Ubuntu on a T22

Prelude

Ubuntu Installation, first phase

Partition the hard-drive

As the was nothing on the 40 Gb hard-drive I just had installed in the laptop, I chose the partitioning method Erase entire disk. However, as I did not like the default partitions (just one root and one swap partition) the installation process suggested, I chose "no" to the subsequent question on whether to write the changes to disk.

Ubuntu Installation, second phase

Twiddled my thumbs while the installation proceeded (copying tons of packages from the CD).

Confirmed that I am in the Europe/Stockholm time zone.

Chose the full name, username, and password for the first, privileged user. This user will automatically be included in the administrator groups that are allowed to sudo to do work normally performed by the root user. (The root account is disabled by default in Ubuntu. Boy, did that take time for me to figure out, but once I did it, I actually decided to try it out and did not enable the root user first thing. Is kind of a nice security thing.)

Removed the Install CD and let the machine reboot to install more packages already copied from the CD and finalise the installation.

Twiddled my thumbs a really long time...

Easy kernel updating

The kernel that gets installed from the installation CD is 2.6.10-5-386. However, as the T22 is fitted with a Pentium III, 2.6.10-5-686 would be a more suitable choice. Thus, we use synaptic to mark linux-386, linux-headers-2.6.10-5-386, linux-image-2.6.10-5-386, linux-image-386, linux-restricted-modules-2.6.10-5-386, and linux-restricted-modules-386 for removal and the corresponding 686-packages, linux-686, linux-headers-2.6.10-5-686, linux-image-2.6.10-5-686, linux-image-686, linux-restricted-modules-2.6.10-5-686, and linux-restricted-modules-686 for installation. (With Ubuntu 5.10, it was instead kernel 2.6.12-9, but the principle of 386 and 686 is still the same.)

This is a quite funny operation to perform, as you remove the linux-image and stuff needed in order to boot the machine. If something fails before the corresponding 686-packages are safely installed, the machine will probably be totally unbootable. ;-)

Networking

If you plug the machine into a network with dhcp, the machine connects itself and starts to download missing packages during the first, set-up all packages boot up - long before it starts X and reaches the login splash. Fine, but what about wlan?

The easy fix is to add an 'iface eth1 inet dhcp' and an 'auto eth1' in /etc/network/interface, and remove the lines marked for removal in '/etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts'. Then you just need to plug in your wireless card and do a 'sudo /etc/init.d/network restart'.

However, what about scanning and choosing between available wireless networks? 'iwlist eth1 scan' gives a "Operation not supported" and there are rumours on google about one needing to get a driver patch to enable scanning. Also, I am having troubles with repeated "unregister_netdevice: waiting for eth1 to become free", that makes it hard to use the machine and impossible to shut it down without the use of the power button... Need to be investigated.

Update: bought a cheap Topcom Skyr@cer PC Card 4011b which, alas, did not exactly work out of the box. About only cardctl and lspci noticed it. Decided to try ndiswrapper. Hoary comes with ndiswrapper in the kernel by default, so no need to compile a kernel module or install ndiswrapper-source, only ndiswrapper-utils is needed. Then you insert the CD with Windows-drivers (and two RedHat-drivers!) and do the following:

sudo ndiswrapper -i /media/cdrom/driver/win2000/netr8180.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -l
sudo ndiswrapper -m
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

And, presto, the leds on the card lights and I suddenly have a wlan0 interface. (Have to update /etc/network/interfaces accordingly, either adding wlan0 or replacing eth1, and, as I try to make others have to work to access my wireless network, I also added wireless-essid and wireless-key entries to the wlan0 section.)

With ndiswrapper, sudo iwlist wlan0 scan works, too (but only with super user privileges).

Update: Because of my Box for Digital TV, I needed to upgrade my wavelan at home from 802.11b to 802.11g. Thus, I also needed a new pcmcia-card for my laptop. Unfortunately, I happened to buy one with a rather unknown chipset... No common Linux drivers, ndiswrapper worked rather unsatisfactory. What to do? A demo license from Linuxant turned out to work very well. Thus I bought a real license.

X

Obviously, as we reached the login splash, X was automagically set up. Apparently, the Ubuntu team has done a lot of work in the areas of autodetection, especially for laptops. Thank you, Ubuntu.

However, I would like a resolution of 1400x1050 rather than the default 1024x768.

Edited /ext/X11/xorg.conf, turning the depth 24 1024x768 screen (unnecessary taxing when displaying videos), into a depth 16 1400x1050 screen. Then I made the mistake of thinking that a HUP signal would make X re-read the configuration. Instead it terminated X. Ooops. Unfortunately, the restarted X was still in 1024x768.

Recent update: It depends on the hardware. The other T22 I installed got 1400x1050 without any fuss. Probably, it is a newer T22 than the other one, with better capabilities.

Ooops. Restarting X makes the text console unusable - it is only a garble of coloured stripes... Need to fixed, too.

One more good thing, System -> Preferences -> Windows, "Select windows when the mouse moves over them" (I am totally used to this).

Update: (20060518) System->Preferences->Font. Play around with it. Also visit the Details menu. If you use the laptop's lcd screen or and external flat screen, subpixel anti-aliasing is probably a good thing.

Also, note the current resolution in the Details menu. I have currently 96 dot per inch. Then run 'xdpyinfo | egrep "(dimensions|resolution)"'. I get:

  dimensions:    1600x1200 pixels (423x318 millimetres)
  resolution:    96x96 dots per inch
    

However, I only managed to get this after adding a DisplaySize line, with an X and an Y value to the Monitor section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. To get initial values, use the formula displaysize = pixelsize/96*25.4. I.e., 1600/96*25.4 = 423.33333333333333333316, 1200/96*25.4 = 317.5. 423 and 317 worked for me to get 'resolution: 96x96 dots per inch'.

apt source list

In order to be able to easily install the software packages of our choice, we need to enable further Ubuntu repositories to search for matching packages in. This is really a matter of editing /etc/apt/source.list, but as I like Synaptic (a graphical package manager interface to apt), I usually start Synaptic and chose "Repositories" in the "Settings" menu. Here you can easily add the Universe and Multiverse, which are not enabled by default.

The Ubuntu repositories' components:

main/Officially supported

The main distribution of free software supported by Ubuntu

restricted/Restricted copyright

Very commonly used software that is supported even though it is not available under a completely free licence.

universe/Community maintained

Every kind of softwares, should be easily installed, but comes with no guarantee of security fixes and support. Use at your own risk

multiverse/Non-free

Non-free software. Each user need to verify his/her rights to use it themselves. Not supported. Use at your own risk

Keyboard

Swedish Characters

There are numerous ways to get yourself Swedish letters on the keyboard. However, I find this option very convenient:

1. Right-click in the top gnome-panel
2. Choose "Add to Panel..."
3. Add the "Keyboard Indicator"
4. Right-click on the new Keyboard Indicator and choose "Open Keyboard Preferences"
5. Goto the "Layouts" tab
6. Add the Swedish layout

Now you can click on the Keyboard Indicator to cycle through your added keyboards. However, note that the selection is per application, so when you, for instance, have switched from "USA" to "Swe", you need to return with the mouse pointer to the target application directly, without visiting other windows on the way. When the indicator shows "Swe" when a window is active, you can find å, ä, and ö, among others, in their ordinary places.

The best thing with this scheme, though, is that you quickly can change back to the American layout when you, for instance, need a > or < (as you know, on Swedish keyboards, the left shift is more narrow to make place for an extra key next to "z" with >, <, and |. As no such key is present at an American keyboard, it is good to be able to switch between the layouts in a hurry whenever you need it. Of course, that makes you always go for the wrong layout with your fingers all the time, but that's life.

Compose and CapsLock

Other useful things you can do when in "Keyboard Preferences" is to choose a Compose key (I chose right alt) and make an extra control key out of the dreaded CapsLock.

Character encoding in the terminals

utf-8 might be the future, but is hardly endurable in your terminals as long as all your files and remote systems you connect to are using latin-1, iso-8859-15, or the like. However, it was not enough to change the LANG and LANGUAGE environmental variables. Instead, you have to do a 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales' and enable some suitable encoding, like, for instance, en_US.ISO-8859-15.

Sound

OK, Ubuntu uses esd by default. Then we install mpg124-esd (using Synaptic) and tries to play an mp3. The sound seem to be working out of the box.

Video

As it currently still is legal to backup DVDs in Sweden, we can go right ahead and execute the script /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh in order to install libdvdcss. This is illegal in the US.

Also installed gstreamer0.8-esd and w32codecs, to have my bases covered with regards to multimedia codecs. (Downloaded and installed ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/dists/stable/main/binary-i386/w32codecs_20050412-0.0_i386.deb - want to try to leave the Marillat repository out of Synaptic if I can.)

Xine

Installed xine-ui and dependencies using Synaptic.

Popped in a DVD movie and tried to view it with Xine. It worked directly - both video and sound, without glitches or framedrops. Unbelievable. With all the troubles I had with video with an identical T22 running Debian. Hats off for Ubuntu!

But, wait, there is more... Remember to run xine-check and follow its suggestions - otherwise xine sometimes refuses to start properly. It is also good to install libxine-dev (which, among other things, comes with a xine-config, which xine-check likes).

Also, if you ever experiences that xine only displays a blue screen, sometimes with another black rectangle attached, try to add the line Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps" to the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf (http://xinehq.de/index.php/faq#BLUESCREEN).

Although Xv works very well for viewing video with Xine on the lcd screen, it was buggy when I wanted to scale the image down to 640x480 in order to fit my TV screen. The movie was shrunk as it should along the X-axis, but the Y-axis did not shrink enough so part of the picture was outside the Xine-window (most often all of the sub-titles). It works to switch to, for instance, Xshm as driver, but that driver is slower than Xv. Need to check for new, better versions of the Xv driver!

Update: It seems that it was the DVD at hand that the Xv driver had problems rescaling. An ordinary .avi movie rescaled just fine (i.e., xine -V xv -B -G 640x480+0+0 works fine in conjunction with s3switch tv to view video with one's television set over a s-video to scart cable.

mplayer

However, I am really a mplayer user, so of course, I need to try to get mplayer running, too.

Installed mplayer-586 (the version for Pentium machines like the T22), mplayer-docs, and mplayer-fonts, with dependencies, and tried to play the same DVD. "Your system is too SLOW to play this!" It seems that mplayer is not really up to the task, but that xine is.

(mplayer-nogui does not work better.)

Open Issue: how to tweak mplayer into working as well as xine?

TV

The T22 can output s-video, so naturally, we would like to connect it to our TV in order to view videos. For this, we need to install s3switch to be able to switch to PAL and to enable s-video output to the TV. Interesting enough, just like on my old Debian machine, s3switch triggers a segmentation fault when you do a "s3switch PAL". However, it does work, because the image on the TV turns from black and white to colour. Perhaps a later version will not seg-fault?

Suspend to disk hibernation

Ubuntu automagically adds hibernation as an alternative at the logout menu. Very convenient. It works, too. However, you get a small error at boot time, pointing out that "resume= option should be used to set suspend device" (check dmesg).

To remedy this, we edit the grub menu ('sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst'). Here, we duplicate the first entry, renaming them to "Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.10-5-386 (resume)" and "Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.10-5-386 (no resume)". Then, we add 'resume=/dev/hda4' to the kernel line of the resume entry and noresume to the kernel line of the no resume entry. Now we can chose at boot time in grub whether we want to use or discard a present suspension image.

How do we know what device to add to the resume option in the kernel line? Simple - check /etc/fstab to see what device the swap partition is on.

Update: Ubuntu 5.10 seemed to have stream-lined it further, requiring no manual tweaking whatsoever.

Heimdal Kerberos

Installed heimdal-clients, heimdal-clients-x, heimdal-dev (to be able to compile Arla), and heimdal-docs, with dependencies.

Edited /etc/krb5.conf to set default_realm to NADA.KTH.SE, added Nada as a realm:

NADA.KTH.SE = {
         kdc = k5-nada-1.pdc.kth.se
         kdc = kerberos.nada.kth.se
         kdc = k5-nada-2.pdc.kth.se
        admin_server = kerberos.nada.kth.se
}

and added

[appdefaults]
        encryption = true
	no-addresses = yes

(no-addresses to be able to use Kerberos to access work from home without to much hassle, too).

Tried out kauth, klist, and a ktelnet -f. Worked flawlessly. ;-)

Arla AFS

Postfix

OK, the configuration files look pretty different than for my old Postfix installation, but here it goes!

We modify the entries myhostname, relayhost (host:port), and add virtual_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual, smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes, smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/smtp_auth, and smtp_sasl_security_options = noplaintext.

Also, we create the file virtual, redirecting root to an address we normally read, and smtp_auth, with the credentials for the relay host.

Finally, you need to run postmap on these last files, in order to convert them to Berkeley database format and restart postfix.

That was enough to get postfix to contact ratatosk in order to relay the mails, but ratatosk refused to accept them as long as /etc/mailname (localhost.localdomain) was used as sender address. After modifying it, I can mail via ratatosk! The mails to root@wasabi get relayed as well.

Second Hard Drive

Thinkpads are pretty cool. With my brand new Ultrabay 2000 Hard Drive Adaptor, I can slip the old 20 Gb hard drive into the Ultrabay as a second hard drive. I could mount the old partitions (sudo mount -t [type] /dev/hdcN [dir]), but since the only thing on it was my first Ubuntu installation, it was not much use. Instead, I wanted to re-partition it to just one, big volume. cfdisk solved that (sudo cfdisk /dev/hdc), followed by a sudo mkfs.reiserfs /dev/hdc1. Now it just a simple matter of mounting it wherever I want it: sudo mount -t reiserfs /dev/hdc1 [mount point].

The second hard drive is a real life-saver (well, at least time-saver) when re-installing one's production laptop, as one quick and easily can backup one's home-directory, /etc, and other files that you don't want to lose and takes (too) long to backup over the network.

Tivoli/TSM

Not only is it good to be able to do backups, it is good to be able to read back previously made backups. Luckily, we have a tsm in place at work just for this!

Necessary steps:

• Download a suitable version for your architecture from IBM (ftp://ftp.boulder.ibm.com/storage/tivoli-storage-management/patches/client/). I downloaded ftp://ftp.boulder.ibm.com/storage/tivoli-storage-management/patches/client/v5r3/Linux/Linux86/v532/TSM532C_FIX2_LINUX86.tar.
• Untar the tar-ball: tar xf TSM532C_FIX2_LINUX86.tar
• Make deb:s of the API and backup accessories rpm:s: sudo alien -d TIVsm-BA.i386.rpm, sudo alien -d TIVsm-API.i386.rpm.
• Install them: sudo dpkg -i tivsm-ba_5.3.2-3_i386.deb, sudo dpkg -i tivsm-api_5.3.2-3_i386.deb.
• Do some testruns. I quickly discovered that I needed to install libstdc++5, as libstdc++6 wasn't Tivoli's cup of tea. Also, if I wanted to keep the libs that came with the TIVsm-API rpm, I needed to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/tivoli/tsm/client/api/bin before running the commands.
• You should also set your locale to C prior to run dsm*, either you will have to install the appropriate languages files (other rpm:s) or do some creative soft-linking.
• dsm.opt should, in my case, contain the line 'SErvername TZ.PDC.KTH.SE'.
• dsm.sys should, in my case, contain the lines:
  

  SErvername      TZ.PDC.KTH.SE
     COMMMethod         TCPip
     TCPPort            1500
     TCPServeraddress   tz.pdc.kth.se
     NODENAME           aioli.pdc.kth.se
     INCLEXCL           /opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin/dsm.inc
     PASSWORDACCESS     GENERATE
     PASSWORDDIR        /etc/tsm
     COMPRESSION        NO
  

• dms.inc should govern what really is backed up through 'exclude' and 'include' directives (google for them!). Here are a few examples: 'exclude /.../cache/.../*', 'exclude.dir /dev', 'exclude.fs /scratch', 'include.encryption /home/.../*'.
• Your tsm administrator need to reset the password for your node too (on the tsm, /usr/bin/dsmadmc.local, 'update node <nodename> <newpassword> forcereset=yes').
• Then you need to run dsmc as root locally and give the above set password, to have it stored encrypted locally, so that you will then be able to run the dsm* commands as yourself.
• To run the graphical interface, dsmj, you might have to install a proper Java first.

	http://www.manja.se/selander/ubuntu_t22/index.html (guacamole)
	Last modified Saturday, 13-Feb-2016 18:51:22 UTC