Linux And Flaky ATL1C Support

Here’s something I thought I’d never see — the day that wired networking in Linux could ever be considered anything less than “it just works.”

I recently purchased a laptop (Toshiba Satellite C655D-S5518 to be precise) and had trouble out of the gate after installing Arch Linux.  The computer would seem to hang whenever the network was involved.  (E.g., running netcfg, networkmanager, or the ip command.)  I assumed that it was wireless support that was causing the headaches, so I ran hwinfo --netcard | grep "Modules\|File" to find the kernel modules related to my networking devices.

Device Modules: "atl1c"
Device File: eth0
Driver Modules: "rtl8192ce"
Device File: wlan0

I blacklisted rtl8192ce but that didn’t solve my problem. 

RANT: Canonical Is NOT Replacing Gnome With Unity In Ubuntu

For people that insist on making distinctions between “operating system” and “window manager,” you’d think there’d be a distinction between “windowing system” and “desktop interface.” However there’s quite a few articles I’ve come across that are suggesting under no uncertain circumstances that Canonical is replacing Gnome with Unity.

Canonical is doing no such thing.

BUG: Plymouth (Ubuntu Boot Splash) Reverts To 640×480 With Proprietary NVIDIA Driver

UPDATE: Try sudo dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc first. With that, I no longer needed to make the tweaks in this article.

Gah! It was so beautiful after the initial setup! 1680×1050 of native-res boot screen. Then I installed the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and it fell apart. Not only did the resolution fall down to 640×480, but the text input box dipped below the screen (I use encryption) and the dots seemed to cut into one another. I don’t know who deserves a swift kick in the [pick body part here], but I lean towards NVIDIA as I could not install in a VESA text mode AND things worked just fine with the open-source nv module.

Andrew’s WebUpd8 blog did not help. Neither did Comment #34 for Bug #526892 on Launchpad. Of all places it was this post on Softpedia that brought things back.

HOWTO: Setup A Dedicated Boxee Box

Pick Out The Parts

You could always re-use parts, but you have to be careful here. In trying an old single-core AMD Athlon 64 3000+ running at 1.8GHz with on-board GeForce 6150, 720p video runs noticeably but not annoyingly at lowered frame rates. But you don’t have to go to the other extreme and get an AMD Phenom or Intel Core i7 processor with the latest nVidia GeForce GTX285. With the average home broadband connection at 2mb/s down and 720p video consuming 2.5mb/s, 720p is more of a niche offering offering right now and 1080p is out of the question. For 720p, an Intel Atom, Core 2 Duo, or recent AMD Athlon 64 II X2/X4 and GeForce 8xxx series card will do.

BUG: Ubuntu 9.04 – OnDemand Doesn’t Scale CPU Speed

Along another one of those long, strung-out searches, I came across a problem I didn’t know I had. Or to be more precise, peculiarities I couldn’t put a finger on. Before Ubuntu 9.04, I had no problem running a bunch of gee-whiz compiz effects on my desktop. Before Ubuntu 9.04, Flash overdoses and crashes caused my CPU fan to spin up instead of slowing down my desktop. Before Ubuntu 9.04, I could see my CPU frequencies bouncing around.

That’s because Ubuntu 8.10 didn’t set the CPU usage threshold to 95% before bumping up the CPU frequency with the ondemand governor.

HOWTO: Compile Midori From Source In Ubuntu

UPDATE: If you want Midori but don’t care for the building, there’s now a Midori PPA for that.

You know you want to do it. You know your friends want to do it. You’ve heard stories of people that have done it. We’ve all wanted to do it — compile a program from source. One of the ultimate goals of any geek to own a computer, compiling a program from source just gives you that geek street cred you’ve always wanted. Now you can have it!

I’m going to show you how to get the Midori browser from source. Midori is a project is headed up by Christian Dywan over at TwoToasts.de. I don’t what has happened, but the version packaged up in the Ubuntu repositories is sorely out-of date at v0.0.18. Midori went 0.1.0 on October 2008.

Ubuntu And The GeForce 200 Series

As of this writing, I’m getting conflicting views on the nVidia GTS 200 series of cards and Jaunty. Canonical says the GTS 250 is supported in 9.04, which uses driver version 180.44. However, nVidia states that driver version 180.51 adds support for the GTS 250. And while nVidia gives you the 180.51 drivers if you specify a GTX 295 card, driver package 181.20 on the Windows side officially states support for that card. Ah, the bleeding edge.

In all probability, you can use 180.44 but your card will come up as an unkown nVidia card. Try the Canonical-approved driver installation first with sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-180 (if you don’t already have the driver installed).

If that doesn’t work, use the Canonical Launchpad driver (180.53)

• Add deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu jaunty main to /etc/apt/sources.list
• Issue the command sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 643dc6bd56580ceb1ab4a9f63b22ab97af1cdfa9
• Use sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade

If that doesn’t work, there’s always manual installation.

HOWTO: Free Disk Space For An Apt Update

I try to limit the space available to my root partition, but sometimes that comes back to bite me in the ass. Especially if I haven’t updated in a while. The major problem with using binary package managers is that they need space for the downloaded tar.gz files AND the space to extract it. There are some tricks you can do to help free up some space for package upgrades.

INFO: Npviewer.bin Process Can Slow Down Linux

I woke up this morning. The computer was still on. I move the mouse to wake up the screen. I get right to my wife’s desktop. “That’s not very nice of me,” I thought. “I never set the option to lock the screen with a password.” As I got to select a screen saver she might like, I noticed the screen savers took a little long to load and ran kinda jerky. I didn’t get far down the list before I said, “Screw it, this is good enough.” I logged her out of her session and logged back in to mine.

When my desktop came to, everything was jerky. I utilize all the fancy compiz effects a heck of a lot more than my wife does, who is content to stick with Ubuntu’s default, not-all-that-intensive settings. I opened up System Monitor’s Resources tab to find both cores of my CPU being pegged at 100%. I opened up the process viewer, only to find nothing out of line. When I selected View All Processes, I saw about 8 copies of npviewer.bin, all of benign size minus one at 125MB. All were consuming 7%-8% CPU time.

A quick look to the Ubuntu forums revealed that npviewer.bin is the Flash plugin, a known resource hog no matter what platform you’re on. It also told of a pretty simple way to stop the madness in one blow: sudo pkill npviewer.bin. CPU went back to fluctuating between 5% and 25% per core.

HOWTO: Update Linksys PAP2 Firmware Without Windows

UPDATE APR 21 2010: There’s an even easier way of doing this.

I finally got my Linksys PAP2T VoIP adapter yesterday. As is par for the course, the firmware was out of date. What wasn’t par for the course is that I had no way to get the firmware to the adapter. The Linksys PAP2T doesn’t offer the standard check-for-update or upload-firmware interface. It uses an upgrade rule that expects to find a TFTP or web server. Linksys also provides a Windows executable that will upload the firmware without you having to fiddle with anything.

The Windows option didn’t go well.