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.

Jaunty Upgrade After Effects © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

First off if you are having problems with a certain contest, then plugging the secret letters into the Internet Anagram Server could be very helpful.

I like RPGs and play in a couple now & then.  I have also run the occasional session or two, but lately I got this itch.  The itch to play in a campaign world of my own devising which means I’ll need to run more than a single session or two. In trying to prepare myself for that, I’ve been following some new blogs and today read the logical article I’ve ever seen on the subject of war & international relationals.

This week while staying home sick¹, I finally got around to upgrading my work laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10. I had been holding off mostly because it is my work machine and I had the idea I should keep it on Ubuntu’s LTS releases. Then I realized while I was keeping the system on a theoretically more stable version, I kept adding 3rd party packages/repositories to update specific programs I wanted (which contradicts the point of sticking with a LTS release). So I did the upgrade and was pleasantly surprised at how smooth the upgrade went. However I did run into one minor and one major problem after the upgrade.

• Minor problem: My dual monitor configuration got screwed up. Most likely because I did the upgrade at home (where I don’t have a 2nd monitor for the laptop).
• Major problem: All my SSH keys stopped working. I ended up recreating them and getting them pushed back out to all the servers I need to access using keys. Still that was disconcerting, especially since nothing about the keys (client/server) had changed. Even our network admin at work was confused by that one.

On the positive side, Adobe Flash Player 10.x is available for Ubuntu 8.10, so now I can watch Comedy Central’s clips of the Daily Show again (under Flash 9.x, they always crashed Firefox). Additionally there are prebuilt packages for Gnome-Do 0.8.x for Ubuntu 8.10, which like Mr. Pibb + Red Vines is crazy delicious! Specifically, Gnome-Do with the Docky theme. I believe the idea behind the Docky theme was to mimic some functionality of OS X’s dock, but could be mistaken (don’t own a Mac). The performance is bit slow on my older desktop², but it works great on the work laptop.

¹ Nausea + dizziness + complete lack of energy. Fortunately I’m mostly over it now, though still working to get my energy levels back up.
² Based on an AMD 1800+ CPU.

Lucky Day © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

The side effect of Nautilus working so poorly was I had time to do a little googling.  I’ve heard good things about the Hulu website for watching TV shows I’ve missed.  Thing i I hate sitting at my computer for long periods of time when I’ve got a comfy couch¹ and a much larger TV than computer monitor. So as I said, I started googling and looking for a XBMC/Hulu plugin and I did find one in the XBMC Forums.

Unfortunately the 0.2 release mentioned in the first post of that thread didn’t work so well for me and there were 38 pages in the thread.  I did some more searching and found an article over at LifeHacker.  The article seems to be talking about the same plugin but links to a newer release of it.  I kept looking to see if there were anything else out there and found what appears to be the main site for the plugin, xbmc-hulu.  That last site doesn’t provide a simple download, but you can use subversion to checkout the lastest copy of their plugin.

And that latest version is pure gold, which is to say I’ve not run into a single problem watching any videos via the plugin.  Now I can sit back on the couch and watch Colbert Report, The Daily Show and all sorts of other good stuff that I don’t get with my cable TV package.  If my sinuses clear up and this cold goes away, I could be really happy.

UPDATE: I appear to be getting quite a bit of traffic (for me anyway) on this post, so thanks for stopping by! Also I’ve finally read through the entire 40 pages (at the time of this writing) in the XBMC Forums thread about this plugin.  From reading that thread, there appears to be a lot of confusion on where/how to get the plugin to work.  So for the record, I’m running xbmc-hulu 1.0 (SVN copied checked out on 26 January 2009) on top of T3CH’s 2009-01-25 build of XBMC (rev17349) on an original XBox (softmodded using Mech Assault via ProductWiki’s instructions).

UPDATE: Per the XBMC-Hulu plugin release thread, there is no currently working version of the plugin.

¹ Someday I will have a comfy chair!

XBMC + Hulu = GOLD! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

When I got up this morning, it was still running but was hung up on a question I needed to answer. I clicked through the question and a few more before heading off to work. When I got home, again the upgrade was hung up on a question. I worked my way through answering all the questions and let the upgrader do its job. Unfortunately the upgrader eventually failed on these packages: gnome-applets-data, gnome-applets, ubuntu-desktop and update-manager. I clicked through the errors and then the upgrader said:

Could not install the upgrades
The upgrade aborts now. Your system could be in an unusable state. A recovery will run now (dpkg –configure –a).

I clicked ok to the error, something flashed up and then the upgrader died/vanished/went away. I tried running:

• sudo aptitude update but it sat there for far too long for my sleep deprived and impatient self.
• sudo aptitude upgrade, only it said there wasn’t anything to upgrade.
• sudo aptitude autoclean, *shrug* it's part of my standard script for updating my systems.
• sudo aptitude dist-upgrade, only it said there wasn’t anything to upgrade.
• sudo dpkg --configure -a, it said there were unconfigured packages but it couldn’t fix them automagically. It mostly complained about gnome-applets-data.

I ended up running sudo aptitude install gnome-applets-data gnome-applets ubuntu-desktop update-manager and that fixed up those errors no problem. For giggles of insanity I tried running sudo aptitude -s -f install to see what else might be left to update³. It found another 111 packages it wanted to remove but some of them I want to keep, so I’ll have to look into that more closely. Most likely all these errors were caused by my own foolishness, as at one point I was testing some stuff out on the machine and enabled some 3rd party repositories to install unsupported apps. *blech* I don’t think I’ll be doing that again. I was able to reboot the machine and connect to it via SSH and SMB, but HTTP seems to be broken at the moment. *bugger* Apache is one of the packages sudo aptitude -s -f install wanted to remove. I guess looking into that just got bumped up my priority list.

¹ An old Dell Dimension desktop with a PII-400 CPU and 256 MB of RAM.
² Never fear, Fritz (my desktop PC) is next on my list of machines to upgrade.
³ More accurately, I found some instructions when upgrading my desktop from Dapper to Gusty that recommended doing that to ensure all apps got updated.

Dapper to Hardy in 23 painful hours © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Then go download and install a proper OS, like Ubuntu.

HowTo: Install Windows Vista in 2 Minutes © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• ALSA & Crystal 4237B Revisited
• Configure ALSA for Crystal 4237B

Some other people out there in Internet land have reported the steps detailed in those posts as working for them. Some have reported that they don’t work. *shrug* My best guess as to why is I think the chip can be configured with a DOS/Windows utility to use different IRQs and what not. Or it could be some sort of difference in the kernel(s) people are using. Or something else entirely. I really don’t know for sure. Lastly I should note that when I last updated the kernel on my laptop to tot 2.6.12–10; the sound stopped working.

Ubuntu and the Crystal 4237B Soundchip © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Below, I’ve summarized everything I read and tried in getting this working:

1. Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add acpi=off to the end of the options for the kernel¹.
2. Install libsdl1.2debian-alsa via Synaptic.
3. Removed /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.
4. Created /etc/modprobe.d/alsa².
5. Added snd-cs4236 to the bottom of /etc/modules.

Mind you that summary leaves out dozens of pages of instructions, including the various diagnostics I ran to try figuring out what was wrong. Some of those diagnostics were:

• lspci -v — No help to me as my soundcard is connected via ISA and not PNP.
• lspnp -v — This would only detect my soundcard after I turned off acpi.
• dmesg | grep -i "isa\|multi\|sound\|audio" — This might give you more info about the soundcard, but didn’t help me.
• pnpdump — This might give you more info about the soundcard, but didn’t help me

Additionally, I ran across several recommendations for the options line in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa but the version of the file listed in the footnotes is the only one which worked for me.

Lastly, if you have this laptop there is a considerable amount of good information still available on Dell’s website for it. For example, apparently there is a Windows/DOS utility for configuring the IRQs and whatnot that the soundcard uses. Fortunately, I didn’t have to try downloading it and finding some way to run it but the option is there if you need it.

¹/boot/grub/menu.lst
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-9-386
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash acpi=off
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-9-386
savedefault
boot

²/etc/modprobe.d/alsa
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias snd-card-0 snd-cs4236
options snd-cs4236 port=0x530 cport=0x210 isapnp=0 dma1=1 dma2=0 irq=5
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-slot-1 snd-card-1

alias sound-service-0–0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0–1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0–3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0–8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0–12 snd-pcm-oss

alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss
alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss
alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss

options snd cards_limit=1

ALSA & Crystal 4237B Revisited © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

From Pukka:

• Jack Thompson whimps out and P.A. steps up to the plate.

Not from Pukka:

• Pumpkin Apple Bread
• Ubuntu No Sound Troubleshooting [Editor] I recently installed Ubuntu 5.10 on my ancient laptop and I plan to get KDE up & running on it. I’ve had problems before getting the sound to work with this laptop. So I’m making a note of this page as the Ubuntu forums link to it for help with sound issues.
• Backlink Checker [Editor] You can use this site to see who’s linking to you.
• Anti-game activist Jack Thompson under investigation
• Transparent aluminum [Editor] Makes you wonder if Scottie stopped by and gave ‘em a tip. :)
• Official Site for gDesklet Sensors & Displays [Editor] I recently wiped out my laptop and loaded the Ubuntu Breezy (5.10) on it. One of the things I added to it was gDesklets (KDE users should think SuperKaramba, Windows/Apple users should think Konfabulator).

Pukka’s Links of the Week © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

10 CSC0010 Crystal PnP audio system control registers
io 0x0210-0x0217

lsmod | grep snd
snd_opl3_lib 10112 0
snd_hwdep 9220 1 snd_opl3_lib
snd_cs4236_lib 16000 0
snd_mpu401_uart 7168 0
snd_rawmidi 22944 1 snd_mpu401_uart
snd_seq_device 8332 2 snd_opl3_lib,snd_rawmidi
snd_cs4231_lib 24832 1 snd_cs4236_lib
snd_pcm_oss 47652 0
snd_mixer_oss 16768 1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm 84872 3 snd_cs4236_lib,snd_cs4231_lib,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer 23300 3 snd_opl3_lib,snd_cs4231_lib,snd_pcm
snd 50276 11 snd_opl3_lib,snd_hwdep,snd_cs4236_lib,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device,snd_cs4231_lib,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer
soundcore 9824 1 snd
snd_page_alloc 9604 2 snd_cs4231_lib,snd_pc

cat /proc/asound/cards
--- no soundcards ---

alsamixer
alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device

modprobe snd-cs4236 snd_port=0x534 snd_cport=0x120 snd_mpu_port=-1 snd_fm_port=0x388 snd_jport=-1 snd_irq=5 snd_dma1=0
Error inserting snd_cs4236 (/lib/modules/2.6.10-5-386/kernel/sound/isa/cs423x/snd-cs4236.ko): No such device
FATAL: Error running install command for snd_cs4236

Update [15 May 2005. 7:57 PM –06:00 GMT]: I just realized that I left off some information that could be useful to diagnosing my sound problems. In the Gnome Multimedia Systems Selector, when I choose ALSA as the default output sink and hit the test button; I get this error:
Failed to construct test pipeline for 'ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture'

I’ve checked and my user is a member of the audio group, so I shouldn’t be having a rights problem.

Additionally, my laptop is a Dell Latitude CPi D300XT, see the complete specs here.

Configure ALSA for Crystal 4237B © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

One of the many lovely gifts that Ariesna and I received for our wedding was a Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G router.¹ Since a wireless router is useless without something to connect to it; I went out and picked up a Linksys WPC54GS Wireless-G Notebook Adapter. Since I was still kind of dazed from the whole wedding/honey-night experience; I didn’t stop to check whether the router had SpeedBooster and if I could get the card online for much cheaper than I could in the store.² I had cash in my pocket and techno-lust burning in my heart. I bought the card, took it home and immediately started mucking about with my laptop to try to get it to work. In a previous fit of whimsey, I had wiped M$ Windows from my laptop and replaced it with SuSE 9.0 Pro. Since APT is such a wonderful thing, I used it to keep SuSE updated; rather I used it to update SuSE on the laptop whenever I booted it up to use it. So the first thing I tried doing in my quest to get wireless networking running on my laptop was to run APT and grab all the latest stuff for SuSE 9.0.

For the first time ever, APT let me down and in doing so it let me down badly. Something in my xserver configuration (or maybe the startup scripts) got hosed. I fiddled with it for a couple of days, but had no luck in correcting the problem. I could work around it, but not fix it. Once I got to that point, I tried to load some missing software I needed to get the wireless card to work, but the software was not listed in the APT repositories I was using. This is especially problematic as the CD-ROM in this laptop tends to be very flakey, so I couldn’t hope to go back to my original CDs and load it from there. In the meantime, I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu (Hoary 5.04). I did this planning on borrowing the modular CD-ROM drive of a co-worker with the same ancient Dell laptop to replace SuSE on my laptop (if all else failed). Tonight, I was home alone and annoyed that I still didn’t have my wireless network up & running. So I ran over to Best Buy, picked up a spindle of CD-Rs, burned Ubuntu to disc and tried installing it.

Much to my utter amazement and total surprise, my laptop decided that it liked this burned CD and allowed me to install Ubuntu without error. It took several hours to do it, but eventually I was looking at an incredibly ugly Ubuntu desktop. This struck me as odd, but then I realized it was displaying at 800x600 when my laptop’s native resolution is 1024x768. So a bit of googling later and a quick run of: sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and I was looking at the very pretty version of Ubuntu’s desktop. About an hour later, after following these directions in the NdisWrapper wiki, and I have wireless networking running on my laptop. Now I just need to look into a 2nd battery for the laptop so I can have be a bit further away from the wall socket than my power cord lets me go. Still, it’s so very nice not having to sit in my lousy desk chair to do some work on the computer. It’ll be even nicer when I can put the funds together to build a MythTV box for the living room to watch all my anime with. :)

Updated 2005-05-27, 19:55 GMT-06:00: I noticed a typo in the dpkg-reconfigure command above, so I’ve edited this post to correct it.

¹ Yes, I do realize that considering this a lovely gift puts me completely and forever in the “geek” category,
² The answers to those questions were: No and Yes.

Sweet, Sweet Wireless Internet © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.