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Jaunty Upgrade After Effects

Posted by Mark | Filed under Computers, Software

Being some­thing of a linux/technology geek and with the recent-ish release of Ubuntu 9.04, I decided to upgrade my home desk­top PC from Ubuntu 8.10.  Like the last time I ran through the upgrade, I was sur­prised at how smooth the upgrade process went.  Unfor­tu­nately 2 new prob­lems appeared after the upgrade was com­plete, with once again one prob­lem being rather minor and the other one being much bigger.

First up the minor prob­lem, after reboot­ing into the new hot­ness of Ubuntu 9.04, I was greeted with a pop-up windo telling me “There was an error while per­form­ing index­ing : Index cor­rupted.” The pop-up gave 3 options: “Ok”, “Can­cel” or “Rein­dex all con­tents”. I tried all 3 but the pop-up kept com­ing back even after mul­ti­ple reboots. The only thing I could ini­tiall fig­ure out to do was to kill the tracker
ps -ef | grep tracker
kill -9 XXXX XXXX XXXX

Yes, I know that’s prob­a­bly a hor­ri­ble idea but I rarely use the tracker’s search on my home PC so pbbb­h­h­h­httt! A quick Google search later, I found a bug report on Launch­Pad about it under which I found these instruc­tions:
sudo aptitude install tracker-utils
tracker-processes -r

I appar­ently already had the tracker-utils  installed, so the first didn’t do any­thing for me. The sec­ond com­mand above how­ever shut­down the tracker and removed the indexes, so the tracker was able to recre­ate them cleanly. Since run­ning those com­mands, the pop-up hasn’t come back.

Now on to the fun with the major prob­lem. This was a case of net­work fail­ure, specif­i­cally wire­less net­work fail­ure. While this is a desk­top PC, I live in an old house with­out net­work cabling and my PC sits too far away from the ideal loca­tion for the router to run a cable. So I have a D-Link PCI wire­less NIC in my desk­top.  The NIC is based on the Ath­eros AR5413 chipset, Net­work per­for­mance has never been as good as a wired con­nec­tion but it had been accept­able until this upgrade to 9.04 when the wire­less stopped working.

I had been using ndis­wrap­per to load the win­dows dri­ver for the card but that sud­denly stopped work­ing. I could see all the wire­less net­works in my neigh­bor­hood, but couldn’t con­nect to any of them (either net­works secured with WPA or wide open ones). I started doing some research into the prob­lem using other com­put­ers with work­ing inter­net con­nec­tions. I found that my router was get­ting black­listed while my desk­top was try­ing to con­nect and then it would time­out with­out ever mak­ing a net­work connection.

Also while research­ing the prob­lem, I found out that there was now a new, open source dri­ver which should be work­ing with my wire­less NIC (ath5k).  So I removed ndis­wrap­per, and tried out this new dri­ver. Alas it wans’t par­tic­u­larly sta­ble, drop­ping con­nec­tion ever cou­ple of min­utes. How­ever since my wire­less NIC uses an Ath­eros based chipset, I had another option. I installed the mad­wifi dri­ver via jockey-gtk (Ubuntu’s tool for installing restricted modules/drivers).  For what­ever rea­son, acti­vat­ing the dri­ver via jockey-gtk didn’t actu­ally get it up and run­ning. To test it, I used:

sudo modprobe ath_pci

To actu­ally get the dri­ver to load on every boot, I edited my /etc/modules file to include ath_pci.

The mad­wifi dri­ver doesn’t appear to make as strong a con­nec­tion as the ath5k did; the gnome net­work man­ager applet shows the con­nec­tion under mad­wifi usu­ally has ~45–55% sig­nal strength (under ath5k & ndis­wrap­per I could get as high as 70%). How­ever I’ve yet to lose a con­nec­tion to my net­work while using the mad­wifi wrap­per whereas ath5k would drop con­nec­tion every cou­ple of min­utes and ndis­wrap­per would usu­ally drop the con­nec­tion at least once an hour (back on Ubuntu 8.10 where it actu­ally worked for me). Also the mad­wifi dri­ver allows me to con­nect to my net­work on boot-up; unlike ndis­wrap­per which always took some time to con­nect after I was booted up and signed in. So over­all, I’m pleased with my new net­work­ing setup but would have been more pleased if the changes I made could have been done automag­i­cally by the upgrade process or if the upgrade process at least warned me that it might break my net­work­ing setup.

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