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Mike Fedyk
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Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Mike Fedyk" journal:
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02:47 pm
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No program "pvscan" found for your current version of LVM
That's what I get when I run pvscan right after installing the lvm2 package. It doesn't make sure the lvm kernel modules are loaded before reporting this error.
This command fixes the problem:
/etc/init.d/lvm start
I need to report a bug...
Tags: feisty, lvm, ubuntu
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11:56 am
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Ubuntu Feisty vs Radeon R200 QM [Radeon 9100]
This is the third time in the total of three weeks this machine has been running that xorg and the console have become unresponsive while running the "flurry" screensaver. The screensaver would freeze on the screen, and unresponsive to mouse and keyboard input like ctrl+alt+f1, or sysctl commands.
The second time I logged into the machine via ssh and found xorg spinning on the cpu. Unfortunately, when I tried connecting strace to the process, the entire machine became unresponsive.
The third time, I installed oprofile with:
apt-get install oprofile linux-image-debug-`uname -r`
The system ended up spending most of its time in the native_read_tsc() kernel function which doesn't make any sense to me because that is for very fast timing. Unless it was stuck in a busyloop waiting for progress that never happens. But why wouldn't the kernel be able to kill or trace the process?
I have commandeered ubuntu bug #65620 since it closely matches this problem and has been closed because of original bug reporter neglect.
Tags: bug, radeon, ubuntu, xorg
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05:10 pm
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gnome-sound-properties and ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf
"Why doesn't the audio output device change when I set it in the gnome-sound-properties (g-s-p)?"
I have been seeing this for a while, as far back as dapper, but tabled looking into it until just now. Changing the output device in g-s-p affected gnome apps, but not anything non-gnome that used alsa or oss directly like vlc.
Running strace on g-s-p revealed some files to lookup and google that brought me ubuntu bug #31893 and the two commands below to set the default sound card for alsa (non-gnome apps) to use:
asoundconf list
asoundconf set-default-card <devicename> This configures some nice settings in ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf. Looking at the strace output of g-s-p further shows that ~/.asoundrc.asoundconf is being open()ed, mmap()ed, read(), close()d and unmmap()ed, but not written to by g-s-p.
That explains why the sound settings only affected gnome applications and since these settings are read by the alsa libraries, it is only checked when each process starts up. Any changes made with asoundconf will not take affect until after a process using alsa is exited and started again to get the alsa libs to re-read the config files.
So why isn't g-s-p changing the generic alsa configs? The asoundconf man page says:
This program is under development. Its features will change without notice and without preservation of backward compatibility, except insofar as they are put to use by other components of the Debian and/or Ubuntu operating systems. (As of this writing the Ubuntu developers have plans to use asoundconf for setting the value of defaults.pcm.card from the system sound preferences menu.)
I have filed ubuntu bug #119033 to help track this issue.
In feisty (or possibly edgy, I have avoided using edgy because I haven't had much success with that release), they have made the distinction in g-s-p between "sound events", "music and movies" and "audio conferencing". The developers will be have the task of finding a way to present a way to configure which sound card regular non-gnome alsa apps will use and presenting the options in an intuitive way. This may be especially hard since to my knowledge, non-gnome apps have no way to inform alsa they will be playing music or audio conferencing.
One nice thing In feisty, there is now an asoundconf-gtk package available that adds a menu entry in (system -> preferences -> default sound card) and removes the tedium of the two asoundconf commands above (and makes the process a little bit more user friendly, but not very much).
Tags: .asoundrc.asoundconf, asoundconf, gnome-sound-preferenes, ubuntu
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02:10 pm
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Ubuntu Feisty and a Z22 Palm Pilot
I'm trying to get a Z22 Palm Pilot working with Ubuntu Feisty today.
First I found this in the kernel logs:
usb 1-1.4: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 5
usb 1-1.4: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 6
usb 1-1.4: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 7
usb 1-1.4: device not accepting address 7, error -71
usb 1-1.4: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 8
usb 1-1.4: device not accepting address 8, error -71
Then I found ubuntu bug #54419 and it gave me three commands that were useful:
sudo modprobe -r ehci_hcd
sudo sh -c 'echo blacklist ehci_hcd > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ehci'
sudo update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r`
That takes away the error messages in the kernel log, but I was still having trouble finding the USB serial device for communications from jpilot.
That brings me to ubuntu bug #108512. Apparently the visor module doesn't get loaded when a palm gets plugged into a usb port on feisty. The two commands below take care of that problem in a "works for me" kind of way. The permanent fix would probably be in the form of udev rules.
sudo modprobe visor
sudo sh -c 'echo visor >> /etc/modules'
With that, jpilot works on Ubuntu Feisty.
Tags: ehci_hcd, feisty, jpilot, palm, palm pilot, pilot, ubuntu, z22
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06:22 am
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VMware Server 1.0.3 on Ubuntu Feisty 7.04
Following "How To Install VMware Server On Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)" at howtoforge, getting VMware server installed and configured was a snap. :)
Tags: feisty, ubuntu, vmware
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05:27 am
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2.6.20-16 in Ubuntu Feisty released
Looking at the changelog for 2.6.20-16 that was just released, I see some "forward ports" done from the Ubuntu Edgy 2.6.17 kernel.
I wonder how much effort is being put into merging these changes upstream. In the best case, forward ports shouldn't be needed since all of the patches would have been merged upstream.
Hopefully the load of carrying the patches will be encouragement enough to get them merged upstream.
Tags: feisty, kernel, linux, ubuntu
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03:42 pm
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Unattended upgrades in Ubuntu and Debian
With Ubuntu Dapper (don't know about previous versions, Dapper is the first version of Ubuntu I've used) there is a nice feature to automatically update your system. I found it in the preferences of the orange update notification icon and then searched for a way to activate this functionality from the command line for use outside of a graphical environment.
It's a nice package called unattended-upgrades. Well isn't that an obvious enough name?
Before this I had been using the cron-apt package to notify me when there were updates in Debian. I didn't feel comfortable with running `apt-get upgrade -y` because that would change config files. Now I don't have to worry about that at all.
I typically use the dapper-updates and dapper-backports sets of repositories and those packages would need a manual apt-get upgrade (or do the same thing with the GUI). But I wanted them installed for me automatically also. Luckily the list of acceptable repositories for unattended-upgrades is not hard coded.
My /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades file now looks like this:
Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins {
"Ubuntu dapper-security";
"Ubuntu dapper-updates";
"Ubuntu dapper-backports";
};
And my /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic looks like:
APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "1";
APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "0";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";
Now I don't have to install any updates manually.
P.S. This works in debian also, just use "Debian testing" or Debian unstable" in the Allowed-Origins list.
Tags: debian, ubuntu, unattended-upgrades
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12:30 am
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sbackup (Simple Backup) in Ubuntu Dapper
I have been helping John troubleshoot (and learn how to troubleshoot) sbackup for the last few weeks.
We would identify one issue and fix or work around it and then another issue would rear its ugly head a few days later. The fact it was a medium priority item on a long list of tasks also factors into why it took the time it did.
It turns out that some of the bugs were already fixed in the newer version already available in Edgy[1]. These fixes weren't brought to the "Long Time Support" release, though this package is in universe so it's up to the community to handle it.
After checking the dependencies I found that the Edgy sbackup package can be directly installed on Dapper thanks to having a short list of deps (also being written in python might have helped).
That fixed the problem of not restoring files beyond 2GB within the archive.
I also had John go through the process of fixing one bug, reporting another in launchpad.
The one we fixed:
sbackup denies group access to /var/backup
The one we reported:
sbackup lock not stored in /var/lock
So far there haven't been any responses to these bugs.
The 2GB restore issue wasn't in launchpad so I created one, marked it fixed with a comment "Fixed in Edgy" and nominated it to be released for Dapper:
Files beyond 2gb in tar not restored
Let's see how things turn out. I wonder if I should escalate this to upstream. I will if something doesn't happen in the next week or so.
1. I didn't want to get into apt_preferences at the time because while teaching I have learned that it is best to stay on topic. If you cover too much, the associations you want to be learned get lost in the glut of terms and information from the side-topics. This was especially true when I had him rebuild the jpilot package from edgy on dapper (but that is a topic for another post).
Tags: dapper, launchpad, sbackup, ubuntu
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04:04 pm
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Ubuntu Dapper, BCM4306, ndiswrapper 1.23 and distro kernels
A friend of mine wanted to get a usb headset working on his HP zx5000 laptop, but it wouldn't recognize after being plugged. It turns out that the custom 2.6.17.11 kernel didn't have the snd_usb_audio module configured to be compiled.
I have tracked the kernel.org kernel between 2001 and 2004. Different releases from kernel.org don't have the same regression testing between releases that a many distributions do. Don't get me wrong, there is significant testing done on each of the kernel.org kernels before they are released. It's just that there has been *some* kind of regression in each of the 2.6.x kernels released from kernel.org.
That is just a byproduct of the constant fast change that the kernel.org goes through (and sometimes because it is not practical in the mainline ecosystem to hold up the next release for a long time). And there aren't as many varied configurations testing against mainline kernels when compared to the beating distro kernels receive. I typically use the kernel provided by my distro unless there is a specific need it doesn't fulfill that can't be somewhat trivially worked around.
So I immediately booted into the 2.6.15 based Ubuntu Dapper kernel. Afterdoing so, the usb headset started working but the wifi stopped working. It turns out that the dapper kernel comes with ndiswrapper 1.8 and the custom kernel was running version 1.23. After installing the linux-headers-686 package and renaming the ubuntu supplied ndiswrapper module, compiling ndiswrapper against the ubuntu kernel was a snap (make && sudo make install). I kept with ndiswrapper 1.23 instead of checking for a newer version because 1.23 was a known version on the 2.6.17.11 kernel, so there is a good chance it will work similarly well with the ubuntu kernel.
lspci has this output for the miniPCI card:
0000:02:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)
Getting it to work would have been much easier if I had noticed that the bcm43xx open source module was loaded earlier. After that was noticed, I inserted an entry for bcm43xx into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and everything was smooth sailing.
Tags: bcm4306, custom_kernel, distro_kernel, hp_zx5000, ndiswrapper, ubuntu, ubuntu_dapper
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12:31 am
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Switching from Debian/Ubuntu to Centos/Fedora
"Why?!! You're going backwards. Most people start with Red Hat and then smarten up and go to Debian."
You're right, I am going backwards. But that's how I usually do things. That's also how I'm learning Active Directory. By knowing LDAP and Kerberos inside and out first. My first distro was Debian "hamm" 2.0 back in December 1998. Not long after that first install I promptly hosed it (chmod -R 777 /), but my second install is still going strong today with the great debian upgrades. The system has survived three computers, and two hard drives. Just about the only thing that is the same as back then is some of the data files.
So why am I switching to Centos on my servers and Fedora on my desktop? Because I already know all of the quirks of a Debian system and whenever I get on a rpm based system I end up spending too much time reading man pages and searching around for simple things. Though I don't expect it to be a painless process.
<rant>
Another thing I usually do when I get on a rpm system is scream (internally) "Where did all of my packages go?!!". Why do they have to call apache httpd? It's apache damn it! And what half-wit came up with the bright idea to put the ever changing version number in the /usr/share/doc directory? Why not just use the package name and be done with it? You can't have two packages with the same name... Oops, you can with kernel packages. Did I already use the word half-wit? Damn. Oh and yum, it's great. I love having 1/3 of the features and 1/10 the speed and 3 times the memory usage of apt-get.
Though they do have multi-arch which will allow for 32-bit firefox until a 64bit version of flash comes out. Debian may have that by 2010, we'll see. Also while installing security updates is *always* painless on Debian, the rigidity of their policies can be a problem. When they say security updates, they mean security updates *only*. No bug fixes, etc. Some things like broken gaim packages, old kernels not supporting key hardware and other issues come out of that rigidity, so running on Debian isn't entirely a bunch of roses.
</rant>
Lack of packages brings me to the external repositories available for RH based systems. Half of them are incompatible with each other, and most of the time you want/need packages from multiple conflicting repositories. rpmforge seems to be trying to bring people together but have excluded the guy(s) from atrpms. I intend to find out why.
It seems to me that the rpm world needs a "universal 3rd-party repo". A repository that doesn't duplicate any packages found in the main distribution, but provides a central place for packages that work together with what's available in the main distro and that 3rd-party repository. Also they need all of the packages available in debian that aren't already in rpm repositories. Maybe it should be called RPMian (.deb is to Debian what .rpm is to RH), but maybe rpmforge or atrpms will be a good project to join instead of starting *another* repository.
I'm all for joining an existing project instead of starting a new one.
Tags: atrpms, centos, deb, debian, fedora, rpm, rpmforge, ubuntu, vmware
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