Ubuntu Netbook Remix 1.01

What do you mean lockups? I installed from the UNR image (for USB) and I could never get any updates because the repositories could not be accessed. This is a known/expected issue (even if you replace the kernel), but has no other repercussions.

 

By lockups I mean everything freezes (including the pointer) and I have to hold down the power button until it turns off.

I was able to get around 26 updates installed without a problem. Seems there are separate netbook repositories. But then there were a remaining 9 updates that refused to install. Weird errors like hashes being wrong, repos not found, etc. 7 of the 9 were open office updates.

I just did a complete reinstall. Rebooted. Entered initial settings. Plugged in a USB drive and it appeared in the favourites on the right but no window opened to show the contents. After that "Quit..." no longer worked, forcing me to hold down the power button to turn it off. It didn't crash, just stopped opening the shutdown/restart/log off options. Same for the small quit icon in the panel at the top.

It also seems not possible to get the linux headers for the default kernel. I get 404 Not Found from apt. This means nothing can be installed from source - pretty useless if you want to try madwifi...

I'm puzzled because there are plenty of people who are finding UNR 1.01 works OK for them. Why does it appear flaky and pretty much unstable for me?

I'm wondering if I should install the full 8.04 then fix the multitude of problems then add the remix UI manually... any pros/cons to doing it this way?

Andy

Update: screensaver turned on. I was curious about the leave message option so I clicked on it. I couldn't type anything into the box. OK, cancel and left it for a while. Now I cannot enter my password to get back in... keypresses are ignored.

After researching LPIA on the Ubuntu forums I see the whole thing is half baked. I guess time to install the full version of Ubuntu and start tweaking until I get what I want.

 

You can install a common i386 version of Ubuntu and add the UNR packages on top of that.

 

That's what I'm working on now, but then you lose the fast bootup time, right? Are there ways to configure the stock Hardy kernel for a faster boot? Any details on that anywhere? I would consider switching to Sickboy's kernel, but then I ran into a problem trying to compile madwifi - complained that libc6 was missing when it wasn't.

Andy

 

II am running Xubuntu 8.10
To finish installing Remix I need to go to System> Prefences>Session, but no such thing exits in my Menu?

 

I'm not sure about that. In my (short) use of UNR, I don't remember a particularly spectacular boot time.

 

A couple of questions (I'm curious)

Why hardy?

Why madwifi?

 

Hardy because Intrepid seems to have more problems on an AAO. I tried it and after running an update the *wired* ethernet speed was cut to 5% of what it was before the update. I also tried UNR and it kept crashing every few minutes. So far Hardy is stable.

Madwifi because it's recommended in the Ubuntu install guide. It says Ath5k drops out under heavy load.

Andy

 

Why Hardy is also my question, because intrepid works much better for me. I use madwifi because ath5k drops out way too much. I watch a lot of streaming video and I transfer a lot of large files over the network. Both things always gave problems.

I do test the ath5k everytime I can see an update, because I would prefer to use that one. Always tested on standard install, so no custom kernel (yet).

 

Try to install any fresh packaged software like Pidgin or smthn' else from getdeb.
Perl 5.10 required and many other fresh libs. Say goodbye to Hardy.

 

I've managed to get remix working &I'm very pleased with it.
One thing I didn't like however was not being able to open two copies of nautilus side by side for drag and dropping etc.
So I've switched over to Dolphin which has split screens, I also managed to set Dolphin as the default filemanager for the right hand buttons

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/nautilus-folder-handler.desktop

Scroll to the bottom of file to a line that reads Exec=nautilus --no-desktop %U

and change it to

Exec=dolphin %U

 

Same here. Tried using a few different servers, with the same result. Is there a solution to get updates (+ dist-upgrade...) working?

 

Same here. If I only use the repositories under the Third Party tab in the Software Sources window (they come from http://netbook-remix.archive.canonical.com/dists/) it works. The normal Ubuntu software repositories were disabled by default for me. If I try to enable them, I get that same error message.

Unfortunately, the netbook-remix ones are out of date, ie. only Open Office 2.4, and they haven't been updated at all for at least two months.

Maybe it's better to install the normal Ubuntu first and then add the Remix packages. But this would result in a bloated, slower install that is not optimized for the Atom, right? Any way of getting more recent software while still taking advantage of the Atom optimizations? This is the first Linux distro I've actually found usable on the AAO. I could see myself making it my permanent OS if this and a few other issues were resolved. Otherwise I guess it's back to XP for me.

 

I've tried the UNR version but for reasons of more recent versions of software I returned to the 'standard' ubuntu. Battery life is almost the same since I use my custom kernel. I used almost the same tweaks on both systems. Major difference is that my AA1 is much more responsive now as it was with UNR or intrepid kernel.

 

It's the "almost" the same part that bothers me. Since I have the 3-cell battery, every minute of battery life counts However this version of Ubuntu seems to be pretty much abandoned. Updates are sparse at best.

There's the specially optimized version of the i386 kernel on Aspireonekernel.com, which adds to the confusion - it's optimized for the AAO, but it's not a LPIA kernel but a regular i386 one... So you get the advantages of a hand-tuned kernel, but you loose any benefits of the LPIA optimizations - all software in the LPIA repositories are optimized for LPIA, not just the kernel itself.
There are at least 4-5 different versions of Ubuntu alone to choose from now, in addition to the countless other distros available.

 

I'm currently running UNR (for the LPIA stuff) with XFCE wm and everything is working great now except the fan control; The fan pretty much seems to have a mind of its own, being on usually all the time.

I have tried various methods for controlling the fan, but all seem to fail:
- With acerfand running the fan just constantly turns on and off every second or so
- With acerhdf 0.2.* kernel module the fan turns off, but after about 20 seconds of having the module loaded the whole laptop just suddenly turns off
- acerhdf 0.3 kernel module does not compile, it says "acerhdf.c:383: error: unknown field 'get_crit_temp' specified in initializer"

I'm guessing the UNR kernel (2.6.24-19-lpia) is too old for the acerhdf 0.3, and there may be some other module/service that is already controlling the fan that causes problems with acerfand? Any ideas on how to fix any of this?

 

Any idea when the next release will be out? :/

 

Interpid Ibex + Netbook Remix + Sickboy kernel...

 

Was this an answer to my question?

If it was, it includes two procedures i'm not particularly fond/knowledgeable of.

 

I'll answer myself: apparently there's an UNR USB-image of the 9.04 Alpha available. Oh well, can't be worse than 1.0.1 while still being Ubuntu.