Gateway M275 with Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04.1)

[ScottHW]

Wow, I feel kinda bad not keeping up on my own thread; especially now that there are a couple other posting here!

Here are two new things I just found out:

I had previously mentioned that I was having microphone troubles. I played around with alsamixer endlessly. And just today realized that the problem is actually hardware.

When I rotate the screen around about half way, I could hear something going on. On a whim, I blew on the microphone, and sure enough since I had it on Mic playback, I heard wind noises.

So apparently my Mic problems are largely just the wires that are running down thru the screen-rotating hinge. Troublesome.

Here's the real kicker; while messing around with alsamixer, I seem to have somehow set my Fn+PgUp / Fn+PgDn volume controls to control the Mic levels....?!?! And now, as I don't know how that happened, I don't know how to set it back to Master.

It's been a while since I've updated this thread, mostly because the first posts got me to a functioning Ubuntu status. I'll go back and clean some stuff up. Happy Heron, everyone!

[newfangled]

Scott, your first couple of posts got me a functioning ubuntu, so thanks again.

I did just discover a new problem though - I can't read burnt DVD disks. Commercial disks work fine, and I know that the drive can read burnt disks because that's how I installed ubuntu. But within ubuntu if I try to open a homemade disk I get "unable to mount location - no media in the drive"

It doesn't seem to work with any of my data DVD: +/-/DL, or whatever.

From searching around a bit, I think it's related to the Vista's UDF formatting, but I'm not sure.

Anyone else have this problem, or know of a fix?

edited to add: actually, looking at them again, most of them are in ISO format instead of UDF, and they were burned under either Vista or XP. So I have no idea what the issue is. The drive chugs a bit when the disk is first inserted, but eventually gives up.

[ScottHW]

New attempts

I've discovered Audacity. It's excellent. I have it on my WinXP desktop, and now on the M275, too.

I am also increasing my Skype usage of late.

It goes without saying that I would try to record Skype conversations with Audacity.
Nothing doing.

I tried PulseAudio, as described here,
http://sugree.com/node/286
But even just launching Audacity and trying to record and playback caused Audacity to crash.

[ScottHW]

Now I'm getting Skype working.

I have Skype for Debian 2.0.0.72

Sadly, Skype for Linux isn't OSS, and is quite far behind in development. Thus, it doesn't allow common Skype features like SMS.

BUT.....
megamania was looking for the same in this thread

A way to send sms with skype for linux!
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=683129

Short version:

1. You need python-gtk2
2. Get Skype4Py 1.0.31.0 from: https://developer.skype.com/wiki/Skype4Py
3. Get Skysentials 1.0.1 from: http://www.kolmann.at/philipp/linux/skysentials/

I just put extracted skysentials into a folder, and made a Launcher for skysentials.py on my top panel.

Also, I spent 90 seconds and put together the attached icon, with the clever name skypython (a quick GSearch suggests it's actually an original name, w00t!)
I'll whip a better version in a few days.

[ScottHW]

Tonight I decided to check out some webcasting clients, starting with Podracer. But Synaptic Package Manager only made it part way thru the install. Turns out my root partition was all filled up.

Here's a helpful command I learned:

 df -h

From the manpage

NAME
df - report filesystem disk space usage
SYNOPSIS
df [OPTION]... [FILE]...
..
-h, --human-readable
print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

(if you want to spruce up your df a little bit, check out discus)

Apparently the 4GB I thought would be enough for root, wasn't.

There are dozens of references everywhere about this, so I'll just summarize. To resize partitions, a great way to go is gparded. But you can't do anything to active partitions. So, simply use a Live CD (I just grabbed my Ubuntu 8.04 install CD), shutdown and boot to a Live Session.

The only other thing I had to do was Swapoff on my swap partition, so that I could modify it's position. There is a key icon next to the swap partition (indicating it's "locked" I guess) so just right-click on the /swap partition and choose the Swapoff option.

I just decreased the size of /home (/dev/sda3), and shifted it along with /swap (/dev/sda2) to the right. Then used the extra 4GB to expand the size of root / (/dev/sda1). Worked like a charm.

Last thing, I had to finish up the package installs that got interrupted by the lack of space

sudo dpkg --configure -a

[ScottHW]

Here's another one that is referenced al lover the interblags, but I found it useful.

To set a keyboard shortcut / hotkey to open a new Terminal console:

System>Preferences>Keyboard Shortcuts

Scroll down, second section is Desktop, last option is

Run a terminal

Click on the right side, under the Shortcut column, which likely says "Disabled". Press the keystroke combo you want to use. I choose Ctrl+Alt+T (for Terminal)

Actually, this may be, or have been, useful for my Volume Keys problem. Can't remember if I posted about it earlier, but somehow I mapped my Fn+PgUp to control the volume of something else in the mixer, NOT the Playback>Master volume. But it is fixed now, and I don't remember changing anything... could have been me messing around with the ALSA mixer so much...

[ScottHW]

So as mentioned above I'm looking into some podcasting. As referred from the Juice page, I thought I'd try IcePodder.

I've had quite some trouble getting it going. First, there are a bunch of other packages necessary, python-this and python-that. And not all of them were in the standard Ubuntu repositories. But I thought I had them all in.

Here's the problem that I came across

-@-:/usr/share/icepodder$ ./CastPodder.sh
CastPodderGui.py:48: DeprecationWarning: The wxPython compatibility package is no longer automatically generated or actively maintained.  Please switch to the wx package as soon as possible.
  from   wxPython.wx import *
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "CastPodderGui.py", line 48, in <module>
    from   wxPython.wx import *
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/wx-2.8-gtk2-unicode/wxPython/__init__.py", line 15, in <module>
    import _wx
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/wx-2.8-gtk2-unicode/wxPython/_wx.py", line 8, in <module>
    from _misc import *
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/wx-2.8-gtk2-unicode/wxPython/_misc.py", line 456, in <module>
    wxDateTime_GetNumberOfDaysinYear = wx._misc.DateTime_GetNumberOfDaysinYear
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'DateTime_GetNumberOfDaysinYear'

Yah. No idea what was going on there. But some Googling for a couple of those strings led me to this helpful page
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-607186.html
Basically, the problem is that I had chosen the newest version, python-wxgtk2.8. And that's the problem. Apparently there are some conflicts between IcePodder and wxgtk2.8. So I downgraded to python-wxgtk2.6

sudo apt-get purge python-wxgtk2.8
sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.6

Note: you may or may not have other things that depend on wxgtk2.8. I know that one of the forums I read mentioned that possibly Audacity needs 2.8.

Anyway, now it seems to work fine.

Well, aside from this

-@-:/usr/share/icepodder$ ./CastPodder.sh
xmms couldn't be imported
Beep-Media-Player couldn't be imported

But at least IcePodder GUI starts up. So I'm not too worried about that player stuff now.

[ScottHW]

This is a follow-up to Post #35 Gparted.

Basically, the repartitioning did work.

BUT... I have started to notice a slight change in my boot behavior. In my /boot/grub/menu.lst I have commented out #quiet splash at the end of my kernel line, and the #quiet on the last line (of that segment) as well.

I used to get

1. BIOS splash
2. GRUB 1 second delay
3. Terminal-looking timestamps and commands (~10 seconds)
4. Ubuntu logo splash, commands underneath in Orange
5. Gnome login screen

But lately, after the Ubuntu splash, it's been going back to Terminal-looking commands, starting with "kjournald starting".
Also, I noticed there has been significant delay at "Waiting for resume device..."
I started trying to think how I could back-track my actions and see what I had done to precipitate the change. Since I previously installed bootchart, I looked back to see if I could spot a change in the logs (/var/log/bootchart/). Sure enough, about 8 days ago, I started seeing around a 10 second delay for something listed as "resume". I also recognized that the 10 seconds on my wristwatch (figuratively, I don't wear a watch) did NOT correspond to the timestamp times during the boot sequence, so the "Waiting..." delay was actually hanging things up pretty seriously.
Fortunately, I didn't have to try very much Ubuntu-forensics, because I don't know what else I would have tried. I realized from bootchart and my own (highly fragmented) memory that this must have been when I repartitioned.
Here's the first useful thread I found

Boot time-'waiting for resume device'
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1056474

It does have basically the "answer"... but I didn't quite get there from that alone. Since I had just been messing with partitions, this seemed a likely possibility.

Short version: Check that UUID for swap matches in:

sudo blkid                 #gives the UUID of each device, this is the "correct" one
sudo gedit /etc/fstab          # these may be incorrect
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst    # may be wrong as well

So, I backed up fstab, and changed the UUID of /dev/sda2/ my swap partition.
My Grub menu.lst didn't have any references to my swap drive, noting to edit there.
Reboot, but that didn't seem to have fixed it.

Here I got a little side-tracked. Since this was basically a boot delay, I remembered that I had done "something" a while ago to try to speed up my boot. What was that...?

TIP: Improve bootup speed by reprofiling bootup
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=254263

I did try to reprofile again. One note there, since I have already commented out the end of my kernel line in Grub, I had to make sure to add profile before #quiet splash at the end of the line. Let it run, but that didn't really do anything for me.

I remembered that I had marked "Swapoff" in Gparted when I was repartitioning, and thought maybe that might have inadvertently done something since I hadn't actually read to do that anywhere. Of course, you have to do that to resize/move the swap partition.
From System Monitor>Resources [tab] I confirmed that I did have 1.9GiB of swap. I used Gparted, did "swapoff" on /dev/sda2 and System Monitor confirmed 0.0 GiB swap.
Reboot, nothing. Swap just came back on by itself. This was always a long-shot idea anyway.

Now, we do get to the solution.

[all variants] System hangs on "waiting for resume device" during boot
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=888424

(IMHO, and no offense meant, but I would disregard what fabian.r says in Post #4.)

It's a short discussion, but does link to what is apparently a well-known bug.

Bug #206358 in initramfs-tools (Ubuntu): “Slow boot process on "waiting for resume device
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ls/+bug/206358

I guess this particular thread doesn't make it as obvious, but I know I saw it in other places [citation needed :] Frequently when Gparted is used to resize or move a swap partition, the UUID isn't recopied correctly into the necessary locations. Two are listed above, the third is /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume

I made a backup of this file, and changed the UUID to match what blkid showed. Last step, to update the "initial RAM filesystem"

update-initramfs -u

Rebooted. Still nothing.

From the ubuntuforums "system hangs" thread above, Theo148 pointed me to the answer on this one. He had a file called resume-old in his ../resume directory somehow, but I had intentionally created a back-up file in this directory. That was a mistake. Moved the .bak, rebooted...

SUCCESS!!!

"Waiting for resume device..." delay is gone, and boot behavior has gone back to matching what is described in the beginning.


Disclaimer: I hope that no one minds too terribly that I use this thread as something of a blog. Particularly since I got very wordy in this post. I know forums are supposed to be for discussion, but if I write all of my experiences, and it helps somebody google and land here to help them solve a problem, it's worth it.

[ScottHW]

updates soon

[ScottHW]

fractals, yah!