Note: This is a long boring blog post. It details my frustration of getting this all to work. If you don’t care and just want to get to where I tell you exactly how to successfully install Linux on this computer, click here.
I haven’t done a tech post in quite a while, so here is one that will hopefully help someone out. A friend of mine recently got a new notebook computer, and the particular model was extremely inexpensive, but seemed to have decent specs regardless, at least for a Linux notebook. The Compaq Presario F500 series sports an NVidia graphics controller, a 1.8GHz AMD processor and 512MB of memory, which can be upgraded to 2GB. This seemed perfect to replace his aging Toshiba Satellite that we upgraded all the up to 512MB of memory and still barely putted along at ridiculously slow speeds, regardless of which operating system we put on there and attempted to optimize. So given the very low price of the new notebook, which was even less expensive than the Asus Eee PC’s, I recommended it. It came with Vista Basic Edition on it, but armed with a Linux disc, we were able to resolve that bug very quickly.
The timing coincided with Ubuntu’s 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon release, so we decided to put that on there. It got about half way through loading the installer before it hung. Googling around through the Ubuntu Forums led to the conclusion that that particular version of Ubuntu wasn’t going to work very well. Most forum threads indicated that it would need some kernel boot parameters to function, namely “nolapic” and “noapic”. Well, these didn’t help us much further either. Most of the Google results were for the F500 series of notebooks, but perhaps the sub-model F560US was yet a little different. OpenSuse didn’t seem to want to load up either and the only operating system that would even install on this thing was Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04. So we went with that, with the “nolapic noapic” boot parameters for GRUB.
In the meantime, I decided to switch from Gutsy Gibbon to OpenSuse 10.3 on my own notebook, since the KDE implementation of Gutsy seemed to have some pretty bad bugs in the network manager that were very annoying. My friend really liked the look and feel of Suse over Ubuntu, so he asked me if we could put it on his Presario. I figured it was worth another try, since I didn’t want him to be stuck with Ubuntu Feisty until the end of time on that brand new notebook. This past weekend I decided to tackle the project again to see what I could come up with. Faced again with the installer hanging at various points throughout the boot sequence, I found that what finally worked was adding “acpi=off noapic” to the kernel boot parameters in GRUB. I was all excited that it was working until I got the system all installed and set up and tried tackling the wireless card. The notebook has a Broadcom chipset of some sort normally sold in Dell notebooks, so there is plenty of documentation online about how to maybe get it to work with the native bcm43xx driver and extracted firmware from the Windows driver as well as many indications that NDiswrapper would work great. Lets just say that after many hours of trial and error and troubleshooting, I realized that having the “acpi=off” boot parameter was not going to allow the wireless card to function regardless of what driver I was using. After a few more hours of googling and trying every boot option that I could think of that had to do with IRQ and ACPI, it just would not boot at all without “acpi=off”. It was either no wireless or no booting at all with this thing. I decided to give up for the day. I gave my friend an ethernet cable and told him I would put Ubuntu Feisty back on there the next day for him. Of course, as most people that know me will tell you, I don’t give up easily when it comes to computers and I have a gut feeling that it should work.
I decided to start over from scratch with Ubuntu Gutsy again. Mostly because there is a lot of community documentation available for Ubuntu and I know the workings of a Debian system a little better than I do Suse and I figured I would install a command line only system and mess with it until I got it all working. If I could get Gutsy working on it, then I could use what I had learned to get OpenSuse 10.3 on it, like my friend wanted. Again I was able to successfully install and run the system by using the “acpi=off” boot parameter and again the wireless card couldn’t bind to IRQ0 with that setting and I was back at square one. But now I just had a command line system and was able to reboot quickly and get to testing really quickly with every different boot parameter and system setting I changed.
At some point I finally found the answer I was looking for. After literally just trying random boot parameters in conjunction with others and by themselves I discovered that the system boots AND runs AND the wireless card works if you use the following boot parameters:
noapic irqpoll nosmp
That was it. It worked great. I was able to bring up the wireless interface (so far didn’t have a working driver/firmware in there, but I didn’t get any more IRQ errors from dmesg) So I rebooted a few times, added the lines to GRUB permanently, installed the KDE desktop and ran a bunch of tests to see if I could get the system to hang. It didn’t. It worked like it was supposed to. So now back to installing OpenSuse. Well, I didn’t want to go through the entire Suse install process, which takes forever compared to Ubuntu just to find out that my boot parameters didn’t work for Suse, I decided to try the LiveCD that Suse has now. I booted it up (with my boot parameters) and it came up nicely. I was convinced that it would work, and as I was about to pop out the live CD and insert the install CD, I noticed that the Live CD had an “Install” option. I gave it a shot. It actually worked. Upon rebooting halfway through the install process, I added in the boot parameters again and when the system was finished I went into the Boot Loader settings in YaST and added the boot parameters in there. That way I don’t have to enter them each time I boot the computer. If you install using the regular installer CD, when the first menu comes up if you just add in the boot parameters, I think the installed system will remember them for you and you don’t have to edit anything in the YaST settings. I think the LiveCD has a few bugs that the regular install CD doesn’t have. I also had trouble enabling community repositories in YaST, which doesn’t seem to be an issue when you install using the regular CD.
One more thing I noticed: Don’t install the Broadcom firmware from YaST. In fact don’t install it at all. Blacklist the bcm43xx driver and use NDiswrapper. The bcm43xx driver, once the firmware is loaded, causes the entire system to slow down to a crawl and it doesn’t work. So, here is the install process for getting OpenSuse 10.3 working on a Compaq Presario F560US model:
Installation Guide
Insert CD and boot.
When you see the menu to choose which installation type you want to do, choose the regular installation, but before pressing Enter, type: “noapic irqpoll nosmp” without the quotes. Those three words should be at the bottom of the GRUB menu in the Options line. Hit Enter.
Go through the graphical installer. It is pretty straight forward and self-explanatory. Go ahead and accept most defaults as they are. I would recommend setting up networking and everything and getting updates with a regular ethernet wired connection during the install process.
Once it is finished, go to YaST (Administrator Settings). Go to System and click on “Boot Loader”. Click the first item and click “Edit”. Make sure that you see “noapic irqpoll nosmp” in the Options line. If they are not there, add them.
While still in YaST, click on Sofware and then choose “Community Repositories”. Make sure that the main repositories as well as the nVidia and any other ones you think you might want are checked and click Finish. After they are done being set up, click on “Software Repositories” in YaST and make sure that all the repositories you selected are enabled and make sure that the “openSUSE-10.3-OSS-KDE 10.3″, which is the CD or DVD, is disabled.
Click on “Software Management” in YaST, and search for “nvidia” and choose “nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default” and “x11-video-nvidiaG01″ to install. Then search for “ndiswrapper” and choose it to install. Click “Accept” and let it finish the installation.
Google for “Dell R151517.EXE” and download that file from Dell’s download site. Open a terminal and navigate to the directory where the file was downloaded. Type: “unzip R151517.EXE”. This will probably spill files all over the place, so you might want to move that file into a directory that you can easily delete later. Once it is done unzipping, type in the following series of commands:
su -
(enter your root password)
cd /home/user/directory/where/you/unzipped/the/file/
Now, if everything went smoothly, when your computer boots back up, you should see the nVidia logo flash across the screen right before you log in. Once you are logged in, you should be able to click on the KNetworkManager icon in the system tray and see your wireless networks. If you didn’t see the nVidia logo before you logged in, edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf as root and find the word ‘nv’ and change it to ‘nvidia’ and restart the X Server or reboot again. Hopefully someone will be helped by this guide and not have to go through the many hours of trial and error to get this notebook working nicely with Linux.
I’ve been working as a freelancer for the past 6 weeks since my arrival in Germany and yesterday I decided to take a real job. I made the 5-hour train ride all the way to Hamburg to meet the new boss and sign a contract and then rode all the way back. So starting next month I am what the Germans call, an “Angestellter”, meaning that I am employed. This makes a lot of things significantly easier, since it isn’t really a problem now to get a work visa, etc.
The apartment is coming along. I finally got some furniture this past weekend and my clothes washer-dryer unit is pretty neat, as it is just one unit that washes AND dries my clothes. Can’t complain about that. I’ve obtained some dishes and made a few trips to the local Ikea store to get ideas about furniture. I’ve got just about everything I need, except I still have no tables at all, no desk, no coffee table, nothing. So for now my work consists of sitting on my couch with my laptop computer on my lap.
After waiting 3 weeks for my internet service to be connected and activated, I finally received a letter from the internet service provider saying that they cannot fulfill my requested service contract for some unknown reason, so it looks like I have to go with someone else for service. It is kind of ridiculous that I have to wait so long for a DSL connection in this country. The house is wired and everything. They should be able to flip a switch and send me a bill. I guess things just move slowly in this country.
As an IT support tech, my skills are constantly improving and I am learning new things. Troubleshooting Outlook was challenging and interesting two years ago, now it is easy and boring. Internet Explorer has its quirks, but once you’ve fought through them once or twice, you understand how it works and move on.
However, one thing about IT is that customers don’t change. Individual customers learn and improve and have less problems over time (at least some of them), but in general I always get stuck going back to covering the basics with users. You know, things that seem mundane and simple to me, like installing Firefox, sometimes aren’t totally obvious to people that don’t do it every day. So, while my job is interesting and exciting sometimes, there are days when I am stuck clearing browser cookies and updating drivers, because for people that don’t do these things every day, it isn’t completely obvious. This is job security for me. My brother sent me a video clip that is funny and true on so many levels:
I was recently surfing the net and came across my government’s Department of Defense website. I couldn’t help but notice the date being off by about 1900 years:
So I was thinking this must be due to some Y2K bug, that somehow escaped everyone’s attention for the last 7.5 years. Fred pointed out that it is actually something to do with the way the site was programmed and it clearly wasn’t tested with Firefox. So I tried it with Internet Explorer when I got to work (no Windows boxen at home), and sure enough, the page shows up with the correct date using IE. The weird thing is, that most of the subpages at that domain work fine in Firefox, so just the front page is broken. It’s a sad thing that even the government isn’t ensuring that their pages are compatible with other browsers. Oh well, it makes for a good laugh.
My girlfriend and I went to go see “Meet the Robinsons” today. The cool thing about it, was that we got to pay an additional $2 each to purchase a pair of 3D glasses because the film features neat 3D effects. At first I was a little skeptical, because I had envisioned those old one-green-eye and one-red-eye paper things that you put in front of your eyes to get a quasi-3-dimensional effect when looking at pictures that have been enhanced with red and green colors around the edges of objects. However, I was very pleasantly surprised to get a pair of cheap plastic glasses, that just look like sunglasses, and were very comfortable and unobtrusive and even fit over my regular prescription glasses without any discomfort. I was very amazed at the quality of the 3D effects and the whole experience blew my mind. The movie itself was pretty cute and it had its moments. I was really excited because before the movie started, there were a few previews of other 3D movies that looked really cool with the 3D glasses on. I am really looking forward to seeing a recorded U2 concert in 3 dimensions this fall. The best of all was that after the previews and before the feature presentation, they showed a Donald Duck/Chip and Dale cartoon from 1953 (one of my favorites, where Chip and Dale are trying to steal peanuts from the elephant at the zoo). The cartoon was completely done in 3 dimensions to fully take advantage of the 3D glasses!
So overall I was very impressed with how far the technology has come and I hope to see more movies in the future done with the 3D effects. One thing to note, however, is that this whole thing is playing visual tricks on your eyes and I think if the movie were longer I would start to develop a headache, similar to the type of headache you get when your monitor’s refresh rate is set too low. This is probably something that varies from person to person, but something to be careful with nonetheless. Also I would definitely not recommend using the 3D glasses as sunglasses, even though they look and feel like sunglasses, I’m pretty sure it will mess with your vision after prolonged use.
So if you get a chance, check out one of the 3D movies that are starting to be released. It is unlike anything I’ve seen before!
I’ve decided I will start blogging about some of my favorite applications that may be not-so-well known. So today I’m going to start off with my recently discovered new favorite application: YaKuake. This little app is simply yet another terminal emulator for the KDE desktop, but the thing that is so cool about it, is that it just kind of runs in the background and it gives you an instant terminal, which drops down from the top of the screen, at the press of a button. It is completely configurable for how big you want the terminal window to be and whether you want it to disappear when it loses focus, etc. It is much more convenient than navigating through my applications menu just to find old trusty Konsole just to type in a quick command like df. In Kubuntu, just sudo apt-get install yakuake. Then find it in your K Menu under System. I just dragged it from there into my /home/jabba/.kde/Autostart folder and created a link to it there. Now from the time I log in, anytime I need a terminal I just hit F12 and I have a terminal. Awesome!!! I am not a GNOME user, but I hear you get similar awesomeness from Tilda.
A friend asked me to look at her computer to see if I could fix. There wasn’t anything in particular wrong with it, but it was running Windows and had enough miscellaneous little issues that, to me, warranted a rebuild of the system. Since this is something I do many times a day at work, I have the whole process of re-installing Windows down to an art and could almost do it in my sleep. However, since I was doing this for a friend and not for work, there are a few things I had to do differently. For instance, I don’t have access to nifty imaging backup software, so I was doing this the old fashioned way… Manually back up all the data, take notes of the user settings, format, install, download drivers, etc, etc…
Now, I should know better than to trust Microsoft to make a reliable solution for preserving a user’s profile upon a system rebuild, but in my laziness I decided to try out Windows XP’s built in “Files and Settings Transfer Wizard”. I had used this tool a few times at work in the past, but have since become accustomed to Norton Ghost and other solutions for dealing with this. I ran the wizard, backed up all the Documents and Settings to an archive on my Linux server and proceeded to format the machine, re-install Windows, all the drivers and third-party software, millions of Windows updates and got the system running and looking pretty smooth.
When I was satisfied that the system was running nicely, I went to the nice “Files and Settings Transfer Wizard” and told it to restore all the files and settings from the archive that it created on my server.
“Your migration store was created with a previous version of Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. Please collect your settings using the current version of the Files and Settings Transfer wizard.”
What?! It was seriously telling me that I need to go back and re-create the archive with a newer version of the software. Unfortunately this is not possible, as there is no more data to recreate the archive from. I don’t think I could have felt more anger towards Microsoft at this point.
Since I didn’t want to inform my friend that although her computer is now “fixed”, I lost all of her data, and since I have been doing Windows builds for a while now and never lost any data before, I was determined to work through this. A little bit of googling led me in the right direction: One specific Windows patch (KB896344) updated the software and for some unknown reason made it incompatible with its own data.
So I uninstalled the responsible Windows update, which by the way broke most of the other Windows components, like Internet Explorer 7 (Don’t even get me started on that one…). But after a restart, I was able to restore all of the data. Now that the data was back on the machine, I still had to fix all the things that broke by uninstalling that update. My first thought was to run Windows Update again to re-install the patch. Well this was no longer possible, since IE didn’t work at all anymore. So I had to fire up Firefox, navigate to the Microsoft Support site, download the patch, install it (which only gave a few errors and IE still didn’t work). Then I had to uninstall IE7 from Add/Remove Programs, fire up IE6, run Windows Updates (2 or 3 restarts later) and re-install IE7. 3 days later than expected and many restarts later, the machine is back up and running with no problems. My advice: Stay away from Windows!
It turns out that all the Justin Dows in the world aren’t as geeky as I am, since I am the first to snag the new address of this blog: http://justindow.com . The old domain is still there and I’ll be using it for some other things in the future, but the http://dowhaus.com/blog/ URL should redirect to here. Please let me know if there are any problems with your links or your feed readers.
Well in the last year or so, I have been able to find a Linux replacement for almost every single task that I use a computer for. I’ve even learned of many new apps that I didn’t know about before, but now can’t seem to live without. Lately, though, there has been one particular issue that I have been trying to find a solution for. Since I tend to travel to Europe form time to time, I like to be able to keep in touch with people back home. Skype seems to do the trick for most things, however there are some things that bother me about it, particularly their lack of a decent Linux client. They don’t support any video calls for Linux yet. I started to research alternatives, and found some promising stuff, like WengoPhone. It seems like an ideal solution to everything, but so far testing has yielded minimal results, as I haven’t, as of yet, been able to successfully place a call to my mom using voice, let alone video. I will keep them in the back of my mind for the future, but I think they are still in their alpha stage of development on their 2.0 version, which looks to be a very promising open-source Skype replacement that is cross-platform.
I purchased a Logitech QuickCam Communicate STX, keeping my fingers crossed and return postage handy, because I had no idea if it would work under Linux but I figured I would just take a chance. Well, I must say that I was completely shocked to open the package, plug it in and open up Kopete to see myself staring back at me. Props to Logitech for that one. So now that I had a working webcam with 100% less effort than installing the same device in Windows (requires driver CD or download, a few minutes of intstallation time and a reboot or two), I was ready to test out Kopete’s video chat features and attempted to connect to someone using MSN Messenger, which seems to have pretty nice Video Call features. This tried to work, but I think my über-restrictive firewall wasn’t allowing something to go through, so I canned that idea. Gaim unfortunately doesn’t support any video or voice stuff, and I didn’t want to try to convince everyone I know to start using SIP-based VOIP clients, because that is just another hassle for the non-computer-savvy folks in my life, and my goal is to be able to connect to them with all the effort on my end, since I am the computer geek.
So I had an interesting thought. My webcam works under Linux. I have an old Windows virtual machine floating around on my hard drive that I haven’t booted up in a while. Let’s see if my webcam will work inside of VMware and whether I can successfully call my girlfriend using Windows Messenger or Skype, since that is what she uses.
Step 1: Download VMware Server, register for a license, and install by un-tarring the tarball and running vmware-config.pl. I just accepted all defaults. Look for it on ubuntuguide.org. There are some dependencies like a C compiler and stuff. I’ll try not to get too distro-specific here, but for the record, I am using Kubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10
Step 2: Install Windows XP in Virtual Machine. This requires you to buy a license from Microsoft. If you don’t have one, I would recommend finding a different way to do video calls under Linux. Don’t buy Windows just for this reason.
Step 3: Install VMware Tools. Reboot the VM.
Step 4: Turn off VM and edit the settings and make sure that you install the USB controller and an audio device. Turn VM back on.
Step 5: Once the VM boots up, go to the VM menu>Removable Devices>USB Devices and select the webcam. Windows will detect the webcam and you can install the software for it (Note: the first time I did this, I had to shut it down and close VMware Server and re-open it before it worked.) Installing the logitech software requires a reboot.
That was pretty simple. The camera includes a built-in microphone, which also worked and I was able to install a virtual sound card in the machine, so that I could get sound. Both Windows Live Messenger and Skype worked almost flawlessly inside the virtual machine. And I was able to call my girlfriend and have a video chat without booting into Windows or messing with my firewall. Of course this is a huge roundabout way to achieve a small task, but I am very impressed that it works. Hopefully I can find a nice full featured open-source IM client that will do video with no hassle soon, but until then I have one last reason to keep the old VM around and have now made it unnecessary to ever boot into the Windows partition on my hard drive again.
