Category: Linux

It always starts with a screwup. When I first set up my Ubuntu installation Grub automatically set up a menu which looked like this:

Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic
Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic (recovery mode)
Ubuntu 8.04.1, memtest86+
Other operating systems:
Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)
Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)

When I set up my partitions I decided against better judgment to leave my system restore partition alone. Now I knew that was what Grub was picking up as the extra partition but I wasn’t sure which one. So I stupidly decided to choose the first one.

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.

It’s now day two of my Ubuntu quest and I’ve made pretty good progress. After following this Wolfenstein Enemy Territory tutorial I’ve gotten it to work but I still have to work on a way to add echo “et.x86 0 0 direct” > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss to my startup so sound works all the time. I also managed to copy my profile from my windows drive so it saved my settings and experience.

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.