30 days with Ubuntu 7.04 - Part III

By Niall C. Brady, May/June 2007.
If you wish to re-publish this article (or parts of), then you are free to do so as long as it links back to here.

<< Part I (Days 1-5)

<< Part II (Days 6-10)

Part III (Days 11-15)

* totem revisited
* networking issues
* power management
* configuring gdesklets and avant-dock
* more updates

>> Part IV (Days 16-20)

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Totem revisited

I can't believe it, I clicked on yet another bbc news video only expecting to wonder why it didn't work (hasnt worked yet, and i've tried many times) when all of a sudden (after about 2 minutes) the video started to play....First time for me, and it appears totem was managing it, but why the 2 minute delay ? I've also noticed that the network icon to the left of the audio icon in the top system tray never does anything. I presume this is because I'm using ndiswrapper for internet and that the network manager can't deal with it. The problem with this is I cannot see the strength of my wireless signal, so don't know if the problem above is related to this. Yet again, I clicked on another link, and 2 or so minutes later, the video kicks in. This 2 or so minutes delay is weird and I plan to research it (time permitting).

Networking issues

I had some strange network issues, the internet kept timing out on me, and I'm not sure if it's wireless related (another box on the same network is working fine) and the network applet in Ubuntu doesnt show me my wireless strength so I'm not sure what the issue is. There is lot's of packet loss though, see here:-

--- www.l.google.com ping statistics ---
1841 packets transmitted, 1460 received, 20% packet loss, time 1876296ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 30.939/34.221/169.541/11.629 ms

The network issues continued during that day on and off, then disappeared as suddenly as they came. I did get this issue again some days later but once again, it disappeared.

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Testing power management

The power applet in the system tray seems to report correctly as long as I remain undocked, and has nice graphs too, however when in the docking station, the power applet didn't function at all. While undocked, I have two choices, Suspend or Hibernate. For those of you that don't know, suspend means that it suspends it's current state into ram leaving enough 'flea' power to keep ram alive, this though consumes some power. Hibernate on the other hand saves all the data in RAM to your hard disc, and once done, powers off the machine ready for you to turn it on later. I proceeded to test both of those functions:-

Suspend

To be sure that I'm not going to lose anything, I save all open documents and press the power applet icon in the system tray, I then choose 'Suspend'. Immediately the screen starts to fade to black and after a bit of hard disc chugging the laptop enters suspend mode (which you can see by the power LED which flashes on/off slowly). After 30 seconds or so I pressed the power button to come out of standby and it worked beautifully. No issue at all.

Hibernate

Hibernate however was another story altogether. I selected 'hibernate' and as before the screen faded and then the hard disc chugged away, more-so than before because it had to write all 640MB of ram to a file, and when nearly done a black screen with some scrolling white text appeared, I didn't have time to note it all but what I did see was something along these lines:-

[138279.xxxxx] Ata1 ACPI get timing Mode failed

The above message was repeated for Ata2 (and so on) for a few lines, but then it eventually shut the systen off (which is correct). Once off, I powered it back on, and this time I was presented with grub, then the Ubuntu boot loader which scrolls across the screen from left to right, and just before the password prompt I saw another few lines of errors:-

BCM4300x Mac suspend failed.

Immediately after those errors popped up I was prompted in X with my password (as I was in suspend mode). I entered it and everything looked fine, but wasnt. Network connectivity was gone, no internet and a quick look at ifconfig showed me this:-

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:90:4B:B2:2B:83
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:84 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:3948 (3.8 KiB)
Interrupt:5

I then manually took eth1 down, and then up again and now I had an ip address and internet connectivity was restored.

Configuring gdesklets and avant-dock

I decided to experiment some more with the desktop, and I chose to install gdesklets and the avant dock. I started with gdesklets by opening Synpatic Package Manager (click on system/administration/synaptic package manager), then in the search field I typed 'gdesktlets' and it showed me two results, so I selected them and I applied those changes. Once gdesklets was installed, you can access it via Applications/accessories/gdesklets.

Installing Avant-dock was a bit harder, you have to add deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/ feisty avant-window-navigator to your sources, update and then apt-cache search avant. You can of course do this in synaptics package manager, by clicking on settings, repositories, and 'add' then paste this line:-

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/ feisty avant-window-navigator

Click Reload, and once done, search for 'avant' without the quotes, then select the 'Avant-Window-Navigator-svn'. You can now apply your changes and have your desktop transformed with gdesklets and the avant-dock. Some of the gdesklets applets refused to work at all, and gave runtime errors, I believe this is because the whole gdesklets project itself is being re-written from scratch. However, this is what it looks like now (last screenshot in the sequence below), groovy.

More updates

3 new updates available, all related to SMB, so I installed them.

>> Part IV (Days 16-20)

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(c) http://www.linux-noob.com 2007.
Please send corrections/suggestions/spelling mistakes to anyweb First draft: June 04, 2007.