Linux [Mint]

[HTM|Scarecrow]

fixed it XD

After 12 hours of intense struggle. I've finally managed to re-install window's back in my PC.

With the help of a really good friend, i learned that the window's CD wont boot into any HD if it already has an OS running [i guess other then Windows]. Hence, I've used the Live CD of linux to get into my partitions [through the use of GParted]. I've gotten rid of all of my partitions. After that, i still kept on getting language errors. Finally, fed up, i just kept on hitting 'enter' and all of a sudden, window's was being installed on my PC

o_O"

I'm still having trouble installing the ATI driver for my graphics card... but that shouldnt be such a major issue.... i should be back to playing UT when i wake up [too tired.... worked all night installing windows....]

[Coyote]

Just to dispel any unnecessary FUD... I've never heard of Linux mucking with ANYONE's BIOS before. It sure as heck has never happened with any machine I've ever used with Linux.

ATI's Linux support has always been sub-par AFAIK. I've been an NVIDIA fan from day 1 and since those cards have amazing Linux support, I've never EVER looked back if I have a choice in the graphics card I use. The only time I deal with ATI is on my work laptop where I didn't have a choice in the card and I typically just run the open-source non-accelerated drivers there because it's too much of a pain to get accelerated GL working (and I don't need it anyway.)

When installing Linux, I HIGHLY recommend installing a second harddrive just for it. You keep your Windows install on the first drive and let Linux do its thing on the 2nd drive. I typically disconnect the Windows drive completely as an added precaution. I manually add the dual boot functionality back to the GRUB (or LILO... LOL) menu after reconnecting the drive. If you don't want to muck around with that, you can choose which OS to boot by changing the boot HD from your BIOS. I know Ubuntu is good about Doing The Right Thing (TM) when it comes to installing the boot loader, but that depends entirely on the age of your motherboard I find. (I've had Linux install the boot loader on the first drive on my IDE chain when I wanted it on the 2nd Linux drive instead--that's why I play it safe these days.)

[Coyote]

Whew.

I finally bit the bullet and got hardware accelerated 3D support AND suspend/resume working on my work Thinkpad T60p with an ATI graphics card. There were a number of issues to contend with...

1) Instead of using the Ubuntu restricted driver, I opted for using a useful utility called Envy http://albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html which is a great graphical front-end and set of scripts for downloading both ATI and NVIDIA drivers for your system, installing them, and configuring your X11 system to work with them. No problems there.

2) Because the restricted drivers were disabled, I had to manually edit several config files to remove the newly created fglrx driver from the modprobe blacklist so that the stupid driver could be loaded on startup.

3) Then I had to remember how to re-enable compiz so that I could verify that my desktop effects actually worked. XD This was in the appearance manager rather than the advanced desktop settings dialog.

4) One of the benefits of using the ATI driver is that you get ATI's cool GUI for setting the parameters of your display as well as enabling clone or extended desktop on an external monitor attached to the display. After some hacking around, I figured out how to make it work consistently well (I do seem to have to restart X when I plug in the external display...meh).

5) Finally to get suspend/resume working, I had to change several options in the /etc/default/acpi-support file AND edit a script that was invoked whenever suspend was invoked so that the scripts in the pm-utils package were not invoked but rather acpi script /etc/acpi/sleep.sh with the 'force' option.


Narf


Each one of those items up there took a fair amount of Googling, hacking, and rebooting mainly so that I could learn what was going on under the hood and so that I could properly isolate the problems that I was dealing with. The good thing was that each of these issues has been run into before and solved with someone's post to a blog or forum. The downside is that most of those posts are older and refer either to a different version of the hardware or an older version of the OS. Thus, some creative interpretation on what I could use from each of those posts was required in addition to some extrapolation and a bit of guesswork.

I love Linux and use it for 99% of my work and personal efforts (I game only on Windows these days). When Linux works, it's a beautiful thing. There's so much about Ubuntu that _just_works_. However, when Linux doesn't work so well, expect to have to spend as much time learning about what's under the hood as one would do if you were trying to learn how to manually hack the Windows registry to fix a driver problem or something.

The problem here that I'm having is mainly that ATI doesn't have particularly stable drivers for Linux. I NEVER have these sorts of problems with NVIDIA cards. When I was running the non-accelerated open source graphics drivers before, suspend/resume worked 99.9% of the time and it was great. So help me, I will NEVER buy another laptop with an ATI card. You'd think that I would have learned my lesson with the T40p that I got a few years ago... very similar issues there...


::Sigh:: At least it's all working now. I'll have to do a lot more testing, but so far so good. I did notice that my reported temperature on the ATI chip idles at 80C and in operation hits around 105C. I wonder if that's accurate... I'll have to boot into Windows sometime and measure the temps there to see.

[Coyote]

More fun Ubuntu 8.04.1 issues with my Thinkpad laptop...

So during one of the kernel updates, someone at Ubuntu thought it would be a good idea to change the wifi driver for the Intel PRO 3945ABG chipset from a version that used a proprietary set of firmware info that you had to download from Intel directly (this is the ipw3945 driver) to a version of the driver that is completely free and contains no proprietary extra stuff (this is the iwl3945 driver). I haven't read any of the Ubuntu discussion lists regarding all of this, but I suspect the reason is just because of the desire to remove drivers that require special proprietary data to work. This makes them somehow "less free" than otherwise.

So, I didn't even know that this was a problem. I got the kernel upgrade and it worked fine at home for me on my Linksys router. Most of the time it worked just fine at work for me as well since I typically don't use my laptop in my office and only use the wifi when I'm walking around to meetings in different parts of the buildings where I work. What's important here is that the problems only really started to crop up when I was in my _office_. I've had wifi problems in my office before. Apparently, I'm right directly between two of the access points in my hallway and so I've had issues with really weak connections in years past. Apparently they fixed that but the fact remains that I seem to be in a strange access point configuration in there.

So, in my office, I had started to notice weird issues with my trackpad and keyboard. Essentially the keyboard would start skipping or repeating keystrokes and the trackpad became almost unresponsive for periods of time. After seeing weird errors cropping up when I read the syslog (via the command: dmesg) I finally tracked the issue down to the iwl3945 driver. Apparently LOTS of people have been having problems with this driver and to make matters worse, they removed the ipl3945 driver completely from the latest kernel upgrade! Grrr... I tried to make the iwl3945 driver work using the tips recommended to me from the forums but it was still very problematic in my office. Finally, I found a website that showed me how to manually install the ipw3945 driver back in the latest Ubuntu distribution which I did and everything seems to work. I'll be testing this again in my office in Monday to see if it's really the driver or something else with my laptop. Note, I don't see this problem generally in Windows XP on this machine.

I haven't considered rolling myself a custom kernel for my Ubuntu distributions mainly because I really don't want to get into the habit of having to support that level of detail for myself. I haven't done that since I had a Debian installation a few years ago and frankly, I don't miss it. I just want to get work done and don't want to worry about kernel hacking these days. That would be the right solution to the problem since then I could compile in any driver that I wanted. The problem with that is that with each new kernel release, I'd have to remember to recompile those changes back in with a new kernel and there would exist the possibility that other parts of Ubuntu might not work as advertised because other services that expected some kernel setting might also not work.

In case anyone cares, here's how to get the older ipw driver working on a laptop with the 3945 Intel wifi chipset on the very latest (as of Aug 2, 2008) Ubuntu 8.04.1:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/using-ipw3...-in-hardy.html

[HTM|Minus]

i tryed it before.. mandrake 10.. got teamspeak working,played tux racer and supertux,crack attack... but i couldent get games to install.... and i coudlent get ut2004 to install. i couldent mount the disk. so i said f*ck it and killed the dualboot with xp

[Coyote]

Bummer. ut2004 has always worked great for me on Linux.