in case things did work out right for you

Backup xorg.conf
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf-bak

now that we have the default xorg.conf backed up we can now safely edit it by adding the following to the device section of xorg.conf

Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy

first we open the file with a text editor

gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

now we edit the device section of the file to look like this

# xorg.conf (X.Org X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type "man xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# Note that some configuration settings that could be done previously
# in this file, now are automatically configured by the server and settings
# here are ignored.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Configured Monitor”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Monitor “Configured Monitor”
Device “Configured Video Device”
SubSection “Display”
Virtual 2720 900
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
Option “AccelMethod” “EXA”
Option “MigrationHeuristic” “greedy”
EndSection

**As you can see from above, I just added
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy
to the device section ***

Once this is done we save and close the file. Changes would be applied on next login.

Issue 2

Desktop Effect is disabled by default on the Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
so laptops running that particular Intel card would not be able run compiz on ubuntu jaunty jackalope. I was able to get round this issue bt removing my Intel Driver from the blacklist. To do this run the

Walk around
Desktop effect/ Compiz was disabled to reduce the rate of X freezes on Intel card GM65/GL960 cards. However applying the workaround in Issue 1 makes the system stable enough to run compiz. Since enabling Greedy mode in the previous work around eliminate the freezes anyway removing the GM65/GL960 from blacklist meant compiz started working without any issues and system is still just as rock solid .. talk about eating my cake and having it.

Removing the Intel card GM65/GL960 from compiz blacklist is dead easy. open Terminal and run the following commands

gksudo gedit /usr/bin/compiz


this would open a text file, search for the following line in the text file # blacklist based on the pci ids


under that you would see the following of lines

T="$T 8086:2982 8086:2992 8086:29a2 8086:2a02 8086:2a12" # intel 965
T="$T 8086:2a02 " # Intel GM965

you need to add a comment “#” in-front of which line to look like this


#T="$T 8086:2982 8086:2992 8086:29a2 8086:2a02 8086:2a12" # intel 965
#T="$T 8086:2a02 " # Intel GM965

Once that is done. log out and login into the system and try to enable desktop effect. It should work like a charm

Issue 3

Finger Print reader: Thinkfinger the tool which would help us to use our finger print reader for authentication is still broken in the repositories.

Walk around

We would have to install one from a third party PPA. Open Synaptic System/Administration/Synaptic
go to settings/Repositories and choose the Third-Pary Software tab Click add (not add CD-ROM) and add the following

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jon-oberheide/ubuntu jaunty main
when you are done click add source and close the the software sources tab.

Now we need to add the PPA key (This is a good practice from a security stand point as it ensures that anything you are installing is actually from the right repository if you skip this part you will get errors every time you refresh your sources)

Open the terminal and run the following command

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xf2a12fabe936a7bbdc4ea33351db180d1323e149

now click the reload button on synaptic. once its done refreshing, search for the following: thinkfinger-tools and libpam-thinkfinger right click install and apply and once its done. the first part is installed

We are now going to configure how to use the finger print reader for authentication. to do this we would have to edit some configuration file on the system. first we run the following command

sudo '/usr/lib/pam-thinkfinger/pam-thinkfinger-enable'

Then we need to restart the system for the changes to take effect. Once you are logged in Open Terminal again and store your finger print on the computer with this command

tf-tool --acquire

swap your finger of choice 3 times

to test run this

tf-tool --verify

then you are done. from now on you can use your finger print for
a) GDM session login
b) Screensaver unlock
c) Sudo and gksudo prompts
d) PolicyKit authorization

Issue 4

Inability to run Desktop effect / Compiz on a Dual Monitor setup : There is a hardware limitation of Intel cards which prevent them from from running hardware acceleration at a resolution higher than 2048 x 2048 virtual size. Fortunately this hardware limitation does not affect the Intel GM965 Chipset, unfortunately the Driver shipped with Jaunty (and previous versions ubuntu if i might add) has a bug that limit the Intel GM965 to just 2048 x 2048 virtual size when running hardware acceleration, which in human language means you can run compiz, and you can setup dual monitor, you just cant do both at the same.

Walk Around Fortunately there is a fix for this bug. To apply this fix we would to add a 3rd party PPA to our source.list and install the mesa package which contains the fix. after which we can then remove the PPA from our source list.

echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/cavedon/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

Then we add the PPA key and refresh our sources
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0x282e4fae542e7613e2dc4056c1fe1a7b426ff7fa ; sudo apt-get update

It would have been easy if you just do an upgrade in which case install latest update. But since i wasnt too sure about some of the packages in from this PPA and what i need is just his mesa packages which contains the fix we need, I would suggest the only package we upgrade to should be mesa. Hence open synaptic package manager and search for the following packages. right click on them and select upgrade

libgl1-mesa-dri
libgl1-mesa-glx
libglu1-mesa
mesa-utils

when you are done. click apply and install the upgrade you have selected.
Once the upgrade is complete. I would advise you remove the PPA from your sources. You can do this by going to settings in synaptic and click on repositories. Click on the Third Party Software tab and scroll down till you see the deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/cavedon/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main, uncheck it and close. Now you will need to click reload to refresh your sources.

Conclusion
After applying the following simple fix, My Dell as been solid as a rock, no more freezes and i get an optimum use of my hardware.

Hope someone finds this useful

With Ubuntu Feisty fawn dual booting has not been easier.And it is possible to install Ubuntu on your Computer without altering anything,in fact your windows would be just like it has always been.I personally currently dual boot Ubuntu with Windows vista not only was the process easier and faster than installing vista its self.it has also been stable no wahala at all.

We are going use to senerios

1-Dual Booting with a fresh XP Install.

2- Dual Booting Ubuntu and XP with XP already installed
1-Dual Booting with a fresh XP Install.

This senerio concerns installing Windows from scratch and then creating the dual-boot.

What you will need:

• Windows XP Boot Disk
• Ubuntu 7.04 Boot Disk

Make sure your computer is set to boot from a CD.

Most computers already do that by defaults.but just in case yours doesnt then go into your BIOS. From there go to “Boot” and go to “Boot Priorities”. Make sure CD-ROM is set to boot first and you’re all set.

Installing Windows XP

Now Open your CD tray and switch off your system.make sure the system is completely off.then insert the XP Boot CD in the CD tray close the tray and start the system.

A blue MS-DOS screen will load up first asking you if you want to install drivers or run an Automated System Recovery. Just wait for them to go by and then Windows will begin to load files needed to install XP.

You will now see a setup Screen.Press enter

Agree with the usual EULA agreement by pressing f8

Now to the important part of this installation. You will now see a screen where you will tell Windows XP to install itself. Since you want to Dual boot your system in that case you should not give XP all your drive You need to create a partition for XP . Press the C button on your keyboard to create a new partition.Note if You already have windows installed on your system and you want to do a fresh install be sure to delete the old partition by pressing D.then You can now create a New partition.

You will now see a screen in which you can edit the size of our new partition. Depending on your hard drive size and preference, determine the amount of gigabytes (GB) you are going to give XP to use . After you have chosen the size hit Enter to create the partition.

Note –

• Windows XP requires at least 1.5 gigabytes of hard drive space.
• 1000 megabytes (MB)= 1 gigabyte (GB). So if you wants to give say 9GB to XP that would be 9000MB

You will now be brought back to the screen install screen Highlight the new partition you created (leave out unallocated space you will need it for Ubuntu). and press Enter to install. The next screen will ask you how you would like to format the partition (FAT32 or NTFS). The choice is up to you and what you prefer. -XP works better with NTFS-. Regardless of your choice, choose the quick option as this will make the installation go a whole lot quicker

Now press F to Format the drive and begin the Installtion of XP on your systetm

Once that is done you will see this

Then these

Then finally These

Finally you have installed windoze sorry windows..now remember that during the installation you did not use all your partitions for windows…now the unused partition is where we are going to install ubuntu.It is a raw partition meaning that it has not been formatted to any file system.and you can see it if you go to Control planel/Administration tools/Cmputer management/disk management.You will see it has an “unallocated partition” in black youcan check the size cause that would be the size of your UBuntu

Note* if these is not the case and you installed windows on the whole drive .No probs just go to the second tutorials you will learn how to dual boot in that kind of situation

OK Now that you have installed windows.its now time to install UBUNTU.

Get your Ubuntu CD.

Now make insert it in your CD tray,shut down,close the tray,and start your system. the ubuntu CD would boot up.when it does you will see these bootup screen

Highlight “Start or Install Ubuntu” and press enter the loader would take some time going back and forth but the patient.after some times you will see these screen

Double click the install icon and choose your language

Next pick your location

Select Your Key Board Layout most Commonly used is U.S English.

Ubuntu will then load the disk partitioner to determine where it’s going to be installed. Choose “Manual – use the largest continuous free space”. This will automatically select the unpartitioned space That left unsed during the XP install. Click Forward.

Next you will see the migrating assistance which is for helping you import some of your Windows account settings like wallpapers and bookmarks into Ubuntu.however i would advise u don’t tick any account cause am not sure of how effective the migrant assistance is.So click forward

Time for your user name and password *remember to turn off CAPS

On the “Ready to install” screen, you’ll see that Ubuntu now has enough information to commence the installation. In the summary under Migrate Assistant, it should say “XP (loader)”. This means that regardless of whether Ubuntu found any user account to migrate, it certainly knows that Windows XP is installed on the other partition and is aware of it.Click Install

Now when the installion complete you have to remove the cd and shut down.when you restart Note* that when the Grub screen comes up there will be an entry “Other operating systems” and beneath that “Microsoft Windows XP Professional” (or Home, whichever version you’re using). By default Ubuntu will load itself after 10 seconds.

Well i guess that is it.You have your Ubuntu XP dual boot! please let me know if You encountered any problem following this steps.

You can either drop a comment here

or give me a call

bigbrovar 08022982697 (Nigeria Residence only)

This Tutorial is for People who wants to install Ubuntu with XP already installed on your system.

What you Need

Ubuntu Live CD

Preparation.

Make sure that you defragment your drive like say twice before you emback on this tutor guide to avoid issues when Ubuntu find it unable to partition your drive.

Start

Insert the Ubuntu CD in your drive and properly shut down your system.

Make your system boot from the CD.most systems do this by default if your system does not do this .Go to into your BIOS. From there go to “Boot” and go to “Boot Priorities”. Make sure CD-ROM is set to boot first and you’re all set. When you rsystem boots from the Ubuntu CD you will see this screen. select “Start or install Ubuntu”.

The installation would go back and forth but be patient.when the Live CD finally loads.double Click on the install Icon on the Screen.

Choose Your Language and click forward

Choose your location and Time zone and click forward

Choose your preferred keyboard layout and click foward

Now when you click forward you Ubuntu loads the disk partitioner. The partitioner seeks to resize the main partition and use the freed space, is pretty much easy to go with.And this is how it works. The partitioning would be done with the help of a slider,so if you have say 40GB harddrive sive on your system and out of the 40GB – say 10GB to Ubuntu just move the slider to the right till you see it read 30GB then can leave it at that 30GB and click forward.

Another option would be to manually edit your partition tables but that is not recommended unless you are an advance user.
*Just remember to give it at least 2 GB though I recommend you give it much more.

Next you will be asked if you want to import any accounts you may have on Windows XP. If you want to do it, if not just proceed.But i will advise you not to.What ever you choose Click forward

Next Your user name and password *make sure CAPs are off

confirm all the information

Now double click install and wait for Ubuntu to install..when you are done .You can restart and remove the ubuntu CD.