Long-term readers of Graceful Exits might remember that the too-new hardware in my Dell Precision M4300 needed some rather nasty hacks just to get both display and wireless card working. One of those left me with a weird hybrid Gutsy/Feisty installation of Ubuntu, which worked for a while. I could get both video and wifi (by compiling both myself) as far as the 2.6.22-9 kernel, but no further. I needed to upgrade fully to Gutsy.

From hybrid to Gutsy Ubuntu

Upgrading from the hybrid version required me first to comment out the two Gutsy repositories I’d sneaked into my /etc/apt/sources.list. Then gksudo update-manager -c presented me with the necessary upgrade button. An hour or so later all the packages had been downloaded, but it took a whole day to have to keep going back and clicking on “OK to replace this configuration file” popups in between sleeping, showering and going to work. There must be a better way for Ubuntu to do that during mass package installations such as an upgrade.

What worked and what didn’t

When it comes to display drivers, Gutsy is very forgiving. My nVidia drivers didn’t work straight away, but the machine realised this and presented me with a low-res VESA mode, which in turn led to a low-graphics mode that was still more than adequate for the mean time. When Gnome finally finished starting, I noticed with joy that wireless works in Gutsy out of the box. I didn’t need to download the iwlwifi package and compile it. Lovely.

If I were going to nVidia, I wouldn’t start from here

Envy is an easy way to install the right nVidia drivers for your machine. However, if you’ve already tried to install the drivers using nVidia’s own packages (as I had, back when I had a hybrid system), you need to find and delete these files. modprobe -l nvidia will tell you where they are: run envy -t and uninstall everything, then delete whatever’s remaining in, oh, something like /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-386/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.ko. Then reinstall the drivers with Envy. That should be enough.

Alsa is a known problem, to put it mildly

A comment on Ubuntu bug 131133 describes the Alsa codebase as “mercurial”. Apparently the snd_hda_intel support is fixed and broken on alternate releases, and Ubuntu High Command are doing all they can. In the interim there’s a workaround: method A worked just fine for me.

I’m terribly, terribly happy. K’s even happier, as now she’ll be able to prise me away from frequent driver recompilation messes.

Seriously: who among us is just itchy and fidgety, waiting for analogue TV signals to be switched off? Who wakes up of a morning thinking, ooh, Whitehaven have to buy Freeview boxes now! with a frisson of glee? Radio switchover would be even more disastrous, of course: whereas TVs normally have a gap between themselves and an aerial into which to insert a Freeview box and convert digital to analogue, most radios are monolithic: receiver, “decoder” and audio equipment all together. That means that the average of five radios per household would be simply landfill material, useless fizzing boxes capable of picking up nothing but static. Future generations will already find a sliver in the geological strata that they can classify as “analogue to digital”; FM switchoff would add a shiny, plasticky laminate to that layer.

Here’s a thought, though: how about a little digital-to-analogue converter for radio? It could be the size and construction of, say, a Fon, and configurable over USB. It would transmit FM in the style of an iTrip to fill perhaps the room it’s kept in, plus neighbouring rooms. It could transmit multiple FM stations at the same time, and even mimic the frequencies of the analogue stations (if they were ever, say, switched off without anyone wanting them to be: God forbid!)

But what if your converter’s chosen frequencies conflict with next door? FM transmission depends on phase coherence, so even if your two boxes were within an electronic ace of each other frequency-wise, they’d still interfere with each other and cause all sorts of beating, flangeing and other dirtily-named auditory confusion. At least when someone passes you on the motorway and their phat BMW iPod transmitter briefly swamps yours then they’re gone quickly, hopefully to come to some sort of messy grief on the next bend. But if you’re stuck near someone who permanently foxes your radio listening—and it would only take maybe three or four such converters for a conflict to be inevitable in the narrow FM band—then what do you do?

Answer: let the converter boxes know how to talk to each other. Let them negotiate their frequency spreads. Let them, moreover, report back to you over what sort of understandings you and your neighbour’s radios can come to. Let them synchronize, if possible, on stations you both want to listen to, strengthening the signal and meaning both of your houses are entirely covered by the FM cloud. Exploit, don’t squash, the wisdom of the group.

There’s lots of help out there, but most advice begins with unscrewing the laptop case, something I was unwilling to do owing to its youth. With hindsight I’ve been able to Google a similar suggestion to the method I followed, but at the time I wass just making small, non-destructive steps towards getting rid of the stickiness.

I started by, of course, switching off the laptop and removing the battery. The latter bit may or may not be important, but I was taking no chances. On this keyboard (yours may vary!) I found I could prise the keys off if I pull them either on their top or bottom edge: they have four plastic connections to the base, and removing them this way unclicks two connections at once. Pulling them up from the left or right would put stress on the connections opposite instead, and I’ve had key mountings break before doing that, so be warned. With the plastic head of the key removed, the board reveals the rubbery underlay nipples (say that out loud, I dare you) that each key squashes when it’s pressed down.

With my up-key nipple thus revealed (!) I found some cotton buds and a can of WD40. I sprayed the WD40 at the bud—not at the keyboard, as it can go everywhere—and then rubbed the sticky fizzy drink off the exposed internals with the bud. Two buds to clean and one to dry up the WD40, although WD40 shouldn’t do too much harm in small amounts: I think keyboards ship with a gentle frosting of some specially mixed lubricant anyway, so the WD40 was only replacing that. But still I dried off the nipple, replaced the key gently—again watching out for the four delicate plastic connections under the key—and superstitiously left it all to dry for a minute or two before reconnecting the battery and starting it up.

Now the key works just great. And in one fell swoop I’ve written a post that’s almost guaranteed to get hordes of entirely the wrong sort of visitors to my blog.

Bizarrely, if you open “Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager”, and click on “View > Show hidden devices,” then there’s a Non-Plug and Play Driver for a service called “Beep”. And, unlike most XP services, this one does exactly what it says. It beeps. And beeps. Whenever a system beep is needed, Beep is there, with its full-volume flava and rich, screeching aroma! Disable it and reboot, or do something more clever if you need to.

Below is a list of the main fixes and workarounds that Nick employed, for my reference as much as anything else.

Kernel

Gusty Gibbon kernel, headers etc. on a Feisty Fawn installation, mixed with apt-pinning; necessary to get the wireless to work.

Wireless

Bleeding-edge Intel wireless drivers were needed for the IPW 4965 chipset (they in turn need most recent kernel). Download the following:

• mac80211 8.x driver
• ipw4965 latest driver source
• ipw4965 latest firmware

The 4695 is a firmware-less card, so you need a copy of the firmware in /lib/firmware/: it gets automagically flashed to the card on boot.

Then, the nastier bit,

• install Gutsy kernel headers
• patch kernel headers for mac80211
• build ipw4965 module

Three lines, detailing so much pain. At least the kernel itself didn’t need recompiling.

Sound

Although ALSA is configured correctly, there’s some bug in the handling of this version of the 82801H chipset. I’m looking into it: there’s nothing more embarrassing than making your users choose between good networking and audio playback…!

Display

The most recent version of the linux-restricted-modules for Gutsy now makes this fix redundant, but initially we needed a bleeding-edge 100.14.09 version of the NVidia drivers to get the display working properly.

The hack to install that was originally accomplished by downloading a non-standard installer and crossing one’s fingers; it worked pretty well but the restricted modules kept trying to do their bit and had to be removed. If you’re sure you have a compatible, hacked-in NVidia module on your system but the restricted version keeps butting in, then sudo modprobe -r nvidia and then restarting X works: Xorg looks in the right place, whereas the kernel gets it wrong.

Edit (2.6.22-10): doesn’t seem to support 100.14.09, so back to the NVidia downloads again.

CDROM

There seems to be a recurring bug with the Linux kernel and SATA CDROM drives, frequently whacked but never fully squashed, that the Gutsy kernel has fallen prey to: my CD drive was not at /dev/scd0 by default. Running sudo lshw produced no details under “*-cdrom” There are a lot of solutions out there, but the one that seemed to work for me was to load the ide_cd module using modprobe.

This does seem to have put my CDROM at /dev/hda, which took a bit of finding, but at least as soon as I ran modprobe Sound Juicer spotted the audio CD in the drive. I’ve not yet tested CD writing, nor DVD writing, so I don’t know yet whether or not I actually need ide_scsi instead; Nick assures me that as most devices support ATAPI these days then the SCSI support shouldn’t be necessary.

Bluetooth

The Precision seems to have an internal USB bluetooth dongle! hcitool finds it with no trouble. I’ve not used it yet and might need to add hci_usb to /etc/modules.

Firewire/1394

As I don’t have any Firewire devices, I still have to have a poke around for this; might need the firewire host controller driver, or sbp2 (SCSI over firewire). Watch this space.

Because it’s a fairly new model (newer than I actually realised), Ubuntu is stretched rather thin on it, but it works really remarkably well without seriously irreversible hacks. Thanks to my co-worker and systems genius Nick I now have a kind of bleeding-edge combination of Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon running. This was necessary in order to use the similarly paint-still-wet v100.14.09 NVidia drivers to get the full 1680-pixel, widescreen resolution and TrueLife sweetness from the screen.

The experimental Ubuntu display tweaks also work pretty well, which makes the whole thing feel very Vista/OSX. When the switch between two of my four workspaces looked like the rotating of a cube across the screen for the first time, I almost wept. Linux oughtn’t to look this good. It was the same realisation that I had when I first opened a terminal in OSX, but in reverse: you can build good-looking, responsive interfaces on top of solid, well-built cores; patience can, in the end, produce far better results than compromise.

You can mix and match your own Ubuntu distributions far more easily than you’d imagine. apt is really a clever piece of software, and you can configure it via “pinning” to obey certain preference “policies”—these are configured in the file /etc/apt/preferences. Here’s my copy of that file:

# If no priority given for a package, it’s set to 500.
# So setting a lower priority than 500 deprecates a repository type
# Setting a higher priority preferences that repository type

# All packages - gutsy has low priority
Package: *
Pin: release a=gutsy
Pin-Priority: 200

# libc6 and libc6-dev - gutsy has higher priority than any other repository type
Package: libc6
Pin: release a=gutsy
Pin-Priority: 600
Package: libc6-dev
Pin: release a=gutsy
Pin-Priority: 600

# Kernel images begin linux-, so gutsy gets higher priority for those
Package: linux-*
Pin: release a=gutsy
Pin-Priority: 600

If you run apt-cache policy X then apt will tell you exactly what policy it will follow when prioritizing all possible candidates for package X.

Beautiful, really. Not perfect—I’ll put up a list of Nick’s necessary fixes shortly—but as far as coping with really quite new hardware goes, this was a triumph for open source. I just wish I’d waited till after Dell’s announcement to run Ubuntu-enabled laptops in Europe….

It’s been dying for a long time now. I originally bought it to write my thesis on back in 2002, spending most of an inheritance from my grandmother on the last of the 1.2GHz machines in the now defunct Dixons. A few months ago the keyboard developed the canonical HP Pavilion G-H-F4 problem, which I was able to correct by occasionally unscrewing the case and fiddling with cables. But now, every time I open it, the display shows a mess of unsync’ed blue lines and rubbish, hinting at the screen it ought to show, unless I have the laptop almost closed. Fiddling with cables doesn’t help, although as all the connectors warm up then I’m permitted to open the shell further and further.

Anyway, I’ve been watching Dell’s abortive open-source offerings (why would you scupper your own product ranges?) eagerly for a while now, waiting for a time when searching dell.co.uk doesn’t redirect me back to the .com site with American prices. I’ve also been sniffing round the now apparently defunct Ubuntu Boxes, which Sean McGrath spotted in his capacity as another avid OS-ready fan. But as nothing seems to be materialising any time soon to enable me to use the software and hardware combination I desire, it looks like I might have to roll my own.

What do people recommend in a laptop that will eventually have Linux on it? Is most hardware plug-and-go these days? What about X and a second monitor, which always seems to be problematic? Anything I should look out for? If all laptops are created evil, pardon, equal, then I may just go for Lenovo or Dell on green issues alone.

1. An iPod can be connected safely, via the Y-shaped cable that comes with a dock, to two generic power supplies at once. For instance, the Firewire cable can be plugged into a mains adapter, while the USB cable used to transfer files onto the iPod (and incidentally charge it).
2. However, this is no longer safe if one of the power supplies is reactive to what you connect to it e.g. a solar/mains-charged, third-party battery pack. In this case, if the pack spots an alternative power supply on the far side of the iPod, it will try to use it to recharge. This will be accomplished through the iPod, which will drain its battery so fast that the case becomes hot enough to fry an egg on.
3. When the computer at the other end of a USB connection is switched off, it no longer provides power to the iPod, so you only have to worry about currents running down the other connection.
4. However, this does not seem to be the case with the Firewire standard which, if the computer is connected to the mains, still seems to provide a large thump of power to the device. Or this might actually be a fault, owing to the age of the computer the iPod was connected to.

So, there you have it: if you use an iPod as a bridge between your solar charger of choice and the mains voltage, chances are it will nigh-on catch fire. It’s a rather long and drawn-out way of destroying the device, but it has a certain Goldfinger charm to its convolutions. Bring in an experimental death ray or a room that fills with poison gas in twenty seconds and you’re all set to be the next Bond villain.

In a sense I was lucky that my iPod was already showing the archetypal signs of pod wear, as it’s now turned into an unresponsive metal brick: this finally gives me the impetus to free myself from the tyranny of making-do. Anyway, I’m now looking for a new portable music player (money willing) if I can find a suitable device. It really has to be:

1. Longer-lasting than my iPod (hence Flash- rather than hard-driven?)—the greenness of the product is important for me, and I’d rather just not buy anything than buy a product with a two-year lifespan.
2. Compatible with Linux on some reasonable level. I hear that anything other than the iPod lets you drop files onto it as if it were a USB hard drive, but that might not be the case.
3. Probably not made by Apple. Between their environmental policy, their use of sweatshops, and their disdain for their customers, I’m heartily sick of Apple’s use of beautiful design to paper over their moral cracks. I hope to find a company that, while it might be just as badly behaved, doesn’t present its products as a choice of lifestyle or aesthetics.

If anyone has any suggestions then do let me know.

I think they currently provide, oh, some old version of Ubuntu on two of their billion computer models only in the US, and then only in states whose names begin with “K”. This might be a way to lever open the barriers placed around this potentially very popular market. You’ll have to move fast, though, as the petition closes on Friday March 23.

Do this for your potential customers, Dell. You could be part of a new revolution: after all, Tim O’Reilly says that Web 2.0 is all about putting the customer first. I bet that came as a bit of a shock to all those people in other industries, like the old Web 1.9, or cheese-making, or DIY superstores, who think their sector is about putting the customer first and it’s nothing to actually crow about. But banal marketing statements from industry sacred cows aside, this is a great chance for Dell and for their customers.

If Dell can give me a computer which categorically does not contribute to the statistics of how many users there are of Vista or XP, and which has a reasonable Linux version on it from day one, then I for one pledge to go out and buy one off them. They’ll have to be quick, though. Without choice, I’ll eventually lose patience and go for a cheaper option: any one of their competitors will do. I’ll have to swallow my pride and just buy and then discard an XP licence for zero pounds, but I’ll be buying it from them, dearest Dell: not you. Time’s a tickin’.

The sad iPod icon (SII). Usually accompanied by a generic, unhelpful apple.com URL, which just makes it all the more sad.

Unlike most people who see this, I didn’t seem to have the symptoms of major hardware failure (the disk making a repetitive ticking noise) that they diagnose before employing the rather hard-core fix discussed below.

I’d upgraded to the newest iTunes on the purple iMac we kick around as a “media centre”, and then plugged my iPod in, forgetting (who wouldn’t?) that Apple software upgrades invariably require several clicked agreements to their T&Cs. You click once when you start downloading it, once when you start installing it, once when you first use it after installation, once at the next full moon….

I watched, dismayed, as the iMac got horrendously confused, as it tried to start up handler software for the iPod that wanted a T&Cs agreement click but wasn’t showing the window; everything slowed, slowed, and then finally stopped. The iMac was mid-software-start; the iPod, more distressingly, was mid-transfer (and yelling “do not disconnect”). Taking a deep breath I pulled the power on the former, and watched the latter intently.

The iMac restarted fine, and I got into iTunes to click all the relevant boxes; the iPod, sadly, continued to show “do not disconnect” until I finally bit the bullet and took it out of its cradle. After this, it would show its Apple logo for a while before inevitably switching to the SII. Trying all the boot-time key combinations didn’t work: booting up in disk mode seemed successful until I connected the USB cable; and diagnostic mode checked everything out, except the hard-drive test which just hung.

By this point a note of despairing hysteria had crept into my frantic plugging and unplugging of devices into different laptops. I remembered something that a co-worker had pointed me to a few days ago, took a deep breath, and googled.

Now, there’s a way of fixing podlets that’s a recognized repair method (if only by the sinister, shadowy iPod underground rather than anyone who would need to disclaim the advice). It’s a bit extreme, and should only be attempted when the only other option is to inflict on yourself Apple’s massively inflated repair costs—I mean, as a last resort. Ready?

You drop it.

From at least several inches up.

Onto a hard surface.

Maybe when it’s switched off, maybe when it’s showing the Apple logo (advice differs on this detail, but frankly by this point it feels like splitting hairs on a big old smashy coconut).

Anyway, I think I’ve found the motherlode for this advice: the author of the fix-for-free article threw his dead iPod out of the window while testing a brand of protective case. Unfortunately, this only seems to fix iPods that are making “the sewing machine noise”. Mine certainly wasn’t: it was quite quietly dying each time I turned it on.

In the spirit of scientific enquiry, though, I gave the rather brutal repair method a whirl. Three inches or so above a wooden desk, and: drop.

The result? My iPod started… making a noise like a sewing machine! Oh, no! I’ve only made it worse, was the first thought that crossed my mind. But wait, I continued, as the inexorable mental PASCAL, that I employ to reason on my behalf at times of great stress, kicked in. My iPod is now… making the whirring noise… that lots of other people have fixed… by dropping it on a hard surface….

Could it be true? Had I put my iPod in a fixable state, by dropping it so as to forcibly break it? Hardly daring to breathe, I dropped it again.

…

I now have a fully-working iPod, which has behaved very happily since: iTunes on both my iMac and my laptop have talked to it quite convivially, and there’ve been no obvious problems.

That one can fix an iPod by dropping it isn’t news. But that one can fix it by dropping it twice, now: that’s news.

Exit gracefully: there is nothing graceful about Apple technology, on the rare occasions when it doesn’t work as a coherent whole. Nor is there anything graceful about whacking hardware on a desk. But if you can get your system to a state you recognise, even if that seems like a retrograde step, then sometimes you can end up fixing it by breaking it. Sometimes, of course, you can end up breaking it by breaking it. Trust in Allah, but tie up your iPod.