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.

There was some recent discussion on this site about Linux and whether it was a consumer-ready operating system or not, and having installed Kubuntu on my PC alongside Windows7 recently I now feel much better qualified to comment.

Installing Kubuntu 10.4 (Lucid Lynx) is a breeze. I mean, really simple. All you have to do is download the ISO, get the little application to make it install from memory stick, configure your BIOS to boot from memory stick and reboot. Then it asks you a few simple questions, sets your timezone for you if you’re net-connected, gives you some hard-disk options like “use all of this one” or somesuch, and then it chugs away happily for really not very long at all. To anyone used to installing Windows, this thing is a lot faster than the usual 45 minutes.

Then it says “OK, I’m done now – pull out your install media and hit enter” and reboots the machine when you comply. Then it loads up GRUB and from there the default Kubuntu option.

Job done, it really is that simple.

Unplug your LAN and look to your wifi, and LO! You are not able to connect to your router if you have any wireless NIC using the popular Ralink RT2860 chipset because it does not support WPA2 out of the box. This is a driver issue. No big deal, right? You just go to the Ralink website (back on wires) and get yourself some fresh Linux drivers and install them … except not. No, what you get is source. You have to edit a couple of files and compile them yourself, then work some command line magic to unload the old drivers and load the new. To do this you just apt-got build-essentials which is GCC, a bunch of Linux headers and whatever else the average joe will need to be able to compile stuff.

This is ok, not too much trouble for a geek. Especially given a nice walkthrough after a short google. I’m not scared of the command line, and I know a bit about using bash. Edit a couple of files because WPA2 is disabled by default here too, run make as root, etc etc.

Then you notice that if you have an nvidia graphics card, Kubuntu has gone straight for the Nouveau open-source driver, which is great so long as all you want is 2d graphics. But really, if it’s not prettier than Windows why would you bother with KDE? I love kmail, but I’ve done without it for years.

Installing the proper binary nvidia drivers is somewhat less simple than compiling your own wifi drivers. It requires that you unload and then seek-and-destroy every mention of Nouveau, adding it to a soon-to-be-depracated (according to a warning that pops up on the command line from time to time) blacklist file, hopping into and back out of single-user root mode from the recovery options in GRUB before installing the drivers from the command line. Thankfully it configures X for you.

I wasn’t giving this my full attention, so it did take me a few weeks to finally nail down getting Kubuntu installed with working wireless and nvidia drivers, but I was still getting this weird thing happen every time I started up Kubuntu: the system would boot, everything would load up and then a few seconds later the screen would go all single colour and the computer was completely unresponsive. I SSHed in from another machine and had a look at what was going on, and Xorg was running 100% CPU. Why? I still have no idea. I found the simple fix was to disable ACPI on the startup command in GRUB.

What this means is that my computer now runs a Linux desktop that can’t turn itself off without help.

So it’s taken a bit of work, a bit of searching internets for answers, compiling my own drivers … and it’s been a lot of fun getting here and getting it working. There is a sense of achievement involved in the journey taken to get me here, writing this article in the same OpenOffice I run in Windows. But this is not what you would call the consumer operating system experience. This is pure hobbyist stuff, plain and simple. This is what makes Linux great for people like me, and if you’re reading this probably people like you. Although I bet most of you, if you love UNIX on your desktop, are using OSX instead because stuff just works and you hate having to faff about with drivers ever.

But if you are a Linux advocate who says it’s ready for the masses, ask your grandma what chipset her wireless NIC has.

Kubuntu is very nice. It’s pretty simple to install and I bet it works just great on a netbook or something so long as what little hardware it has is properly supported. But the second you run into any kind of problem you are in the shell if you’re lucky, or fighting a losing battle with dependencies if you’re not.

It’s just not ready to compete with Windows or OSX on a consumer level yet, and I rather suspect that as long as X lives and breathes it never will be. No consumer is ever going to want to have to know what sits between the desktop they can see and the drivers or kernel they can’t. Most people never want to have to hear about windowing systems or compilers. These are the kind of people who refer to their computer box as their hard disk, and will tell you that they write their letters in Microsoft. The best advice you can give someone like that is to go buy themselves an iMac.

My Windows 7 experience probably reads a lot like a lot of other people’s experiences. I put the RC1 onto my wife’s PC as soon as it came out, as she was running VISTA at the time (I blame Spore). I then dallied with a dual boot system on my own machine as XP SP3 was running my racing simulators just fine and I didn’t need to splash out on a memory upgrade to make my machine games worthy in W7. Once I’d got the extra memory though there was no real reason to keep XP around longer than it took me to find a cross disk migrate tool so I could move my PATA installed W7 onto my SATA drive, for which I thank Acronis who sell an awesome bunch of tools to handle exactly this sort of thing.

So about a week ago I get a MASSIVE panic on when I see a message pop up telling me that my RC1 install will roll over and stick its legs in the air (and not in a good way) at the end of Feb. Now, I’ve been running this install as my main desktop for 9 months, as my wife has on hers. So in very little time I have to install two Windows 7s without losing any program data, settings, game saves and all the other gumph you accumulate on your desktop machine. I really really don’t want to do a fresh install, and my wife tells me that if I mess with her Sims3 neighbourhoods she will have parts of my person as adornment, if you know what I’m saying.

So two upgrade installs are in order.

And this is where the path gets a little twisty. You cannot upgrade RC1 into a release W7. You cannot upgrade an Ultimate install into anything other than an Ultimate. 32Bit only goes to 32bit. Antitrust N releases can only upgrade other antitrust N releases. So basically you can only use the upgrade install function if you are upgrading what you have to the exact same thing. I understand it deigns to allow you to upgrade VISTA to W7, so long as all the above criteria are met; i.e. 32bit to 32bit, ultimate to ultimate, etc.

RC1 is Ultimate. I don’t have more than 3gig RAM and do like a bit of hardware driver support, so my install is RC1 32bit. So I need to find me a release to market Windows 7 Ultimate 32Bit (non antitrust N) to install and then I have 30 days to work out how I’m going to pay for them (MS are kind enough to allow you a 30 days grace trial period before activation), or get me a cheaper version and hose everything.

Hang on, I hear you think – didn’t this guy just say you can’t do an upgrade of RC1 anyway? Well, gentle reader, just because you can’t do something doesn’t mean it can’t be done. There’s two files on an install ISO that you can edit to enable you to 1) install a different level of install, and 2) specify the minimum upgrade version.

In \Sources\ there is a file called EI.CFG that tells the installer what version it installs. So delete that and it will allow you to choose Basic, Expert, Advanced, Home, Professional, Ultimate, Whatever, Etc. So long as you have the correct valid key for the version you are installing, it’s all good, right?

Also in \Sources\ there is a file called CVERSION.INI and this is the baby you want to edit to enable upgrading your RC1. Change MinClient=whatever to MinClient=7000 and you’re good to go.

Seriously, that’s all it takes. Delete one file, edit another. Save the ISO, burn it to a DVD, run setup.exe and jump through the whiney driver hoops.

Now, that said, who wants to buy me a couple of W7 Ultimate installs?