Showing posts with label Karmic Koala. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karmic Koala. Show all posts

Friday, May 7, 2010

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx and the fixes

So here comes Lucid Lynx, an LTS (Long Time Support) version of Ubuntu after two years, giving so much of expectations. I can see many whistles such as the new theme which tries to wrap Ubuntu in a non-geeky cover, specially the shift from brown to purple. Twitter integration, UbuntuOne, Mac like theme, which still seem whistles to a user, unless he is literally a kid which can rarely be the case for a Linux user. Ubuntu 10.04 was released on 30th of April, with the code name Lucid Lynx. This has become the long time support version of Ubuntu after Ubuntu 8.04, known as Hardy Heron, making a huge expectation from the user base.

I did upgrade my operating system from Ubuntu 9.10. The upgrade had introduced me few bugs, which I have fixed without much difficulty. As there are many users out there facing similar issues, work arounds for many of the bugs can be found online, and that's the biggest supportive force behind Ubuntu, as well as the other FOSS projects, I would say.

Let me share few of the issues I had to fix after the upgrade.

After the upload, when each time the computer started, this annoying error was thrown. "An error occurred while mounting /proc/bus/usb. Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery." I realized this was due to a usb fix I did for Virtualbox for Ubunut Karmic Koala which is no more required after the upgrade to Lucid. To fix this, in terminal,
sudo vim /etc/fstab
Removing the line we had added from the file, "none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devig=123,devmod=664 0 0" from the fstab fixed this issue, according to the Ubuntu Community's help page for Virtualbox/USB.

"The panel encountered a problem while loading "OAFIID:Deskbar_Applet". Do you want to delete the applet from your configuration?", an error message was thrown immediately after the upgrade. I deleted it, and it seems I didn't lose any deskbar applets at all.

An annoying bug that I had to fix was, "Desktop effects could not be enabled.", where I was unable to go for the 'Normal' and 'Extra' visual effects from the 'None'. That obviously was due to an error in the graphics card driver, I felt. Command lspci shows the PCI buses and the devices, where we can get the details of the graphics controller installed, where mine was
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07).
This had many workarounds on the web. Anyway I found the reason for the issue as well as a nice fix here, which finally made my Lucid free from the annoying bugs introduced during the upgrade.
sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-intel libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
sudo update-alternatives --remove gl_conf /usr/lib/nvidia-current/ld.so.conf


Though the new purplish Mac-like theme got a huge attention, as I was already using Mac4Lin theme, this new enhancements to the look n feel failed to impress me, as I felt Mac4Lin still leads!

The first software that I tried after the upgrade was, Zekr - A Qur'an Study Tool, which obviously is a cool tool for the Muslim brethren, as I see. As the final note, I really feel that I shouldn't go for 'Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat', which will be released this October. The reason simply is, I am not ready to spend days for downloading the upgrade files of 4 GB and fixing bugs to move from an LTS version to just a normal version.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

libxml2 and ubuntu upgrade

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 from 9.04, Abiword cross-building failed with the below error message at libxml2. Uninstalled libxml2 that installed from the channel and reinstalled a later version from here. Issue is fixed!


make[6]: Nothing to be done for `all'.
make[6]: Leaving directory `/home/pradeeban/abiword/src/af/util/xp/t'
make[6]: Entering directory `/home/pradeeban/abiword/src/af/util/xp'
../../../../doltcompile /usr/bin/i586-mingw32msvc-c++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I../../../..  -mthreads -I/usr/include/fribidi -I/opt/win32/include/glib-2.0 -I/opt/win32/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/opt/win32/include/libgsf-1 -I/usr/include/libxml2 -I/opt/win32/include/wv -I/usr/include/libgsf-1 -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/opt/win32/include/enchant   -I../../../.. -I../../../../goffice-bits -I../../../../src/af/ev/win -I../../../../src/af/ev/xp -I../../../../src/af/gr/win -I../../../../src/af/gr/xp -I../../../../src/af/util/win -I../../../../src/af/util/xp -I../../../../src/af/xap/win -I../../../../src/af/xap/xp -I/opt/win32/include -Wall -Wextra -Wsign-compare -Wpointer-arith -Wchar-subscripts -Wwrite-strings -Wmissing-noreturn -Wunused -Wpointer-arith  -g -O2 -MT ut_html.lo -MD -MP -MF .deps/ut_html.Tpo -c -o ut_html.lo ut_html.cpp
In file included from /usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:18,
                 from ut_html.cpp:36:
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:80: error: external linkage required for symbol ‘xmlIsBaseCharGroup’ because of ‘dllexport’ attribute
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:80: error: uninitialized const ‘xmlIsBaseCharGroup’
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:124: error: external linkage required for symbol ‘xmlIsCharGroup’ because of ‘dllexport’ attribute
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:124: error: uninitialized const ‘xmlIsCharGroup’
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:136: error: external linkage required for symbol ‘xmlIsCombiningGroup’ because of ‘dllexport’ attribute
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:136: error: uninitialized const ‘xmlIsCombiningGroup’
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:156: error: external linkage required for symbol ‘xmlIsDigitGroup’ because of ‘dllexport’ attribute
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:156: error: uninitialized const ‘xmlIsDigitGroup’
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:176: error: external linkage required for symbol ‘xmlIsExtenderGroup’ because of ‘dllexport’ attribute
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:176: error: uninitialized const ‘xmlIsExtenderGroup’
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:190: error: external linkage required for symbol ‘xmlIsIdeographicGroup’ because of ‘dllexport’ attribute
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:190: error: uninitialized const ‘xmlIsIdeographicGroup’
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:191: error: external linkage required for symbol ‘xmlIsPubidChar_tab’ because of ‘dllexport’ attribute
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/chvalid.h:191: error: uninitialized const ‘xmlIsPubidChar_tab’
In file included from ut_html.cpp:36:
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:279: error: external linkage required for symbol ‘xmlStringText’ because of ‘dllexport’ attribute
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:279: error: uninitialized const ‘xmlStringText’
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:279: error: storage size of ‘xmlStringText’ isn't known
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:280: error: external linkage required for symbol ‘xmlStringTextNoenc’ because of ‘dllexport’ attribute
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:280: error: uninitialized const ‘xmlStringTextNoenc’
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:280: error: storage size of ‘xmlStringTextNoenc’ isn't known
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:281: error: external linkage required for symbol ‘xmlStringComment’ because of ‘dllexport’ attribute
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:281: error: uninitialized const ‘xmlStringComment’
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:281: error: storage size of ‘xmlStringComment’ isn't known
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:279: warning: ‘xmlStringText’ defined but not used
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:280: warning: ‘xmlStringTextNoenc’ defined but not used
/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/parserInternals.h:281: warning: ‘xmlStringComment’ defined but not used
make[6]: *** [ut_html.lo] Error 1
make[6]: Leaving directory `/home/pradeeban/abiword/src/af/util/xp'
make[5]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[5]: Leaving directory `/home/pradeeban/abiword/src/af/util/xp'
make[4]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[4]: Leaving directory `/home/pradeeban/abiword/src/af/util'
make[3]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/pradeeban/abiword/src/af'
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/pradeeban/abiword/src'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/pradeeban/abiword'
make: *** [all] Error 2

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Log in Screen Issue - Ubuntu

Last night I was working with some Localized applications in Tamil Language in Ubuntu 9.04.
For that I had changed my keyboard settings to ta-IN using System > Preferences > Keyboard, and choose Tamil India. For the first time, I forgot to switch back to the English Keyboard before I log out.

Today, at the log in screen, I tried to enter my user name. To my bad, it was entering Tamil characters, which made logging in impossible. I changed the language there at the log-in screen, but it just changed the log-in screen interface language, not the input language.

I tried to recover using CD, and failed. Similarly when I tried to go to the console using Alt+Ctrl+F1, still the keyboard input to the username field must have been in Tamil, thus giving diamonds instead of the letters. Finally in the Grub, I choose somewhat earlier version of gnome-terminal before the update to the later Ubuntu version, as the log in option, where I was unable to log in, yet still able to log in using the console (Alt+Ctrl+F1), as the keyboard was still EN-US there.

Then after some serious examination of the web and bugging my pals, I found the solution.
In /etc/default/console-setup
I found the two parameters were set to refer to India and Tamil.

sudo vi /etc/default/console-setup

I modified them to refer to EN-US.
XKBLAYOUT = "us"
XKBVARIANT = "en"

After saving the console-setup file, I restarted the computer. Then I was able to type in EN-US, and I successfully logged in.

Now I will make sure my keyboard settings is not Tamil or Arabic before I log out, to prevent this issue repeating again. Seems sticking to EN is mostly the safe.

[Update as on Nov 2009]
Since Ubuntu Karmic Koala has the input language and keyboard as a setting option in the log in window itself, it seems this issue has been fixed for Karmic Koala.