Last week, Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” was released. Being a fearless cutting-edge Kubuntu kind of guy, I opted for an upgrade at the earliest possible. So later that Thursday night I set the distribution upgrade going in my rock-stable Kubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Viñales^WMeerkat” AMD64 install’s package manager and went to bed. The servers were clearly being hammered and the ETA of the files required was some 22 hours hence. I got up the next morning to find that the upgrade had halted as some files were not retrievable. I set it going again and this time it didn’t quite take as long, proceeded without a hitch and later that day I was booting into a shiny new operating system.

Five minutes later and I was still booting into a shiny new operating system.

And then I was on the desktop. The long boot was almost certainly a first-boot cleaning up and getting everything ship-shaped deal, I figured. So I did it again, and LO! It was just as slow. Network transfer speeds across the wlan were horrible, there were 30 second pauses in dmesg waiting for some error to be thrown up by my SATA DVD drive, and right at the end of the logs was some sort of problem with IRQs for the onboard audio.

SATA DVD dmesg weirdness

[2.065528] ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m1024@0xfe02f000 port 0xfe02f180 irq 22 [2.610044] ata4: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) [2.611679] ata4.00: ATAPI: TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223C, SB05, max MWDMA2 [3.413170] ata4.00: configured for PIO4 [35.000034] ata4.00: exception Emask 0×0 SAct 0×0 SErr 0×0 action 0×6 frozen [35.000038] ata4.00: failed command: IDENTIFY PACKET DEVICE [35.000043] ata4.00: cmd a1/00:01:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 tag 0 pio 512 in [35.000046] ata4.00: status: { DRDY } [35.000051] ata4: hard resetting link [35.550037] ata4: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) [36.352253] ata4.00: configured for PIO4 [37.152989] ata4: EH complete

hda-intel audio IRQ weirdness

[119.307732] hda-intel: IRQ timing workaround is activated for card #1. Suggest a bigger bdl_pos_adj.

I headed over to the Kubuntu forums and posted a couple of new topics in the appropriate Natty Post Install section with logs etc and asked for help. I love the internet and forums are a pretty special place. The immediate response is usually not the one you were hoping for. I opted for a clean install to remove the upgrade from the list of suspects.

180gigs of ~ rsync later and I was ready to boot off the install CD. I didn’t want to completely wipe the hard disk as I have specific needs. I use the last 10gig of that disk to hold my Windows pagefile, and the last 10gigs of my Windows disk to hold my Linux swap. I also keep an emergency 10gig partition for swap on the Linux disk in case I ever need to pull the Windows one.

Thankfully, KDE now comes with a rather snappy partition manager. I was able to boot off the install CD, go into a live session, clean out the existing Kubuntu partition and then fire up the actual install process and tell it to use it. This went swimmingly well, although I do recommend that you should only instruct the install to get downloads during if you are remarkably patient. It goes and gets all the language files you specifically didn’t get the install DVD to avoid.

At the end of the install it just hung there, waiting to finish. It was something like 90% done, which according to progress bars could mean anything from just started to almost done.

One of the great things about running a live session and installing from it is that underneath the installation procedure you have a fully working operating system, so I was able to open a terminal and see what was going on. Three processes (kwin, knotify and kded4) were each using 100% of their respective cores. I decided now would be a good time to read a book rather than be tempted to try and fix it. Some time later the progress bar went from 90% to done and I was instructed to reboot into my new OS.

Except that for some reason grub had decided to ignore the fact that the UUID had changed with a new partition having been created and I was dumped unceremoniously into a grub recovery prompt. So back into the live CD I go, mount the drive, install grub to it (again) and reboot. This time it worked.

And five minutes later I am on the desktop, with the same problems I was seeing after the upgrade install. So, kudos on a fantastic upgrade script, epic fail on the actual quality of the install.

Luckily, by now some people who really know what they are doing have answered my forum threads, and these are the things I did to fix my problems:

SATA DVD Weirdness

In the file /lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage.rules, comment out the line directly under:

# ATA/ATAPI devices (SPC-3 or later) using the “scsi” subsystem

Then run (as root): update-initramfs -u

Be warned though: this is not a static fix. A later upgrade could overwrite that file and you will have to redo this hack.

hda-intel audio IRQ weirdness

In the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf add the following line:

options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1

But yes, I still have two IRQs assigned to that device, and one of them apparently still causes the same message to appear at the end of dmesg. Also, call me superstitious but if I make any changes to anything under modprobe.d I immediately update initramfs.

Slow wlan transfer speeds

Create a file called /etc/modprobe.d/ath9.conf and in this file write the following:

options ath9k nohwcrypt=1

That fixed that problem.

Other things to consider

If you have an nvidia graphics card, you probably don’t want to use the nouveau drivers, but rather prefer the official binary package from nvidia. Unless you hate 3d and a pretty desktop. So install the proper drivers from ‘additional drivers’ and set about removing nouveau as it’s only going to cause you grief later, probably.

Create a file called /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-local.conf and add the following line:

blacklist nouveau

I also created one to remove ipheth from loading iPhone network tethering as I will set that up if I need it:

blacklist ipheth

update your initramfs again and reboot, again.

You’re now running proper drivers with real opengl. Win.

However, if you make any changes in the nvidia control panel, excepting the ones that you can tell it to write into your xorg.conf, it will lose them as, and correct me if this isn’t completely insane behaviour that ought to have been fixed about a million years ago, Kubuntu does not know how to load the settings unless you tell it. To do that you go into your system settings, find the startup programs thingy and create your own entry with ‘nvidia-settings -l’. Except that this will break if you don’t deselect ‘Include X Display Names in the Config File’ first and you will end up with the same old default settings.

Issues I still have yet to fix

I’m seeing awful tearing in VLC video playback that wasn’t happening in 10.10 with the same settings.

More as I find them, almost certainly.

Conclusion

However much closer Ubuntu 10.10 was to the holy grail, the consumer desktop, I must say that my experiences thus far with 11.04 suggest that one small step for a penguin has been a massive leap back for penguinkind.

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