I’ve been digging through the articles and online trying to come up with solutions to the problem. Maybe I could help debug or a patch existed.

I couldn’t find much, except that it was likely to be some sort of weird hardware problem that was nobody’s fault. Some advice seemed to recommend trying the latest kernel out.

So yesterday I followed the instructions and upgraded my system to Intrepid Ibex. At first it seemed to go very smoothly, but then there were problems generating menu.lst and some of the packages failed. I tried manually editing menu.lst but upon booting up the newer kernel seemed to fail with my video card.

The system sort of works right now, although it seems to have problems shutting down or restarting. I can boot using the older kernel. So I’m going to keep around the system for a few in case I need a handy Linux box.

Of course after I did all this Ubuntu released alpha 3 of Intrepid Ibex. Perhaps the LiveCD of the new version will fair better, for now though I’m taking a break and going back to the slower, more sluggish but more compatible Vista system.

This really should have been easy, but if you try to remove it will come up with dependencies. So I opened up Synaptic Package Manager and this is what I did. The following applies to 8.04.1 Hardy Heron.

Packages I removed:
evolution-common
evolution-data-server
evolution-plugins
libedata-book1.2-2
libedata-cal1.2-6
libegroupwise1.2-13
libexchange-storage1.2-3
libgdata1.2-1
libgdata-google1.2-1

Packages I upgraded:
libecal1.2-7
libedataserverui1.2-8
evolution-data-server-common

Just thought it might be helpful to anyone else wanting to rip Evolution out. So far I haven’t noticed any problems at all.

System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manage

Search for p7zip and install

Now they should work just fine.

Download puttygen.exe for windows. Open up your ssh keys with puttygen and choose export. Export them as OpenSSH keys.

Copy these keys over to linux and put them in ~/.ssh

Create the text file ~/.ssh/config

Put the following block for each key.


Host shortname
HostName myserver.com
User username
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/myserver.key


Host holds an alias for your ssh config. Now to connect to a particular server just envoke ssh shortname

Pretty simple.

You can download the code from Google code. And there is a Radiohead YouTube group created especially for fan made videos.

I managed to get the examples running on Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy Heron. The jikes included with the package did not work, instead install jikes via the Synaptic Package Manager. Then rename your jikes to jikes.old and create a symbolic link: ln -s /usr/bin/jikes jikes

Now you can run processing. To get the Radiohead data working follow the various README instructions.

And if you want to take it a step further, here is a list of links for everything I could find:

• Here’s a little Python script for converting Radiohead’s 3D laser data into an X3D file.
• This page features three different demos using different programs.
• Here is a C++ program to visualize the data.
• Partially Frozen has a very nice demo done with an application called Krakatoa.

System->Administration->Login Window
Local Tab — Changes look
Security Tab — Allows auto login

Nice, but when I rebooted I was just given an equally annoying prompt which asked for my keyring password. I found this answer in this forum post. You can just delete your unlock password entirely.

System > Preferences > Encryption and Keyrings
Under Password Keyrings click on “login Automatically unlocked when user logs in.”
Click “Change Unlock Password”
Enter your old password, but leave the new password blank.

And now you have a normal insecure auto-login.

Apparently the system restore partition mucks with your bootstrap even if you cancel, because after I quit out of it Grub just repeatedly returned Error 17. I remedied this by following the command line instructions at the Ubuntu GrubHowTo.

This gave me the excuse I needed to do a little work on my menu.lst. First I added a Grub splash image I stole from a German Ubuntu forum. I had to load this png file up in Gimp and save it as a xpm, then gzip the file which I found an option for in a right click context menu. Next I opened up a terminal and su’d to root to copy the file to /boot/grub as splash.xpm.gz and to nano menu.lst to which I added the line:


splashimage=(hd0,2)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz


This worked perfectly, however I wanted to add a little color to the mix. Beware! The color tag does not work with a splash image, in fact on my machine the color tag caused me a major headache as I hadn’t commented it out. Apparently it buggers up the foreground and background tag. Which is how your supposed to set colors:


background = 8fc3c2
foreground = 000000


This sets my background to a weird blue-gray and my foreground to black.

Finally I reorganized and renamed my entries. I was kind of upset that Grub doesn’t seem to allow whitespace at the beginning of an entry but I fixed that with a dash. It now looks like:

Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic
Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)
---------------Maintenance---------------
Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic (recovery mode)
Ubuntu 8.04.1, memtest86+
Recovery Drive (Damages Grub)


I probably should have modified the names a bit more.

Speaking of profiles I also copies my Firefox profile over. The profile instructions at Mozilla were very helpful, especially after I figured out that the page was auto-adjusting it’s locations depending on my operating system. Later I found the buttons on the top that allow you to manually override. Pretty snazzy.

I have managed to ‘crash’ the system a few times. Enemy Territory seems to cause some graphics problems. I also haven’t had much luck with streaming Windows Media Video. Both Totem and VLC will read the video but both seem to cause graphic instability and crashes.

Also Gnome seems to like ditching title bars from time to time. I’ve found a logout and re-login work to get it back it place.

I’m actually a bit surprised at the crashes and quirks. I knew there would be issues, but I expected Linux to die gracefully and perhaps offer some information. It looks like I’m going to have to do some digging if I’m going to get to the bottom of it.

Also Linux doesn’t seem to know if I have my headphones plugged in at boot. I remember Windows also doing this and me needing some stupid driver loaded in the background to make it work correctly. This is a minor annoyance though which is easily remedied by unplugging and plugging back in the headphones.

I’ll keep everyone updated…

Update: I managed to get the wifi working finally. I followed the instructions on this forum except I downloaded the drivers I found here. It took a bit of mucking around but finally it worked. We’ll see how this develops the next few weeks. Also note the wireless LED does not work.

Everything worked, that is except for the wireless card. After some Googling I found plenty of links which direct me to try out ndiswrapper which apparently does the trick.

So I’m attempting it. Although currently I’m making room for it and shifting around my partitions to make a new one. I’m using Gparted LiveCD 0.3.6-7 to assist me in the task. So far everything seems good but it’s taking forever. 150 gigabytes of stuff apparently takes a while to move around.

I’ll keep everyone updated. So far the current plan is to dual boot so hopefully I’ll still have my Frankenstein Vista copy safe and sound.