Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

While reading a PDF, I noticed GKrellM was showing disk activity. I was curious to know what was causing that. Googling “top for disk access” turned up IoTop. Conveniently, this is in the Ubuntu repositories. I installed it with Syntaptic and ran it with sudo iotop. To make it easier to see what’s continually using the disk, press “a” to switch the display to accumulated access.

The disk access was from Galleon, the TiVo media server. I didn’t remember having it running and wasn’t using it, so I turned it off with sudo service galleon stop and disabled it with sudo update-rc.d -f galleon remove, which is the Ubuntu equivalent of chkconfig.

The disk usage went down, but was still going. Next, I saw activity with rsyslogd. In /var/log, the most recently written logs were user.log, syslog and debug. Looking at these showed the rotten Lexmark printer driver at work. It periodically scans for scanners and fills these logs up with debug messages. The last time I called Lexmark about it, they said they couldn’t do anything about it. That was about a year and a half ago. Looks like it’s time to look into that again. That’s another thing for “the list”.

There’s another thing accessing disk, and that’s jdb2, which is part of the journaling file system. I found a post about HAL causing this. This will also go on the list.

Note, this isn’t the most direct way to update, it’s only the path I followed.

1. Start ROM Manager
2. Boot into recovery
3. Select Backup and Restore, then Backup
4. Copy the backup to your computer
5. Download a CyanogenMod 10.1 M release (I used M3)
6. Run adb push cm-10.1-20130411-EXPERIMENTAL-toro-M3.zip /sdcard/.
7. On the phone, select “wipe cache”
8. On the phone, select “install zip from sdcard”, “choose zip from sdcard”, select update.zip above.
9. Reboot. Don’t freak out when your WiFi or Mobile connection indicators don’t turn blue. Until the Google apps are updated below, your phone won’t be able to connect to the Google servers.
10. Check your mobile network setting (I didn’t need to change this.)
11. Fix the clock
12. Download the updated Google applications
13. Reboot into recovery
14. Run adb push gapps-jb-20130301-signed.zip /sdcard/0/. (Note the path is different for Android 4.2!)
15. Load with “install zip from sdcard” as above
16. Wipe the cache
17. Reboot. Until you reinstall Gmail and Sound Search, you’ll get occasional messages they’ve crashed. That’s OK.
18. Sign in to Google. If you have 2-step authentication enabled, enter an application specific password.
19. Using Google Play, uninstall and reinstall Gmail and Sound Search. Although I didn’t see this documented, I also had to reinstall Amazon Mobile, Chrome, Google Play Music, Google Voice, ROM Manager and YouTube. I ended up going through the apps list one by one to check everything.

The whole process took about three hours including the usual household interruptions and a 45 minute wait to download GApps.

As I mentioned, I took about 1,200 photos in Israel. Since these are family vacation photographs, I collaborate with my wife to decide which ones get posted to Gallery on Family Tidings. 1,200 photographs is a lot of decisions. Luckily, Gallery has some tools to help.

First, I create an album for the pictures and make it hidden. Then I take all the candidate photos and upload them to the album. At this point, I can log in and rate them from one to five stars. My wife does the same from her account. After this is done, I keep the ones that have at least three stars. To do this, create an album called “extras” under the subject album. Mark it hidden on the General tab and exclude it from display in the image block on the Album tab. Edit the subject album and change the sort order to “rating”, descending. Back in the album, find the first photograph rated two or lower and from its menu, select “Move photo”. Select all the photographs after that, but make sure you don’t include the new “extras” album. For the Destination, choose the “extras” album under the subject album and select “move”. Select the subject album, choose Edit Album and set the sort order back to “default” and remove the hidden attribute.

I just got back from Israel and have about 1,200 pictures with an EST (UTC-5) timestamp that should have an IST (UTC+2) timestamp because I forgot to change my camera’s time. There’s a utility called ExifTool that can read and write the Exif (Exchangeable Image File) format embedded in the Canon Raw images with CR2 extensions. It’s available on Ubuntu in the libimage-exiftool-perl package. To change the dates, run
exiftool -AllDates+=HH:MM FILES.CR2.
In my case, my camera’s clock was 16 minutes fast and I had to shift the time ahead by seven hours, so I used
exiftool -AllDates+=6:44 *.CR2

This renamed each file to file.CR2_original and replaced the original with the updated Exif data. Unfortunately, the new file has the current modification time. I should have used the -P option. To fix this, I ran (in Bash):
for FILE in *.CR2; do touch -r ${FILE}_original ${FILE}; done

Alternately, I could have had Exiftool not rename the originals, but put the updated copies in another directory:
exiftool -P -AllDates+=6:44 -o ../from-camera-with-corrected-times *.CR2

After having the DS411+II for over a year, I updated the DSM version. It was version 3.x and now it’s 4.x. The new version has better support for packages, sort of like the Google Play store. This is really nice, but I can’t use it because I’m in a limbo state right now, as I have a mix of old third party packages and source installs. These are all related to Sickbeard and SABnzbd. SAB is recognized by the package manager as installed, but Sickbeard isn’t because it’s a source install.
There’s a new third party package repository called Synocommunity that contains these packages. I added that repository, but don’t want to upgrade Sickbeard until I’m confident I can migrate my configuration without hosing it.
The version I have of Sickbeard is the alpha master from Github. For some months, it has had a bug that prevents it from updating. The first thing I need to do is fix that and get Sickbeard up to a recent version.
Step one: Find the Sickbeard installation. The Sickbeard installation page has a link to a Synology forum post that links to a manual Synology installation post.
I SSH’d into the NAS as admin and ran find / -type d | grep -i sickbeard. The source tree is in /volume1/opt/share/sickbeard. I changed to that directory and ran git status. This showed I have no changes in my local repository and should be able to update manually with git pull, so I did and I got “error: cannot open .git/FETCH_HEAD: Permission denied”. The file exists and is readable, but only writable by root. I logged back in as root and ran git pull, but git wasn’t found. I added /opt/bin to the PATH and ran the pull again. This time it connected to the remote repository, but failed because it couldn’t find tr, which is in /volume1/@appstore/baseutils/utils/bin. I added that to the PATH and reran. Now the pull worked. I restarted Sickbeard and it’s now fine and the version check works.

Boon is a dual boot desktop machine with an old, mostly unused copy of XP in one partition and a LVM of rotating Linux distributions, currently Ubuntu 10.04. This machine is kind of cranky and doesn’t like being left on all day. Sunday I left it on all day. When I came back to it that evening, it had locked up. I rebooted and got a kernel oops. This morning I tried diagnosing the problem. The current version of Linux failed to boot. The prior version also failed. And the rescue version failed. The kernel oops listed an IO error, so I suspected a problem with the suspend image stored in the swap partition. (This machine is normally suspended rather than powered off.)

I started SystemRescueCD and it was just fine. So no memory or CPU problems. I ran vgdisplay to see the volume groups. I was able to mount the root and home partitions and they looked OK. In the root partition, I looked in etc/fstab to see where the swap partition was. It was referenced by a UUID. To check, I tried mounting that UUID and confirmed that mount saw it as a swap partition. To get rid of the suspend image, I ran mkswap on /dev/disk/by-uuid/.

After a reboot it’s back up!

After reloading the OS on my phone, Google Authenticator needed to be set up again. After selecting my Google account, it said to turn on 2-step authentication, but this was already done. The fix is to go to https://accounts.google.com/SmsAuthConfig and select Android next to Mobile application. This will show a bar code in your browser that you can scan with Google Authenticator (using the “scan barcode” option rather than selecting your email account). That’s it!

I’m still not happy with the new version of Ubuntu. It runs acceptably from boot-up, but if I suspend or hibernate, performance bogs down and little glitches happen, like the speaker occasionally clicking and the fingerprint reader not working.

Since I can live without it, I ran the uninstall for Fingerprint GUI to see if that was the culprit.

Next, I tried to locate some help with the volume buttons, which also don’t work. I found some advice on ubuntuforums for 11.10. This was the first Unity release, so it might also work with 12.04. …And it does!

After a few cycles of suspend, no issues. Hibernate also isn’t causing a problem, but although it starts to hibernate, actually only drops down to suspend mode.

I’ve already got a partition set up for the installation, /dev/sda7, which was the upgraded Ubuntu 12 version I’m not happy with.

The first step is to create a bootable USB drive with Ubuntu 12 on it using the Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 LTS ISO.

The USB booted up into a Ubuntu installation with an icon on the desktop to install Ubuntu. I used /dev/sda7 which was the previous upgrade from 10 to 12 that I wasn’t happy with. The boot loader will be installed to /dev/sda as before. I added a separate 2 GB swap partition different than that used by Ubuntu 10.

The new system booted pretty quickly, but of course, I don’t have all my stuff on it yet. On to the check list:

• Ubuntu 10 still works
• Windows XP still works
• Wireless networking works
• Ctrl-Alt-Delete brings up the dialog box (by default!)
• Suspend works

While checking out the system, Upgrade Manager started itself to look for updates, but it crashed. I sent the crash report in and restarted it and installed the 20 updates that were waiting.

• Used the Software Center to install GKrellM, EMacs, Chrome, Fingerprint GUI, Dropbox and KeePassX.
• Fingerprint reader works.
• Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901 printer driver–The Printing application found the printer when I told it I had a network printer and entered its IP address. It identified the printer as Lexmark Pro800-Pro900, but had no driver for it. I installed Lexmark’s (disk space wasting) driver. I chose the 32-bit Postscript PPD for CUPS-based and OpenOffice Printing with Debian-based packaging. After installing it, I couldn’t figure out what to do next, so I ran dpkg --contents lexmark-inkjet-legacy-1.0-1.i386.deb and saw the file lxPro800-Pro900.ppd in /usr/local/lexmark/v3/etc. I gave that file to the Printing application with “supply a PPD file”. The test page printed just fine.

I’m finding the upgraded Ubuntu 12.04 on Pinto, the Thinkpad T60, to be noticeably slower than version 10. I’m going to try an install from scratch and see how that goes. If it’s still too slow, I’ll leave Pinto at version 10.