Installing Ubuntu 12.10 on Dell XPS M1730 Laptop

December 3, 2012 in Tech Talk & Other Thoughts by Brian Thompson | 2 comments

I’ve set out and installed a full working version of Ubuntu 12.10 on my Dell XPS M1730.

To kick things off my keyboard died on the laptop which makes it impossible to do anything during boot up.  After a lot of work trying to get it working again, I gave up and bought a cheap USB keyboard.

I started out by having my computer setup with a RAID 0 with one master partition running Windows 7 64-bit.  After many failed attempts at getting the hard drive partitions setup for Ubuntu I undid the RAID which wiped out windows 7.  I’ll have to re-install Windows 7 hopefully in a dual boot at a later time.

Once the partitions were wiped out I used a USB boot version of Gparted to setup the partitions  as noted in link, but I made boot partition bigger after reading a few other articles (besides the size is so small it doesn’t really matter)

 
Boot Ext4 512MB
Swap Swap 4GB (4096MB)
Home Ext4 remainder of hard drive minus 80GB for later use in Windows 7

 

 

During my install of Ubuntu the screen would just flash colors.  A quick search found that this is really common with Nvidia graphics cards.  I combined a few options suggested on the internet by setting some custom install options.  Press any key when the keyboard logo appears at the bottom of the screen to get to the install menu, go down to install and press F6 then add the following after the ‘–‘with a space befoe the text”nouveau.blacklist=1 vga=771″

I get an error that the blacklist and 1 are invalid options, but when I try an install with just vga=771 I get the flashing colors.  So I’m not sure what the noeveau argument is doing, but it does enough to get the display to work properly.  I didn’t try installing with just the nouveau parameter and without the vga parameter.

With that I could continue with the install.  In the install I choose to manually select the partitions to use.  By double clicking each partition I was able to designate the /boot, swap, /home specifically.

After the install I restarted the computer and had the flashing colors all over again. I followed this article to get things working.  Right after the bios boot, but not before, hold down the shift key.  At the grub menu select Advanced Options then the recovery mode option

I selected the network option and then yes as directed.  Some text scrolled for a while and then is seemed like things just stopped but without taking me to the GUI screen to choose root.  I pressed up and some garbage text was displayed.  I think I followed this by Enter and then a Ctrl-ESC.  This caused more text to be displayed and then rather than going back to the GUI it went into Ubuntu without the flashing colors.  From there I opened up an Xterm window and proceeded to do the commands from the link (pasted below for my information)

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings

With that I was now have a Ubuntu setup on my Dell XPS M1730.

This computer will be my media player and I don’t plan to physically use it much especially now that the keyboard is broken.  Things that I’d like to get setup are VNC, SSH, VPN, Samba, XMBC, and iTunes (I really like the genius playlist editor).  I’ll be posting a later blog about this. (Update: 12/29/2012:  Here is the post about the media server)

 

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Fun times with Apache 2.4.3, PHP 5.4.3, and MySql 5.5 updates

November 19, 2012 in Tech Talk & Other Thoughts by Brian Thompson | 2 comments

About a month ago I got a virus on my computer and in my infinite wisdom I used a registry scanner to help clean up the issue.  This scanner also decided to delete some files that allowed my website to work.   I should have just rolled back my windows 7 to the last registry backup, but too late the damage was done.  For the life of me I couldn’t figure out which files it wiped out as it didnt’ have a log of the actions it took.

So I embarked on re-setting up my apache server.  I didn’t keep any of the installation files I used the first go around so I ended up downloading the files all over again. I got apache from Apache Lounge.  I found 64-bit version of php at http://www.anindya.com/php-5-4-3-and-php-5-3-13-x64-64-bit-for-windows/  and don’t forget about the extensions needed on the same webpage.  And MySQL from their own website. Lesson 1:  Save the installation files for future re-use.

Well of course apache, php, and mysql all had updates that caused various issues.  This being my first real upgrade I discovered something quite important that is noted in all the installation files.  First backup the apache and php config files.  Then start with the generic config files (httpd.conf and php.ini-production) and then add back in my unique settings.  I initially tried to just start with my old configuration files and then add in the new default settings, but this is really messy and not the way to do it.

In apache, Order commands are depreciated are now depreciated  as noted in these two links (1 and 2) so I had to make several updates to the httpd.conf file to correct this.  Additionally, several changes were made to the LoadModule selections.

 #new for 2.4.3 update
LoadModule access_compat_module modules/mod_access_compat.so
LoadModule allowmethods_module modules/mod_allowmethods.so
###This is needed for SSL to work in update
LoadModule socache_shmcb_module modules/mod_socache_shmcb.so
#changed with 2.4.3 update
#LoadModule authz_default_module modules/mod_authz_default.so
LoadModule authz_core_module modules/mod_authz_core.so
#changed with 2.4.3 update
#LoadModule authn_default_module modules/mod_authn_default.so
LoadModule authn_core_module modules/mod_authn_core.so

With the updates I was/am having issues with wordpress so I updated that again too to version 3.4.2 and still noticed the problem with numeric links and have blogged about it here.

But after all of that I appear to be back up and working.  I did notice during this whole process that the use of Location in the httpf.conf file to make sure certain webpages use https rather than http was not case sensitive.  I’m still working on this and hope to post about it again when I understand things, but for here is a link the my forum post about the topic

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Numeric Permalinks are broken

November 8, 2012 in Tech Talk & Other Thoughts by Brian Thompson | No comments

Well after getting my website backup and running I’m having issues with numeric permalinks on WordPress 3.4.2.  I’ve posted a message on the wordpress forum to see if anyone has any ideas.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/permalink-issue-everything-but-default

 

Circuit Issues

September 29, 2012 in Tech Talk & Other Thoughts by Brian Thompson | No comments

I’m having some issues with my circuit and am asking for some help here:

http://www.electronicspoint.com/l7812-voltage-sag-12v-dc-motor-t252661.html#post1495634

 

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Cyanogen 7.2.0 Update on my Evo Shift

June 18, 2012 in Tech Talk & Other Thoughts by Brian Thompson | No comments

The stable release of CM 7.2.0 was released on June 16 and of course I jumped right in on day 1 and did an update to my phone. Updating from a previous version is much much much easier than the first install noted in my previous post (Installing a Cyanogen 7 on my Evo Shift). All I had to do was download the image and install the ROM in recovery mode.

For some reason the bluetooth wasn’t working, but after a series of Dalvik Cache resets and phone resets something corrected itself and now everything appears to be working fine.

As for performance I got a 48.487 & 50.716 MFLOPS Single Thread on Linkpack.  On Quadrant I had a 2273.  Both are better than my 7.2 rc2 scores.  I’m sure if I did a compare to Lisa’s phone (stock ROM) it would blow away her scores.  I wonder if she will ever break down and ask me to do an update for her too.

Update 1:  Bluetooth is not fully working.  When a call is initiated by the phone has a crackling sound when the phone initiates the connection. Reported as Cyanogen issue 5349.

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