Σάββατο, 17 Ιούνιος 2006, 11:57 by Giannis Papaioannou
It's been a while since I solved this in ubuntu. After starting Xorg, when pressing ALT-CTRL+F1-6 to change to a console, the screen was becoming blank black. There was no way to return to Xorg but CTRL-ALT-DEL was soft rebooting the system. This bug started somewhere between dapper upgrades in March, I expected it to be fixed with another upgrade until dapper made it to stable release.
The problem is a bug of i810 driver for Xorg (and maybe of some other drivers like mga). I had setup a clone screen for the vga output of my laptop and for that reason the following statement was in my xorg.conf:
Option "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
Removing this statement fixed the problem. It seems that using the MonitorLayout option causes the problem no matter what I set it to. Mystirious are the ways of Xorg.
Παρασκευή, 02 Ιούνιος 2006, 10:04 by Giannis Papaioannou
Last two days I noticed that there were no upgrades for my ubuntu laptop. Then I looked the calendar, today is 2/6/06. Ubuntu Dapper release was ready on time. Now, my laptop is supposed to be running a stable operating system.
I should of noticed that some of the annoynces were going away, but still caught me by surprise. Anyway, the biggest bug remains, after running Xorg server and if I switch from X to a console, then I get a blank screen and my only option is to press ctrl-alt-del and reboot. Unfortunately, my googling for this didn't help much, I'll have to make a serious effort to solve this.
Δευτέρα, 15 Μάϊος 2006, 11:39 by Giannis Papaioannou
Last night I felt like upgrading the linux kernel on my laptop (Sony Vaio VGN-FS215B) which runs an Ubuntu (Dapper). I prefer running a custom built kernel on this machine because, when using the precompiled kernels that come with the distribution, a lot of unwanted modules persist on mistakenly load themselfs. The previous kernel I had installed was 2.6.15.1 which was the latest kernel with Dapper when I decided to upgrade from Breezy. Now, 2.6.15.6 is available as a source package.
Taking all the steps by the book, untar, make oldconfig, make-kpkg kernel_image etc, in not so few minutes the deb package was ready. Reboot.
And then there were none... gouhou gouhou... there was no wlan0. dmesg showed me that the ipw2200 which controls the wireless device couldn't find the appropriate firmware. By checking with Documentation/networking/README.ipw2200 within the kernel tree, I found out that I had to download the firmware (from here) myself and put it in /lib/firmware/`uname -r`dir. Also the ipw2200 driver changed from version 1.0.10 in 2.6.15.1 kernel to 1.1.1 in the 12.6.15.6 kernel, which means that the already installed firmware is not usefull anymore.
This process of installing the firmware by hand in a base installation's directory, is so much not what I have been used to by the Ubuntu maintainers. After all the license does not prohibit redistribution as long as the license agreement goes with the product on the same directory. If not a package in an unofficial repository, at least an automatic download of the license agreement and then, if agreed by the user, the firmware itself would be nice.