Linuxlore

Ubuntu ATI driver

Author: Paul Tansom

A couple of weekends ago I was at OggCamp and the first talk on the Sunday was a good one by LornaJane Mitchell. For one it was a timely reminder of how my IT career started. It was also a virtual kick up the backside to get a bit more use out of my blog. I tend to think in completed articles, but I do have a precedent for short technical comment entries, so here goes more…

I’ve just upgraded my desktop machine, it isn’t exactly state of the art, the new one is only a 3.2GHz P4 and is my first 64 bit desktop, but that’s beside the point. The point is I dropped the old SATA HD into a new box and let Ubuntu get on with the job of sorting out the hardware changes (as an aside Windows 7 put on a bit of a show and then gave up in a huff!).

All went well apart from the graphics, which meant I couldn’t even get the login prompt (I knew I should have stuck with a console and typing startx!! To cut to the chase the solution that worked for me was to boot into the recovery mode kernel and do a one off boot into a safe graphics mode. From here I used the Additional Drivers tool to remove the proprietary ATI driver. This allowed me to reboot into the standard desktop and confirm thins were working, but sadly I couldn’t get above 1024×768 which restricted screen space somewhat.

As it happens I doubt the above was needed because my next action was to boot once more into recovery mode and restore the proprietary driver and reboot. This time when the screen went blank and complained about being ‘out of timing’ I used ALT-F2 to bring up a CLI login and from there used:

sudo aticonfig --initial

This created /etc/X11/xorg.conf, although unfortunately this didn’t make any difference, but it did prepare the ground for:

sudo aticonfig --resolution=0,1280x1024,1024x768

which persuaded the driver to use a more sensible set of parameters that worked with the monitor.

The most notable difference I’ve spotted in the logs so far is that when not working I had the line:

(II) fglrx(0): Setting screen physical size to 423 x 317

whereas when working it is:

(II) fglrx(0): Setting screen physical size to 338 x 270

I’ve not explored whether there is anything else, or what that actually means!

August 23rd, 2011  |  Posted in Computers, Linux, Ubuntu, Windows, Windows 7  |  No Comments »

What have I done?

Author: Paul Tansom

As the title says, what have I done? Just before Christmas (this post has been sitting in draft form for a while!) I spent some time with my eldest son, Aaron, showing him how I set up a website. This involved configuring Apache, installing WordPress, creating a MySQL database and then using WordPress to choose a theme and create some content. This was to some extent a bit of a whistle stop tour, but he has had fun deciding on what content to put in, and we have had some interesting discussions about being careful what you write and this issues around copyright on images, etc.

I’ve set him up as a contributor so that anything he posts has to be approved. The big question is, how much work have I let myself in for, and what interesting discussions are there in store? I guess also there’s the question of whether it will be frequently updated. Perhaps he will put me to shame, he’s already had more comments than I have, and so has my younger son, Scott!

For the record, the sites are:

http://aaron.tansom.co.uk
http://scott.tansom.co.uk

January 23rd, 2011  |  Posted in Family  |  1 Comment »

Ubuntu, Dovecot and Sieve

Author: Paul Tansom

Finally upgraded my main on site Ubuntu server to the latest LTS release (10.04). It was a small jump since I was running on the release immediately prior (9.10) and not the previous LTS release (8.04). I was doing this because the previous LTS release lacked a particular package version that I needed to use (which I can’t remember details of as I type this), and the LTS release wasn’t far off – although too far to wait given my need to install onto my new hardware (an Atom 330 based board which is handling the load very nicely with low power consumption).

Anyway, the upgrade was largely uneventful, which is always nice, I do like a boring life for some things The only two items of note were:

• For some reason Upstart didn’t automatically start nmbd on boot – I’m not sure whether this was a one off, but I’m now following a bug on Launchpad and will have to find a suitable time to do another reboot and see what happens.
• There was a minor problem with the Dovecot configuration (and this is what started me towards this blog post!) – the sieve plugin has changed.

I’ll elaborate on that one a bit.

Recently I migrated my mail system from a combination of Exim, Procmail and Dovecot to Exim and Dovecot with Sieve. I’ll get round to blogging about that process at some point, but for now suffice it to say that instead of receiving may with Exim and passing it to Procmail to filter into the various mailboxes and then using Dovecot to access it via IMAP, Exim now passes the mail direct to Dovecot which then uses built in Sieve support to filter the mail into the various mailboxes. This has two advantages, firstly Dovecot can index the mail as it comes in, which has a minor performance boost when first accessing new mail from the client, and secondly the Sieve syntax is much easier to follow than Procmail (well I find it is anyway!).

Getting right down to the issue at hand, on this upgrade I found things stopped working, and after a very brief look around the config file and Dovecot plugins directory identified that in the dovecot.conf file the line:

mail_plugins = cmusieve

needed to be changed to:

mail_plugins = sieve

This did get me thinking that it may be nice to manage a do-release-upgrade process in stages rather than hitting all services at once, but having said that the number of dependencies being upgraded at the same time in this process would likely make that impractical to manage – and to be honest I’ve not found a major problem yet

January 22nd, 2011  |  Posted in Computers, Linux, Ubuntu  |  1 Comment »

Empathy MSN bug

Author: Paul Tansom

Yesterday I noticed that one of my two MSN accounts wasn’t logging in but instead was returning the error message “No Reason Specified”, which isn’t all that helpful really. I wasn’t overly worried because to be honest I don’t really use MSN, it just idles when ever my machine is on, much like my Yahoo and AIM accounts. I use Google Talk and Facebook Chat on the whole, with the odd venture into Skype.

Anyway, today the second account started giving the same error, so I decided something must be wrong, and I should take a look. If nothing else I wanted to find out whether it was me or something that needed raising as a bug. It looks as though this is a general problems and there should be a bug fix to the python-papyon package on the way, but to summarise the details from Ubuntu bug #664570:

Find the file

/usr/share/pyshared/papyon/service/description/SingleSignOn/RequestMultipleSecurityTokens.py

and edit the line

CONTACTS = ("contacts.msn.com", "?fs=1&id=24000&kv=7&rn=93S9SWWw&tw=0&ver=2.1.6000.1")

and replace it with

CONTACTS = ("contacts.msn.com", "MBI")

Personally I always leave the original line there as a comment for reference or backout purposes

Then restart Empathy and you should be fine.

October 21st, 2010  |  Posted in Computers, Linux, Ubuntu  |  No Comments »

Little Bang

Author: Paul Tansom

Just have to add a link to this. Dawn and I saw the Bang Goes the Theory pykrete ice boat experiment as it happened down in Gosport, but Aaron and Scott missed out as they were at school. So, when the weekend came we decided to repeat it in miniature. Dawn tweeted some photos we took, and @bbcbang asked if they could use them in the live show on the red button after the programme on BBC1.

So, if you take a look between 16:10 and 16:40 (roughly), you’ll see Aaron and Scott’s very own pykrete ice boat experiment featured – they we very excited about it! I love the quote from Yan to Jem at the end “do you take apprenticeships”, followed by Jem’s reply “they’re already way ahead of me”

October 15th, 2010  |  Posted in General, Sailing  |  No Comments »

Not to blame for Windows 7

Author: Paul Tansom

In contrast to the wonders of the recent Microsoft advertising where everyone is trying to claim responsibility for Windows 7 (is it just me that sees this, along with the terrible launch party idea, as a desperate attempt to build the sort of community that open source software has?), I would like to make it publicly known that Windows 7 is not my fault. I’ve been working on installing it recently, and really don’t want to be associated with the palaver involved in doing so!

First off, it totally fails to recognise the controller my hard disk is attached to, so I have to add it in on install. This is a Silicon Image 3512 based SATA PCI card, and it also failed to recognise the ITE 8212 PATA card I tried. Once I’d installed I found that it seemed to think I had a USB2 CDROM drive attached, which I don’t, I don’t have one (well, bar a case in a box that is waiting for an ATAPI DVD-RW to be installed!). It also failed to detect my network card.

So after a reboot, just in case, I decided to take a further look. It seems that Windows 7 lacks drivers for my NIC (SIS 900), SCSI card (Adaptec 2940) and sound card (AC’97, either Realtek of SiS, depending on whether you believe the Gigabyte website or lspci!). The NIC and sound are on the motherboard, whilst the, admittedly old (it was purchased when I built my first 486!) SCSI card is PCI,

So, after some fun with Google, and a bit of downloading, I installed a Windows XP driver for the SiS900, and tried Windows Update. This found 22 updates, totaling around 155M give or take, and proceeded to install. Sadly, 5 updates failed to install properly, including the updated SiS900 driver and the AC’97 audio driver!! The others were the SiS AGP driver, Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool and updates for Windows Defender. Nothing critical then, just network and sound drivers and protection from anything nasty (which you won’t need with no network will you!).

Thankfully, after a reboot, another run of Windows Update, and another reboot, I seem to have a basic install of Windows 7 that works. I just need to decide what to do about the SCSI card, sort out anti-virus, and adjust my network settings (for some reason I seem to have been connected to two when I only have one, and I need to change the workgroup). Then I can start looking at getting some actual software installed to make the machine useful.

Anyone who claims Windows is easier to install and has better driver support than Linux really needs to think again!

February 26th, 2010  |  Posted in Computers, Microsoft, Windows, Windows 7  |  No Comments »

BIOS fun

Author: Paul Tansom

Isn’t playing with a computer BIOS fun? No? Of course it is!

I’m rebuilding my main desktop system at the moment. It isn’t anything spectacularly new, in fact it is based on a Athlon XP 2800+, but it runs Linux (Ubuntu 9.10 currently) with ample performance for my day to day tasks. Windows XP runs on it adequately, when it actually works (I clearly use it too little because it sulks and ‘blue screens’ every few months, requiring a repair or reinstall).

Anyway, as part of this rebuild I decided that it made sense to get everything bang up to date, including the BIOS. The board is obsolete now, so the BIOS was a few years old and should be stable enough – wrong! The board is a Gigabyte GA-7S748-L (GA-7S748 with on board LAN), and was running the F5 revision. Updating was simple enough, just boot of my DOS USB key (yes, I have a USB key with DOS installed!) and run the utility. This brought things up to revision F9, which was the latest, and is where things started to go wrong.

The first thing I noticed was that my Windows 7 installation couldn’t see the HD, so I reached for a driver (Vista was the most up to date) to add during the install process. This didn’t work, and further investigation showed that the BIOS of the PATA PCI card the drives were connected to wasn’t active. It turned out that enabling USB legacy support disabled the card BIOS. Unfortunately, in order to configure the card BIOS you needed a keyboard, and since mine was a USB one, USB legacy support was required to use it – catch 22!! After trying a PCI SATA card instead I found that this was clearly a motherboard issue and not specific to one card or chipset.

So the next thing to do was to back off to the previous BIOS (F8 in this case) to see if the bug had been introduced in the latest BIOS upgrade. Unfortunately it seems that the F8 BIOS was completely bug ridden (so it is a shame it is still available for download). After installing it the computer wouldn’t boot at all, although it would allow use of the BIOS itself. This board has a facility to flash the BIOS from a BIOS based utility (Q-Flash), which sounds pretty handy in this case. Sadly it didn’t work, although thankfully, the failure didn’t damage the installed BIOS any further. After a bit of research with Google, I found that if you disable USB support completely you can boot to a floppy and re-flash the BIOS using a DOS based utility (will DOS ever die?!).

So, with this information I managed to get back to the F5 BIOS and all was working again. Out of curiosity I then tried the F6 BIOS and found that the USB legacy support clash with the PATA card BIOS was introduced there, so presumably exists in F7 too. Back to square one again then, with the original F5 BIOS and a working PC!

February 26th, 2010  |  Posted in Computers, Microsoft, Ubuntu, Windows, Windows 7  |  No Comments »

Microsoft to provide default Ubuntu search?

Author: Paul Tansom

A while back I noted from Popey’s blog that Canonical are changing the default search engine in the next version of Ubuntu to Yahoo!. I don’t think I’ve been particularly impressed with the Yahoo! search since the 90′s sometime, when I switched to Google because it provided much easier access to the search results I wanted. This was largely because it was at that time unencumbered by advertising results being engineered into high listing placements. Sadly that isn’t the case today, and I have the same annoyance with Google providing endless ‘search noise’ in the form of links to price comparison sites, or links into a site search for the terms you’ve used on Google, generally with results that are totally irrelevant. That is beside the point for this post though.

I note from recent news that Microsoft and Yahoo! have been given the go ahead for their search deal, which means that Microsoft Bing should be providing the search results for Yahoo! by the end of the year.

Interesting times, since that would appear to indicate that the average new user of Ubuntu will be using a Microsoft search engine, and one that may not be as good for searching for information on Linux and Open Source software – although it has to be said I’ve not experimented with this myself.

February 20th, 2010  |  Posted in Computers, Linux, Microsoft, Ubuntu  |  No Comments »

Protext now free

Author: Paul Tansom

Nearly two years ago now, back in December 2007, I blogged about Protext. Protext is a word processor that started out life on the Amstrad CPC range of 8 bit micro computers, but also found homes on the Amstrad PCW, Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, Commodore Amiga and PC running DOS. It also appeared on the Amstrad NC series of portable computers.

Anyway, the primary reason for that post was to provide a link to the new home for the website as I’d had a little fun tracking it down since Google links hadn’t updated (likely due to the site not having been removed by the ISP!).

There are two reasons for this follow up. Firstly to provide a track back to the original post and a link to the new location, since it has moved once more. I’ve been in touch with Mark Tilley again (who provided the link for me) and the Wikipedia page has been updated, which should help Google find it.

The second one is to make note that it is now a free download. It isn’t open source, but as a nostalgia point, and for those that still enjoy using it, the last version for the PC, Atari and Amiga is available as a binary download.

Oh, and again, I guess I should put the link in:

http://www.tigerteam.co.uk/protext/

Tags: Amiga, Amstrad, Arnor, Commodore, CPC, Protext, Rombo
September 7th, 2009  |  Posted in Computers, Retro  |  1 Comment »