Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

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.

There’s no option for this. The instructions for Ubuntu 12 say hibernate is disabled by default because it doesn’t work with some hardware. I tried Running pm-hibernate from a tty while logged out and it worked. I like Pinto to hibernate from the log-in screen when no one is logged in. I don’t ever hibernate while I’m logged in. I tried my old instructions to set this up, but they no longer work, I suspect due to Unity changes. I tried installing Advanced Settings (Tweak advanced Gnome 3 settings.) to change this, but this seems to control actions when logged in. Next I found this. Under org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power, I changed lid-close-battery-action to hibernate and restarted. At the log-in screen closing the lid suspended instead of hibernated.

Fingerprint reader worked when signing in, but the screenlock unlock doesn’t seem to use the reader. After resuming from suspend at log-in screen, it didn’t work. I’ve been using Thinkfinger but it hasn’t been updated since 2007.

First I found a reference in askubuntu.com that questioned the age of Thinkfinger and recommended Fingerprint GUI.

I still have Thinkfinger installed. The first step was to disable it in /etc/pam.d/common-auth by commenting out the pam_thinkfinger.so line. Next I followed the instructions to install Fingerprint GUI. It was pretty simple.

To clean up, I removed the packages libpam-thinkfinger, libthinkfinger0 and thinkfinger-tools.

Now that Ubuntu 12.04.1 is installed, there are a few things to check out:

Grub boots into the old operating system and it still works.

I had to change the default in menu.lst, but that was expected.

Windows installation still works

I have NTFS on /dev/sda1, but it’s not in the Grub configuration, nor the last configuration from March 2012.  It was in a copy from January 2, 2012, so I put it back.  It still works, but, dang, is it slow!  No wonder I didn’t miss it.

Suspend

Works (see Fingerprint reader).

Hibernate

See separate post about hibernation.

Shutting the lid suspends the laptop

Works.

Fingerprint reader

Partially worked. I’ll post an investigation separately.

Wireless networking

No issues.

Dropbox

It seems fine, except the icon on the status bar is all white, like it’s an inverse shadow.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete brings up log off dialog

Ctrl-Alt-Delete doesn’t do anything. Fixing this required changing my keyboard shortcuts in the keyboard app.

Some other notes:

• The system was pretty sluggish and the hard drive was active. Running top showed tracker processes running. These are search indexers. I turned them off with Search and Indexing Preferences. I turned off everything on the Indexing tab. A restart was required. The system is quicker now, but swaps to disk more often. I checked memory usage between 12.04 and 10.04 and there was a significant difference:
  In graphical mode, logged in via tty: 10.04=276MB 12.04=307MB
  In graphical mode, logged in to X: 10.04=667MB 12.04=787MB
  To try to deal with swapping, I installed zram-config. This seems to have helped.
• Emacs was missing–I installed it with the Ubuntu Software Center along with an add-on to keep the Emacs cut buffer in sync with the system clipboard.
• Shutting down no longer has that minutes-long delay.

Having backed up and cloned the Ubuntu 10.04 partition, I’m ready to upgrade the cloned partition to 12.04.1 LTS.

All that’s required is to boot into the clone partition and run System->Administration->Upgrade Manager.  First, I checked for and applied outstanding updates to 10.04.  Then, I pushed the Upgrade button.  There was a warning that third party sources were disabled and they could be re-enabled after the upgrade with the software-properties tool.

During the installation, it wanted to replace my NTP configuration (I had picked a couple local servers) and /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cupsd. The latter had custom stuff for my Lexmark printer, so I’ll probably need to reinstall that. /etc/default/nfs-common had some changes too. I had added NEED_IDMAPD=yes to mine, but I don’t remember why. I’m going to use the new version and see if anything breaks.

After the installation, I rebooted and found the first problem right away. Grub had been updated to run the new 3.2 kernel, but using the old sda6 file system. The mouse didn’t work and neither did networking, but I was able to log in. I fixed up /boot/grub/menu.lst and rebooted. I did notice that the upgrade left the older kernel files that were referenced in menu.lst outside of the DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST section. That’s an improvement.

Pinto, the Thinkpad T60, has three OS partitions of 10 GB each.  Space is getting tight on there, so I’m going to repartition the disk into two 15 GB  partitions.  The partitions are as follows:

sda6: Ubuntu 10.04

sda7: old Ubuntu (partial installation)

sda8: openSUSE 10.2

I’m not using sda7 or sda8, so I’ll remove them and resize sda6 to 15 GB, then create a new sda7 partition of 15 GB.  But first, I’m going to back up the sda6 partition.

I’m going to use SystemRescueCD to back up the partition.  Download the ISO (systemrescuecd-x86-2.8.1.iso).  Check the downloaded file with MD5Sum by creating a file with the same name as the ISO but with an appended .md5sum extention.  In this file, copy the MD5sum number from the web site, followed by two spaces and the ISO file name.  Save the file, then run md5sum -c systemrescuecd-x86-2.8.1.iso.md5sum.

If the MD5sum is OK, burn the ISO to a CD with k3b (Tools->Burn Image).  If you forget to select verify CD in k3b, you can do so afterward with the mounted CD.  Run df to see which device the CD is mounted on.  Then run MD5sum on the device, for example, md5sum /dev/sr0. Compare the output to the MD5sum you saved earlier.

I booted with the default options and after loading the kernel, the screen went blank right after “>> Loading modules…” and never came back.  I tried a few different boot options in the manual, and nomodeset fixed the problem.

I started the GUI with the wizard and mounted a USB drive manually in /mnt:

• mkdir usb
• mount /dev/sdb

You can see where the USB drive is with System->Show Filesystems.

Next, I ran PartImage and saved sda6 to /mnt/usb/pinto-sda6-ubuntu10.img.

With the partition backed up, I started GParted and deleted sda7 and sda8. Now sda6 was in the middle of 30,710 MiB. I made sda6 15,355 MiB with 15,355 MiB left. When the resize was done, there was only 15,353 MiB left, so I resized sda6 to 13,354. I made a new ext3 partition after sda6 that was also 13,354 and labeled it ubuntu12, which what it will become. Last, I copied the file system:
dd if=/dev/sda6 of=/dev/sda7 bs=1024k
then followed the rest of the steps to make sda7 it’s own OS:

• In GParted, select the new partition and give it its own UUID with Partition->New UUID.
• Save the Grub configuration and current kernel files in /boot
• Change the new partition name
• Add an entry to grub’s menu.lst to boot the new partition
• Update the new partition’s /etc/fstab

For the last step, Grub has changed on my system since the linked post above.  Rather than specifying root for the new entry, the disk is specified by UUID.  To get that, use blkid, in this case: blkid /dev/sda7. You can also use ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid. Note this is not the UUID on the line that starts with uuid (that’s for /boot), but the uuid in the line that starts with kernel.

On my Ubuntu 10.04 machines when I use the Auto-Type feature of KeePassX, the Alt key will act if it is stuck on.  To fix it, I have to log out and back in again.  The bug is documented on the KeePassX forum as Auto-Type under 10.04 causes stuck key problems.  Luckily, there is a workaround there, too.  By increasing the delay before Auto-Type starts to one second, it gives you time to release the Auto-Type hot keys before Auto-Type begins and the problem doesn’t happen.