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  1. Ubuntu tips

    November 28, 2008 by Oğuz Yarımtepe

    Today i was trying to compile a driver under Infra-Linux distro. Infra-Linux can be usefull for the ones who are encounter with the commercial restriction of Ubuntu trademark policy. My firm is producing laptops and one of the customers asked Linux installed laptops. The trademark policy of Ubuntu doesn’t allow one firm to desitribute products with Ubuntu installed although you will not charge for it. ıt is possible to distribute Ubuntu installed things but this requires some legal agreements. This may have some advantages i am sure. But for the ones who don’t want to deal with such thing there are other solutions.  One of them is Infa-Linux. It is developed for to solve this restriction. Based on hardy and with some customizations. They didn’t change the Ubuntu distro a lot just some icon sets, splash screens and some more changes which will not effect using the Hardy repositories. After installing the distro indeed the Hardy repositories are enabled also. The thing is, installation is by default Russian :). For the ones who are looking for using Ubuntu at their commercial products but without restrictions, i can suggest them Infra-Linux.

    I know there are other Ubuntu derivatives. You may want to share them also as a comment to this post.

    The second thing is the compiling problem i encountered. “no rule to make target” error is a common error when we are using make command for source files. It may be because of some missing packages. The solution for that is installing module-assistant and then running “sudo m-a prepare” command from command line. I was still getting the same error. Then i found that it may be because of the space character at the directory names :). The source file is under a directory which has a space in its name at my system. So i moved it to another place. And voila. It worked.

    And a little fun.

    I have been watching Avatar for a while. I should say, i really liked it. I think there should be some Cartoon Meme thing also 🙂

    Category Ubuntu | Tags: | No Comments

  2. One tip and another OpenWeek

    October 29, 2008 by Oğuz Yarımtepe

    I have already read the Fridge and saw the new OpenWeek will be held next week. I checked the timetable and found really interesting topics. Planning to attend the Netbook Remix, packaging, bazaar, Python and bug fixing related topics.

    And a simple topic. If you have a problem about changing keyboard layout, like although you had changed it from GUI but is not taking effect, then try running oem-config with sudo.

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  3. Test applications at Ubuntu

    October 17, 2008 by Oğuz Yarımtepe

    You may be needing to test you computer battery life time and S3 mode like me. There is not a current tool to test S3 mode. Indeed making your computer sleep and waking at a spesific time is really easy from console. So i wrote a small script for the ones who wants to test the S3 mode of their computer. It is run like “./sleeper.sh somenumber”. It waits 90 seconds before entering the suspend mode then enters the suspend mode, make the computer wait at suspend mode 3 minutes and then power up.Change the DATA_DIR before running the script.

    EDIT: You will need to add this line to your sudoer’s (run sudo visudo to edit the file) file:

    yourusername ALL = NOPASSWD: /bin/bash

    The other tool i want to mention is the Battery Life Toolkit. You may be wondering the total amount of time your battery will last if you use it for office applications or play game. So download bltk . To test, you may just download also the OOffice1.4 from the SourceForge site. After extracting and running “make” put the office package under “extern” directory and then run make install. When you run ./bltk -O you will see an OpenOfice simulation. When the battery finishes, it will end the simulation and you will be able to see the bltk report about the battery life time.

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  4. Ubuntu tips & tricks

    October 15, 2008 by Oğuz Yarımtepe

    This is a general approach to enable the fn+somekey function work.

    Lets take into consideration of fn+f1 that enables and disables my wireless adapter. I checked first the syslog output

    $ tail -f /var/log/syslog

    Use ‘setkeycodes e02c <keycode>’ to make it known

    Yours may be different that e02c. We should define a keycode for this scan code. e056 is the scancode that our kernel is detected. Open the file /usr/share/hotkey-setup/key-constants and take one the key constants that looks suitable to you. setkeycodes should be run with sudo so to try it is working

    $ sudo setkeycodes e02c 218

    $ xev

    Press the key combination to see whether your X detects the code for the keys after defining the kernel keycodes. You should see the keycodes defined for your key combination. It will be different than 218. Take the x keycode and use it at Xmodmap file.

    Create a file under /etc/X11/ with the name Xmodmap.

    Just write the keycodes you want to assign something like:

    keycode 243 = XF86Launch3

    XF86Launch3 is taken from /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB. Choose an unassigned keysymbol name. XF86Launch ones  seem ok.

    Then by using gconf-editor define a script to run. So first define XF86Launch3 at the /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_3 value part. Then define a script path for the value of /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_3. You may create a script that will enable or disable wireless under /usr/loca/bin like

    #!/bin/bash

    dbus-send –system –type=method_call –dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.setWirelessEnabled boolean:true

    so just write /usr/local/bin/somescritname.sh at the value part.

    Go to terminal windows and write update-gconf-defaults to make your effects work. When you press the key combination the script will launch.

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  5. Ubuntu Hardy tips & tricks

    October 3, 2008 by Oğuz Yarımtepe

    If you have a freeze problem during startup and the splash bar is not proceeding, edit the grub screen by pressing the “e” button on the keyboard and remove the “splash” and “quiet” parts from the kernel parameters to see what is going on during the kernel boot process. At my situation the problem was related with r8169 module. I had installed Ubuntu Hardy 64bit desktop edition to my laptop. When i checked the messages i realised that just after r8169 loading, boot proces was freezing. So by playing kernel parameters like adding pci=noacpi pci=nopci, somehow i managed to reach the desktop and blacklist the r8169 by adding the line “blacklist r8169”. Then recreated the initramfs by update-initramfs -u. At the next reboot the problem was removed.

    Category Ubuntu | Tags: | 2 Comments

  6. debugging a problem

    September 25, 2008 by Oğuz Yarımtepe

    Today i realised that there may be some other factors that is causing the problem on your system other than software itself. Let me explain a bit more. I have been working on a netbook project that will be on the market soon with Ubuntu Netbook Remix installed. I have been dealing with the wireless adapter that will be plugged on netbook for a while because although the driver is compiled and installed without errors, somehow it was not possible to use it for Internet connection. Indeed the situation is explained as a bug at Launchpad, and i was not the only one suffering from it. But the driver was working on the Ubuntu Hardy sytem without errors with the same adapter. I was thinking that the reason may be either from the driver itself, because there were some “No Rx description available” messages at the syslog output, or from the kernel itself, because the system was atom based and the kernel is an lpia one. There was also another main problem that the system was not able to come out from suspend mode when the adapter is plugged. I first thought it may be a driver issue and decided to disable the wireless adapter at the sleep scripts. So i checked the /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d directory and added a 01wireless script that will disable and unload the module and if the operation is a resume, will reload the module and up the adapter. It didn’t make any sense at the situation. The next thing was checking the driver. There was also a rtl-wifi drivers on the net and the Realtek one seems a fork of this driver. So i started to check the code, check the dmesg and kern.log outputs to guess what can be the problomatic thing. Then i suddenly remember the suspend problem also happened even i haven’t installed the driver ! I just didn’t give enough importance to that at that time thinking to compile and run the driver as soon as possible. I plugged the adapter out and tried. Now that time it was possible to wake from sleep up. I asked my colleague, who is working on the hardware design, to check the PCB if there are any errors. And voila ! There was a voltage leak, protecting the adapter waking up from sleep. At the new layout this problem was recovered. No one had thought this may be a problem about suspend because at the tests with windows the system was waking up.

    Then i changed the PCB with the new one and started to try the adapter on this system. This time the adapter was not able to detect any SSIDs at the wlan ! Same driver same adapter, a few minutes ago were able to scan the wireless network, but now it was not possible. I checked the syslog messages via tail -f and inserting the wireless module to the kernel. The message was strange because it was saying “the driver is not possible to scan SSIDs” ! Then i decided to think what had changed. BIOS was updated to a new release, there may be something wrong. I asked some information about the new release and the BIOS team said they didn’t see any problems with the wireless. Ok what else? Nothing indeed. I decided to be sure the adapter is working correct. There was already an open system which is being used by my BIOS developer colleague. I asked him whether he was able to scan the network via the wireless adapter. He hessitated and said yes, indeed he was not possible at first try, he started to scan after pluging the battery ! Ok my battery is not plugged and this may be a problem. I asked him to try. We plugged the battery, and guess what, there was no scan results. We decided to think what can be the problem. He then started to repeat what he did at that time. One of his actions was suspending the system. After waking up from suspend the adapter was scanning ! It happened on the win$ system. But i was surprised. There was something wrong with the BIOS. I haven’t tested the suspend thing at Ubuntu system yet. But today i learned that there may be hardware or BIOS related problems causing the problem at your system, especially if you are working on an open system that is being developed each time 🙂

    Category Ubuntu | Tags: | No Comments

  7. developer week

    August 27, 2008 by Oğuz Yarımtepe

    I was reading the Fridge and checked the presentations at the Ubuntu Developer Week. I haven’t realised that the Developer Week will be held on next week so i checked the wiki also to learn the details about participations and rules. I found many interesting topics to follow during the 5 days. Python related topics, Ubuntu and Gnome tips, bug resolving techniques, intro to MOTU, PPA and BZR were the ones that sound exciting at my first glance.

    Category Ubuntu | Tags: | 1 Comment

  8. opensuse 11 vs. ubuntu hardy

    August 20, 2008 by Oğuz Yarımtepe

    I have been dealing with OpneSuse 11 last few day. I was trying to run a Motorola sm56 modem on it.

    The installation was quiete easy. I was able to choose the package categories, manually partiton my disk and let the Suse configure the devices as its own way. After the installation, i didn’t have problems with my Intel GM965/GL960 card and the KDE desktop opened without problem. I was able to choose KDE 4.0 during the installation step but i preferred to use the version 3.5.9 because of its stable functionality. Then i checked whether my wireless card is detected automatically and the answer was yes. After that my probloatic life began with the OpenSuse network manager because although i was able to see my card at the knetworkmanager and create a new profile, i was not able to connect by using it. After opening yast and editing the wireless card information without changing anything but just pressing next and rebooting i was able to connect. Strange hugh? I was once at the #suse channell at the freenode and what they said is the current network manager is bugy. Some even didn’t suggested me to use it :). During the OpenSuse experince i never managed to run the network manager as i configured.

    With the new OpenSuse 11, it is possible to use the OneClick property and forget thinking about the rpm repo addition. But you need an Internet connection for it :). OpenSuse has many repos for different branches. For a beginner it may be hard to find the repos and add them to the yast to enable the download from net. I realised also that the software management tool is also bugy enough to force me use xkill to stop it running. It was freezing sometimes while downloading from net and was not able to press the abort button which makes me use xkill. The restarting is making the package download session continue.

    I also needed to revert to an older kernel during my experience, but as i read from the forums there is no easy rpm based solution, and it was not possible to use the package manager to install an older kernel to the system.

    After all those things i can say i am happy with my current Hardy system. Network manager is working as expected or at least i am able to use the konsole power and configure the wireless card. The default package settings include generally eveything a user needs. After the installation compiz was enabled and i don’t need to do anything extra for it. And from my point of view, I find apt quiete handy and efficient comparing to yum or other konsole tools.

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  9. dual monitor at nvidia card

    August 7, 2008 by Oğuz Yarımtepe

    Here is a simple tip for the ones that have nvidia card like me and see no VGA or LVDS related output at the xrandr -q output at the terminal. Try nvidia-settings and choose xserver configuration and press detect. Then configure the the detected screen when the cable is plugged at the VGA output. It is possible to clone or extend the desktop screen.

    Some may be thinking to change the xorg.conf file to managae these things but after hardy it seems screen related thing are done automatically by xorg that is why we dont see anymore the screen size and resolution option selection at the dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. So if you really want to play with you xorg.conf at Hardy, back up it, because it may not be opened the next time you restart the xserver by giving the error no resume image found. At this time you may change to the other konsole envireonment by ctrl+alt+f2 and copy back your xorg file and reboot.

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  10. Gnome secrets

    July 31, 2008 by Oğuz Yarımtepe

    I have been working under Gnome for nearly 1 month. I had used Gnome during my Debian days. Then i had changed to Kubuntu and till now i was happily using Kde.

    Yesterday i realised a hidden property of Gnome that is enabling /apps/gnome-power-manager/ui/cpufreq_show at the gconf-editor. With this enable feature you will be able to choose computer speed policy at the gnome power manager. Or if you add CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor applet to your tray then you will see it is possible to choose some schemes like Powersave or Performance that are already come with kde power manager by default.

    Although i still find the Gnome environment away from being user friendly i encounter many forks or applications that are derived from it, like maemo which is taking my considerating now a days a lot becaues of my search for a device that will make the time more bearable on the way to the job at the morning and also return from it at the evening.

    There are some cases we all encounter that we need to run a device under Linux. Yesterday i tried to connect to Internet via using AW-GE703H PCI-E Half Mini Wireless Card. The problem was it was not detected at my Hardy when i run lspci. So after making some search i felt like installing a driver for it may help to see a lspci output. I tried first the windows driver. Using ndiswrapper and installing the driver didnt helped taking ip from it. It was possible to see it at the ifconfig output but not possible to assign ip to it. Thne tried a Linux driver that is written for the same chipset. It worked. The thing is although i was able to see the card at ifconfig and assign ip to it i was still not able to see it at the lspci output. Still not sure about the reason of it.

    I see people posting their KDE 4.0.1 screenshots to their blogs. Seems it is more stable than before. Should try it soon.

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