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Table Of Contents
| 1. | 2004/08/21 - 2004/08/27 | (61 posts) | Install Reports |
| 2. | 2004/08/22 - 2004/08/26 | (6 posts) | Shutting Down a Laptop |
| 3. | 2004/08/24 | (11 posts) | Sounder CD 7 |
| 4. | 2004/08/25 | (3 posts) | Tasks |
| 5. | 2004/08/25 | (16 posts) | X Resolutions Dilemna |
Introduction
Welcome to the first edition of Ubuntu Traffic. This issue covers the week of August 21-27 in 2004. Ubuntu Traffic summarizes the most important mailing list and IRC discussions involving the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
Bits and pieces that didn't get a full story but are worth mentioning include:
Mailing List Stats For This Week
We looked at 176 posts in 1361K.
There were 34 different contributors. 24 posted more than once. 33 posted last week too.
The top posters of the week were:
1.
Install Reports
2004/08/21 - 2004/08/27
(61 posts)
Subject: "Install from newest cd issues"
People:
Scott Dier, Matt Zimmerman, Henrik Nilson Omma, David Miller, justdave, Paul Cooper, Pete Ryland, Colin Watson, Baptiste Mille-Mathias, James Blackwell
Many sounders installed Warty this week using the sounder CDs and the daily builds. I've collected all of the reviews into a single section in traffic this week and done rough summaries of what has been reported.
Scott had a mostly successfully install experience. He ran into the following problems:
- I wasn't ever asked for a hostname, so all of the debconf mails never made it (don't really care) and they hung up the installer in the first stage every time one was trying to be sent.
- Dual monitor setups aren't configured, not a huge deal.
- I'm having a hell of a time getting CUPS to say that paper should be letter, not a4.
Matt Zimmerman replied about the CUPS issues saying, "The CUPS web interface is deprecated in favour of gnome-cups-manager, which has a much simpler security model. If there is a straightforward way to disable the web interface, we should probably do that." Scott replied and pointed out that, "the gnome utility didn't have a ubuntu test page, but I've not yet tried after I did a dist-upgrade."
Henrik Nilson Omma tried installing Sounder CD 6 on a Dell inspiron 8000 with a 40 GB HD and a 1400x1050 display. He had the following two issues with the install:
- Install sequence: After 10-15 minutes of setting up a disc system and installing the base system, I am told that installation of my Ubuntu system is complete and I will now boot into it.In reality it takes another 20-30 minutes to install the rest and several more questions are asked.
- Keyboard questions: At the start of the install I was asked for language (English) and flavour (UK). Then much later I'm asked for keyboard type. I feel that when I specify that I prefer UK English, the system should assume that I use a UK keyboard and not ask me.
Fabio replied that the keyboard bug has been fixed for 80% of cases in Sounder CD 7. Mark filed a bug (#836) about the message that says that the installation is complete when it isn't. In quick succession Colin Watson squashed that bug.
David Miller posted a long message to the list his experience with Sounder CD 6. Dave reported that, "the initial install process went quite smoothly up until the reboot into the installed system." Among many other things, Dave pointed out that:
- On the first boot, it tried to (and continues to on each reboot since then) do a mknode for /dev/hda*, which already exist. I also get a lot of device-mapper errors on every reboot.
- In the video mode setup, the text states that "simple" configuration mode is disabled on laptops, but it still allowed it as a choice, and I foolishly chose it. If it doesn't work, and we know it doesn't, it shouldn't be offered.
- Once the install finished, X came up all scrambled. I immediately assumed this was because I had chosen that "simple" configuration option instead of "medium", but no amount of "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" would fix it. After doing an "apt-get remove --purge xserver-xfree86" and doing "dpkg -i" on the .deb file on the CD, and using the "medium" configuration choice, it then worked.
Fabio Massimo Di Nitto replied to say that both of the video bugs above were fixed in Sounder 7. Matt Zimmerman followed up that he had chased down and fixed the bug behind the first item quoted above. Matt also asked Dave to test again with the more up-to-date Sounder CD.
Laster in the week, Dave Miller took Matt's advice and followed up with with a second review using Sounder 7 onto the same iBook. A number of his issued has been addressed but he had the following issues to report:
- X still comes up borked. I copied my config from the backup copy and all was well. (I'll try this again with the new one that just got posted)
- The battery monitor still doesn't work until you open a terminal and modprobe apm_emu.
- Sound still doesn't work. Doing "modprobe dmasound_pmac" gets sound working, but the volume control applet in the gnome-panel still doesn't work.
Paul Cooper posted the following report about his experience installing Warty onto his 17 inch iMac:
Just tested the Sounder 7 install on a 17'' iMac. Everything went smoothly with the install until the system starts and X kicks in.
It seems the X config is wrong and after segfaulting and restarting a couple of times X gets shut down and a blue screen with a Yes / No dialog appears. I *think* it's a Yes / No dialog but unfortunately the characters are scrambled (unicode issue?). After a few more unreadable dialogs, some just info + OK, others Yes / No, eventually returned to console. After looking at the XF86Config-4 file noticed it had chosen the fbdev driver so I tried switching to the nv driver (the iMac has a GeForce 4 MX I think). This worked but only for 640x480 - the 17" iMac has 1440x900 resolution.
I've run out of time to play with this for now but if someone wants to come over and investigate more (Scott?) then feel free email me.
Pete Ryland posted an install report of his own. He had the following to say:
I've been using Ubuntu 4.10 _Warty Warthog_ - Unofficial i386 Binary-1 (20040807) on my main work machine for a few weeks now, and thought I'd make a few comments on the whole experience, which has been very good so far, but here's the few negative things I've noticed:
- Can't set hostname (but already fixed)
- To set up the partitions and LVM how I wanted was really painful and confusing.
- Nautilus doesn't seem to work - it just hangs (but I don't use it anyway)
- Missing finger client
- Missing NIS/yp client/server (when using client-side yp, I always run a yp server locally and use it as a secondary in case of server or network failure)
- Once the CD is installed, no apt repository is set for updates or further package installs
Sebastien Bacher replied that Nautilus problem probably was an issue with hal support which has recently been turned off. Matt Zimmerman replied that NIS and finger was added to supported. Some other keyboard issues that Pete reported in regards to a somewhat funky keyboard setup he had were discussed in some depth on the list but are not summarized here.
Lionel (Ploum) Dricot posted a 7 page review of his install of Sounder 7 CD in Abiword format. Sebastien Bacher replied to him with the text version of his report pasted into a message.
Lionel reported that the partitioning was difficult and overly confusing. Colin Watson replied that the erase entire harddisk option is more simple -- but clearly not useful for everyone. Lionel also brought up the fact that the locking of the root password is confusing because not all the applications have been modified to use sudo yet and users are still prompted for a root password that does not exist. Colin Watson replied that, "the change to lock the root password rather than set it was quite recent, and not all the follow-on changes have been sorted out yet."
Baptiste Mille-Mathias posted a review of his own to the list and raised the following issues:
- "switch cd between drive" problem: I have two CD drives, 1 dvd + 1 CD burner, the dvd is declared a bootable in the bios. I started the first part of the installation on the DVD, until the reboot. After the user creation + password procedure , the installer claimed not to find the CD in the DVD drive to scan it (but it was in), so I try to put it into my burner and it worked. But when the package installation process started the installer was not able to find the packages. I had to put back the CD into the DVD drive to make it happy.
- package corruption: On the 2nd installation on the same system, I had an installation problem on ubuntu-artwork package, but no way to know the reason of the problem.
- No information about the root user: It could be useful to say to the user how to perform the management task at the end of the install.
Matt Zimmerman replied to the issue about root and sudo -- which was brought up by many sounders -- and suggested that, "we should probably add this information to one of the existing dialogs displayed while creating the user, e.g.: "This user will have "sudo" privileges by default, and logins as "root" are disabled. You may set a root password later if you wish.""
James Blackwell gave Warty a long and critical but glowing review. He reported a few issues with this docking station and expressed sadness at the lack of KDE. His review ended with: "Warty is a misnomer, as the default install went smoothly, and very closely guessed how I wanted to work. Warty is serious competition for distributions that have had the opportunity to spit-n-polish for years."
Lets keep both the reviewing and the bugfixing going strong!
2.
Shutting Down a Laptop
2004/08/22 - 2004/08/26
(6 posts)
Subject: "Shut down (on a laptop)"
People:
Jenny Blower, Matthew Garrett
Jenny Blower reported a bug to the sounder list about her laptop not shutting down in the way she is used to saying, "i've been using warty on a laptop, and when i'm shutting the machine down i'm now just getting a blank screen, instead of the 'blurb' i used to get.. this is great, except for one small thing.. the machine itself doesn't actually turn off automatically, so i'm having to guess as to when it's finished! any chance of a nice 'its safe to turn off now' message/screen?"
Matthew Garrett replied that this was, in all likelihood, a bug and suggested that, "discussion on the ACPI mailing list suggests that having CONFIG_RTC enabled in the kernel breaks shutdown - CONFIG_GEN_RTC should give the same functionality without any problems. Is there anyone who can test this?"
Matt Zimmerman and Scott James Remnant tried to track down the bug -- nothing that both the modules were loaded -- but weren't able to get the problem to go away even by blacklisting the potentially problematic module in hotplug.
3.
Sounder CD 7
2004/08/24
(11 posts)
Subject: "Sounder CD 7"
People:
Colin Watson, kamion
Colin Watson threw another sounder CD out to his rapidly swelling crowds of hungry fans. There are lots of new issues so I've included his message in full here:
Sounder CD 7 is ready:
- http://ftp.no-name-yet.com/cdimage/sounder-test/7/
- rsync://ftp.no-name-yet.com/cdimage/sounder-test/7/
See for access instructions. I recommend rsync if possible, as you can then download future images based on this one to save bandwidth.
New in this release:
- The installer has an optional feature to copy all the packages to the hard disk before installing Base and Desktop: it's not used by default yet, but please boot with 'anna/choose_modules=archive-copier' to try it, and send your feedback. Eventually the general idea is that you won't have to use the CD at all after the first reboot, but not all the integration work has been done yet so you'll still have to reinsert the CD after rebooting to stop base-config complaining.
- If you tell the partitioner to erase the entire disk, it'll now skip the scary detail page and go straight to the summary and confirmation.
- The Base installation stage now tells you what it's doing throughout rather than sitting with the progress bar at 68% for ages.
- The root password is now disabled by default, and the installer won't ask you to set it; instead, the initially-created user is added to sudoers and you'll be allowed into single-user mode without entering a password. (If you set a root password using 'sudo passwd root', single-user mode will go back to asking you for a password.)
- The CD now includes a few extra packages that aren't installed by default. See http://wiki.no-name-yet.com/WartyWarthog/ShipSeed for the list.
- The desktop guys have done quite a bit of work, which I confess to not being familiar with. I believe they'd like testing of the trash applet, which is a new feature.
- Following dpkg fixes and an archive flush/rebuild, amd64 is back, although there's still one uninstallable package in Desktop.
- Thom tells me that we now have Totally Rad Laptop Support.
If you're upgrading, you may want to try with a freshly created user account to pick up changes to the default desktop.
The post got some rapid feedback from Mark Shuttleworth with largely positive feedback. One thing that Mark brought up was that the trash applet -- which is not installed by default -- was crashing on Sounder 7. Colin Watson confirmed this behavior. Sebastien Bacher rooted out the bug: a missing ".Trash" directory.
Finally, Colin Watson followed up his own message about the new deb copying functionality saying: "I forgot to mention that you also need to add the KEEP_DEBS=yes argument at the grub prompt on the first reboot, otherwise base-config will merrily run 'apt-get clean'"
4.
Tasks
2004/08/25
(3 posts)
Subject: "Bits about tasks"
People:
Colin Watson
Colin Watson posted a summary of some thinking he'd be doing about tasks and the way they are handled in Ubuntu at the moment:
In contrast to the substantial number of tasks in Debian, we've currently got just one task in warty, namely "desktop": this controls which packages get installed after the first reboot in the default installation. (We're thinking of adding a "base" task too, for upgraders' convenience.) At the moment, aptitude doesn't have a section or a description for it, so it files it under "Unrecognized tasks", which is kind of ugly.
With the current version of aptitude, you have to provide a /usr/share/tasksel/debian-tasks.desc to get proper sections and descriptions, which is also kind of ugly, and would mean we'd have to conflict with tasksel. We could of course hack aptitude to look in a fallback location as well, and I'll probably do that.
That still leaves what to call our tasks. The current "desktop" name is very generic, and indeed there's a "desktop" task in Debian; I can imagine exciting clashes during upgrades if we don't resolve this clash. How about renaming "Task: desktop" to "Task: ubuntu-desktop", and similarly making any "base" task we create be "ubuntu-base" instead?
Fabio Massimo Di Nitto replied that he thought this sounded sane and Matt Zimmerman agreed as well.
5.
X Resolutions Dilemna
2004/08/25
(16 posts)
Subject: "about X resolutions on non-laptops (xresprobe)"
People:
Fabio Massimo Di Nitto, Mark Shuttleworth, Bdale Garbee, Matt Zimmerman, Matthew Garrett
Fabio Massimo Di Nitto posted a message to the sounders list describing a problem he'd run into with X resolutions on common desktop systems:
Scenario: Classic home made workstation with the most common video hardware available on the market. xresprobe (and all the underlaying tools) perfectly capable of detecting the video card and the monitor. As we discussed during the last conference, our X resolution should be set to the second best available and insert the others as option.
In Section "Screen" this solution would look like (give the best is 2048x1536):
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" [SNIP] "640x480" "2048x1536"What I am experiencing is that the resolution is always set according to the first entry in the Modes, that means 1600x1200, but the virtual desktop resolution is always set to the maximum specifies, 2048x1536 in my case. Now this can be rather annoying since, for example, you will get your gdm login not fitting into your monitor and enable the desktop scrolling. (Note that this behaviour is also driver dependent. It happens on nv but not on nvidia)
What i would like to discuss is one of the possible solutions:
- use the best mode available as first entry.
- drop completely the best mode availabe in favour of the second best.
- drop completely the list of other modes in favour of the second best.
- drop completely the list of other modes in favour of the best.
- setting a threshold so that if the best is higher than 1280x1024 use the second best is used otherwise use the best.
Fabio posted examples from each of the scenario's he described.
Mark Shuttleworth replied saying, "For Hoary, we should certainly TRY the modes from top to bottom, asking the user if the mode works." Fabio replied that he was, "not sure if this is the right thing to do. If the first probed resolution doesn't work, we will ask the user at least 2 questions and it will take a lot of time to wait the timeout from the first one + the time to start X a N amount of times, until it works. It would be only one if we ask him directly which resolution he would like to have if the probe fails."
In a follow-up, Fabio rephrased his question to be a little more direct saying that "On my system i can see that the correct resolution is the second best one. Is it true for everbody out there?"
Bdale Garbee replied saying, "Probably not. "Conventional wisdom" has always been to start with one of the lower-resolution VESA standards (for a long time everyone used 640x480 16 colors, then it seemed like 800x600 was more or less assumed to be available, most recently folks seem to assume that 1024x768 will always work) and don't try to mess with higher resolutions until you've got something working that the user can fiddle from. Trying to do a better job than that is admirable, but I worry that anything you try to do is going to fail in some cases, and therefore you may not end up delighting more people than you annoy no matter what you do? Were I doing it, I'd be tempted to just set 1024x768 as the default resolution and spend my time working on a tool to make it easy for the user to jack up the resolution to what they want easily/interactively."
Matt Zimmerman replied to Bdale saying that, "We have such a tool in gnome-system-tools; the "gotcha" (as Fabio pointed out) is how X sets the virtual resolution at startup to the size of the largest available mode. The user can then switch freely between modes, but their desktop doesn't behave the way they expect. I imagine it is non-trivial to allow the virtual screen size to be dynamically resized." Matthew Garrett replied to Matt Zimmerman saying "xrandr supports that, and gtk has toolkit support for it. I don't know how many common drivers support xrandr."
The list saw other traffic on x autodetection and all signs point to rapidly improving autodetection packages leading up to the preview release very soon.
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