Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

I ran out of space on the /home partiton of Boon’s Fedora 9 system. It’s on a logical volume using logical volume management 2 (LVM2). To increase the space, I had to boot Fedora 8, which was on a different volume. Once booted, I ran sudo system-config-lvm. Then selected:
Volume Groups
Logical View
fedora9-home
Edit Properties
Change size to Gigabytes
Increase from 60 to 80
Apply and restart

This morning I logged in (after hibernate) and got a different theme on the desktop. Different colors, fonts, icons, whole deal. This has happened once or twice before and has fixed itself on the next log-in.

Also, Ctrl-Alt-Del to log out doesn’t work. I don’t know if that’s because of the theme change problem or because I suspended while in this session (which breaks middle mouse button scrolling).
Update: Logging out and back in fixed the theme and the Ctrl-Alt-Del key log-out sequence and middle mouse button scrolling.

This morning a kernel update was downloaded by the software updater. However, menu.lst wasn’t updated. I did this by hand. Now that I’m running 2.6.27-11, I don’t need 2.6.27-7. Here’s how to uninstall it:
On the menu, select System/Administration/Synaptic Package Manager
Click Search and enter linux-image-2. Installed kernels will have a green box to their left. Keep at least the two most recent. For each older one, click its green box and select “mark for removal”, then click the Apply button.

The only outstanding issue remaining with Ubuntu (assuming the next system update properly updates the Grub configuration file) is that switching users doesn’t work. If I lock the screen in my session, I can choose switch user and log in as someone else. But when I log out of the second session, the screen is blank except for the mouse cursor. Ubuntu can be restored with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace (the X11 restart sequence), but my first session is lost. More research is required.
Update: If I select switch user, then cancel, I get the same blank screen. However, if I suspend (Fn-F4), the session will be there on resume.
Update: This morning my wife did a switch user from my account. When she logged out, the blank screen was there. I suspended with Fn-F4, resumed, then everything was fine. …Except now the middle mouse button scrolling doesn’t work.

The Ubuntu installation isn’t updating the grub configuration file. I updated /boot/grub/menu.lst by hand to use the new kernel. I also installed “Choose next default for grub” and “StartUp-Manager” (System/Administration/StartUp-Manager on the menu).
The StartUp_manager returns the error “Grub configuration file lacks ### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST”. I exited and backed up /boot/grub/menu.lst, restarted StartUp-Manager, left options alone, and exited. menu.lst was unchanged. Next, I restarted, checked “show text at startup” (you have to change something to get it to rewrite the configuration file) and exited. Still no change.
I’m thinking Ubuntu won’t update Grub’s configuration because I told it not to install a boot loader. These instructions tell how to add Grub after the fact. This is what I did:
$ sudo grub
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,2)
grub setup (hd0,2)
Error 12: Invalid device request

The Grub How-To didn’t provide much help for error 12, other than indicating that you can run update-grub manually:
sudo update-grub
/var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process

Rebooting solved that problem, but then Grub still refused to install.
As a test, I backed up /boot and installed Ubuntu in another partition and told it to install the boot loader on the /boot partition (as openSUSE was set up). The installation gave me the same error. What’s suddenly wrong with that partition?
Running short on time, I reinstalled and told Ubuntu to format /boot. This worked. I mounted the first Ubuntu partition and updated /boot with the old files to restore the original Ubuntu and the old openSUSE.

The user accounts Ubuntu said it was migrating, it didn’t. The Firefox settings for the one account I set up were moved, but none of the other user accounts got moved. Worse, when I tried to add them, the “Add User” button is greyed out. Even when I did sudo users-admin I can’t add users.
[update: Seems you need to click “unlock” on the GUI to enable adding accounts.]

Although it’s not as straightforward as selecting options from a GUI, you can set up the middle button to enable scrolling. All I had to do is create /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi as root and reboot.

This was the easiest installation ever. Networking and sound works right out of the box. So do the ThinkPad volume control buttons (openSUSE missed these). Ubuntu found the old installation of openSUSE and pulled in the Firefox settings. The only thing not quite right so far is the middle trackpoint button doesn’t enable trackpoint scrolling.
When I did the install, I clicked Advanced settings and told the installer not to install the boot loader. This is because the ThinkPad has the ThinkVantage button that’s part of the MBR that in the past would be overwritten by some installers. I didn’t know if Ubuntu would have preserved it, but Grub is already installed so I knew I could skip it. I only had to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add an entry for Ubuntu. [update: Ubuntu does overwrite the MBR.]
Suspend works fine. Hibernate does too, except at restart, I had to pick Ubuntu from the Grub menu. This is probably related to my installation (or lack thereof) of Grub.

I was listening to LugRadio Friday and they’re pro-Ubuntu. I’ve never run Ubuntu, but liked their stance on usability as a high priority. It turns out Ubuntu has become more popular than I thought (see DistroWatch’s Page Hit Ranking). With the failed upgrade of openSUSE, I’m starting from scratch with whatever distribution I load on Pinto, so now’s a good a time as any to try something new. Stay tuned for the gory details.

I read through the openSUSE wireless networking forum for clues as to why NetworkManager wouldn’t connect to my wireless network. There wasn’t anything related to my problem. I could connect, but only using nm-applet. The KDE NetworkManager clients all failed. It seemed like they would forget any security settings I gave them.
Knowing that upgrades are error-prone (why do I still hope they’ll work?), I loaded a fresh install of openSUSE 11.1 on the third Pinto partition. Now knetworkmanager works fine. But I’ve got a new decision. Do I move in to the new openSUSE or see if the latest Fedora will play nice with my ThinkPad T60?
openSUSE 11.1 is much quicker than 10.2 and I like how KDE 4 looks with it. However, I’ve never warmed up to openSUSE’s application launcher menu. I haven’t figured out how to navigate it with just the keyboard and things are rarely where I tend to look for them. And 11.1 does this funky think with the Intel 945GM graphics card that causes garbage to appear on the screen during X11 start and graphical log in. It’s only momentary and causes no harm, but it doesn’t look nice. Lastly, all the other computers in the house (other than the OLPC XO’s) are running Fedora and that would make administration easier. The issue with Fedora? The last release I used didn’t hibernate properly. Since IBM distributed openSUSE with ThinkPads, that was the reason I tried it. It worked and I’ve been running it since.