Dear readers,
It has recently come to my attention that there was a problem when viewing my blog with javascript enabled in your browser where you would be redirected to some obvious spam/malware/phishing sites (fake Flash or Java download pages). This was happening due to a third party gadget that was part of my Blogger template and apparently had only recently been causing this behavior. My apologies for anyone whose browser was hijacked by this.
These third party gadgets are submitted to Google and available for a blogger to choose to add to their blog's layout template. All indications are that the blog has not been "hacked" and the problem is resolved now.
Information about this problem on the Google support forums seems to indicate that this has happened to many other bloggers as well. If you run a blog, you should remove the Sociable or Share It gadgets as they are known malware gadget.
https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/blogger/aLsGFogJraw/6eU71c8g9ZMJ
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Oh Ubuntu, won't you ever win?
After several months of idling in my basement. I decided to fire up the ol' Ubuntu desktop in order to use one of the few apps I have on that OS that I don't currently have an equivalent on Windows. After successfully using the intended software, Ubuntu's Update Manager helpfully notified me that I needed hundreds of critical and recommended updates to software packages. I am fine with that, and figured it wouldn't hurt to update since it had been some months and I expected to need to use Ubuntu again more regularly.
After downloading and installing all the updates, I needed a reboot. After doing so, my desktop wouldn't come up due to errors like this: Xorg says the kernel module is of version 304.88 (The old version before I updated) but the driver components are of version 319.32 (The new version).
This isn't the first time I've gone down that road, and it usually doesn't end well. I don't know why security fixes can bring down the GUI of my desktop. But oh well.
Thankfully, to Google and AskUbuntu, the answer is so simple it brought tears to my weary eyes.
Thanks to a Mr. "Joren" for the solution:
First remove all the old drivers:
Worked like a charm.
Source: http://askubuntu.com/questions/349129/12-04-lts-wont-boot-after-nvidia-driver-upgrade
After downloading and installing all the updates, I needed a reboot. After doing so, my desktop wouldn't come up due to errors like this: Xorg says the kernel module is of version 304.88 (The old version before I updated) but the driver components are of version 319.32 (The new version).
This isn't the first time I've gone down that road, and it usually doesn't end well. I don't know why security fixes can bring down the GUI of my desktop. But oh well.
Thankfully, to Google and AskUbuntu, the answer is so simple it brought tears to my weary eyes.
Thanks to a Mr. "Joren" for the solution:
First remove all the old drivers:
sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
sudo reboot Worked like a charm.
Source: http://askubuntu.com/questions/349129/12-04-lts-wont-boot-after-nvidia-driver-upgrade
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Europa Report: Movie Review
I am always a fan of science fiction films and happy for any science fiction that comes my way. In this case Europa Report is a fairly independent movie that is being released online and On Demand before being shown in theaters. I recently watched this through my cable providers "Video On Demand" feature, where you can purchase a rental of this movie for $9.99 (ouch). There are both standard definition and high-definition versions available, but if you get one you don't get the other, so use with caution. I think releasing movies straight to the internet/on demand and skipping the theaters is a new strategy in the movie industry. Hear about that trend in this recent NPR: On Point broad cast: Is the U.S. Movie Industry Broken?
Europa Report is about a fictional manned-mission to Jupiter with a landing on the icy moon Europa. One of the four large "Galilean moons" of Jupiter, it has an icy crust, and as we all know, likely to have a sub-surface ocean of liquid water. This near-future sci-fi to stick closely to known technologies and science, might be what one would call "hard sci-fi", more 2001 than Star Wars. But actual science is not usually box-office dynamite (or so studios believe), so as the crew of 6 astronauts approach Europa they fall into increasingly critical misfortunes that threaten their mission and their lives. The movie is foreshadowed by an "executive" talking to the camera, documentary style about the mission and you get the sense something went wrong. Most of the movie is then shown through lost-footage style clips showing bits and pieces of the long journey and the events on Europa. This seems to be a common trope now as it is similar in the style to Apollo 18. Not only is the footage spliced together out of order so you don't get a full understanding of the events until later, but they use a lot of creepy noise effects and interference at times to make it seem "spookier" I guess. I still think Moon did the best job in recent years, to tell a story in space without devolving into a sub-genre of typical horror films, and just having normal drama in a science fiction setting (yes the premise for Moon isn't that realistic). In any case, I don't think it is a huge spoiler, given the trailers for this movie, to tell that things don't ultimately end well for the entire crew.
Other than the style, I found the characters and story were pretty good, the effects were pretty good overall and didn't seem like overuse of CGI and they did have some weightlessness scenes. The scenes in orbit around Jupiter and Europa were quite impressive, makes you wish we really were going there. There were no explosions in space, super AI, fusion reactors or any other really exaggerated technology. The ship had a rotating living section to simulate gravity which they spent most of their time in. Once they get to Europa they send a large section of the craft down as a lander which will then drill through the ice and hopefully reach the under-ice lake or ocean in order to search for life. That is the plan anyway.
Europa Report currently has a 69% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Overall I enjoyed the movie. It's probably worth a Netflix rental, rather than paying $9.99 for it.
1.jpg) |
| Europa Credit: NASA |
Europa Report is about a fictional manned-mission to Jupiter with a landing on the icy moon Europa. One of the four large "Galilean moons" of Jupiter, it has an icy crust, and as we all know, likely to have a sub-surface ocean of liquid water. This near-future sci-fi to stick closely to known technologies and science, might be what one would call "hard sci-fi", more 2001 than Star Wars. But actual science is not usually box-office dynamite (or so studios believe), so as the crew of 6 astronauts approach Europa they fall into increasingly critical misfortunes that threaten their mission and their lives. The movie is foreshadowed by an "executive" talking to the camera, documentary style about the mission and you get the sense something went wrong. Most of the movie is then shown through lost-footage style clips showing bits and pieces of the long journey and the events on Europa. This seems to be a common trope now as it is similar in the style to Apollo 18. Not only is the footage spliced together out of order so you don't get a full understanding of the events until later, but they use a lot of creepy noise effects and interference at times to make it seem "spookier" I guess. I still think Moon did the best job in recent years, to tell a story in space without devolving into a sub-genre of typical horror films, and just having normal drama in a science fiction setting (yes the premise for Moon isn't that realistic). In any case, I don't think it is a huge spoiler, given the trailers for this movie, to tell that things don't ultimately end well for the entire crew.
 |
| Thera Macula (false color) on Europa. Credit: Paul Schenk/NASA |
Europa Report currently has a 69% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Overall I enjoyed the movie. It's probably worth a Netflix rental, rather than paying $9.99 for it.
spoiler alert!
Stop reading if you don't want critical pieces of the movie spoiled for you.
While the Europa Report was pretty good, but the "science" part of the plot kept reminding me
of List of things I did not care for in Prometheus. Basically it comes down to: "We are going to go halfway across the solar system, for
the first time in humanity, but as soon as we get there we have no
ability to actual get any scientific research done without being eaten by
monsters". One the main claims to fame this movie has is the supposed realism and authenticity of the mission. I feel their hearts were in the right places, and it's basically a movie about every space geek's fantasy about what might be on Europa, but they fell into too convenient plot devices I found hard to swallow, despite enjoying the movie.
Among my issues with the plot:
Among my issues with the plot:
- No redundancy of communications... what!? Isn't that the most important thing for a mission to another planet/moon? Not to mention they apparently did have a way to repair it, but chose not to until the very end. Oh and genius idea that the life-support subsystem can swap parts with the communication subsystem.
- No redundancy of their drilling probe? They lose one and all is lost. They can't improvise a camera on a pole and look under the ice?
- Apparently, there was no firm plan to have the crew explore the ice surface after landing, no radiation protection, no way to deal with hazards of walking on ice, no vehicles to use other than walking. Why send humans at all in that case?
- When they do send a scientist outside, they have no safety harnesses, they
don't use a buddy system like mountain climbers (were the Apollo
astronauts ever alone?). Let alone have any sort of a rescue plan i.e. a jet-pack or
other person suited up ready to go out in an emergency. Maybe flotation devices might be
useful on a planet with liquid water? For that matter, I wonder how buoyant a space suit is with low gravity, since I believe in those neutral buoyancy tanks on Earth they weigh down the suits with additional weight. She basically sinks like a stone in falling through the ice, they don't even bother to go after her, but it's implied she is eaten/killed by the monster. This is like horror movie 101 stuff, never go out alone, never walk towards the mysterious light.
- So they go all the way to land on Europa and they don't have a reliable way to go outside, so you would think the lander would have all sorts of robotic arms, scoops and other sensors to get as much science, like any other lander NASA has ever sent to another world, but other than the one drill probe, apparently not. Wouldn't a major effort be to take back "Europa-rocks" of ice samples or whatever they can find and bring back to Earth for research?
- You would think to support such a mission there would be a network of probes either in orbit around Europa or in the Jovian system which would be taking images of them and the landing site (maybe to see aerial view of the "lights" they are so desperate to see up close), able to relay communications, etc.. Like we have on Mars now with NASA's MRO
- 6 crew all the way to Europa and only 2 scientists doing anything while they are there.
- They didn't exactly explain how long they planned to live on Europa, similar to some missions to Mars, the return window is some length of time away, so they need to have some semi-permanent base to live and work out of for an extended stay. For Mars exploration there are ideas to send unmanned supply/cargo craft that would already be there on the moon for them to use to set up some sort of base. It didn't look like they had any plan like this, and it seemed like they had an all or nothing EVA to get scientific data before trying to come home? It wasn't clear if the rapid take off was due to the crew death's or because they weren't going to stay long anyway.
Maybe the idea (I doubt the writers
even thought this far ahead) was that the mission was really just a
"plant the flag" expedition to Europa, without much plan for hard science, but to promote the Europa
Ventures company. Something like the quick and dirty ways they could
get to Mars really fast without doing anything useful while there. But
then again, they probably wouldn't need 6 crew for that. On the other
hand, the one thing they did have redundancy for was the lives of the
crew!
Some unresolved questions or plot points, and maybe I just missed them:
Why couldn't they leave theAndrei in the orbiter? Not that it
mattered I guess, did they imply he had radiation poisoning or just that
he was depressed?
Why did that male scientist die at the end, did he
just fall because of an "ice quake" or did the monsters get him?
Hopefully the monsters' ecosystem isn't waiting for spacecraft to land, be attracted to their lights and fall through the ice so they can be eaten. They would get very hungry.
Wasn't the monster creature attracted to light almost directly taken from Arthur C. Clarke's "2061: Odyssey Three"?
It was implied that there was some connection between radioactivity interference and the monsters, could be interesting if there were alien life that could somehow use radiation in the environment directly as a food or heat source. But this was never really "answered" within the movie.
Monday, June 17, 2013
Windows Update Error code 80246007 on Windows 7
I have tried applying Windows Updates for .NET Framework security updates and was hitting failures on Windows 7 with error code 0x80246007. If I View the error details from Windows Update History I saw the following error codes:
For Windows update failure log (View Details):
http://support.microsoft.com/
Unfortunately, the article does not apply to Windows 7 specifically. Searching for the error code and Windows 7 brought up no additional results. What to do?
Disclaimer: I am not an expert on Windows system administration, I make no claims to be able to solve your individual problem nor advise you to not follow normal support paths for your issue. If you use any of my suggestions you do so at your own risk.
Reading the knowledge base article, the cause is described as:
Under resolution there are the same steps to resolve for Window Vista and Windows Server 2008. Broadly speaking, these OSes are similar to Windows 7 in many respects. So I attempted to follow the steps, which involve writing a small batch script to stop the Windows Update service, wuauserv rename the Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download folder and restart the Windows update and bits service.
This finally solved my issue. My guess is that these steps would apply to either 80070002 or 80246007 error codes on Windows 7.
I recommend if you hit this issue, to comment on the KB 958042 page above and let Microsoft know they need to update the KB for Windows 7.
For Windows update failure log (View Details):
Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 4 on XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7, Server 2008, Server 2008 R2 for x64 (KB2804576)
Installation status: Failed
Error details: Code 80246007
...Searching for this error on Microsoft Windows support site I only found the following KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/
Unfortunately, the article does not apply to Windows 7 specifically. Searching for the error code and Windows 7 brought up no additional results. What to do?
Disclaimer: I am not an expert on Windows system administration, I make no claims to be able to solve your individual problem nor advise you to not follow normal support paths for your issue. If you use any of my suggestions you do so at your own risk.
Reading the knowledge base article, the cause is described as:
This problem may occur if the Windows Update database is corrupted.
Under resolution there are the same steps to resolve for Window Vista and Windows Server 2008. Broadly speaking, these OSes are similar to Windows 7 in many respects. So I attempted to follow the steps, which involve writing a small batch script to stop the Windows Update service, wuauserv rename the Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download folder and restart the Windows update and bits service.
I tried the instructions as described. Received access denied for every line of the batch script. I then tried running from a Command window I had 'Run as Administrator'. I still got the access denied error on renaming the Download folder. So I just manually renamed via Windows
Explorer, and reran the script.
The next time I ran Windows Update for the update which failed I then hit error 80070002 for one update.
This time Windows Help advised to delete data from Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore as well as \Download folder, and to just restart Windows Update service.
Read the full solution: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Windows-Update-error-80070002
This finally solved my issue. My guess is that these steps would apply to either 80070002 or 80246007 error codes on Windows 7.
I recommend if you hit this issue, to comment on the KB 958042 page above and let Microsoft know they need to update the KB for Windows 7.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
New PC (again)
It's been a few years since I've gotten a new laptop. Realized it was about time as the screen on my old Toshiba began flickering white lines and generally acting up.
I got a new Sony Vaio S-series. This model is one of the few Windows 7 PCs that have a full HD resolution screen, 1920x1080. (I am envious of the MacBook Pro Retina displays). I looked at Windows 8 PCs as well, but couldn't stomach the "start" display, I wasn't interested in touch screen features.
Step 1: Transfer Files
I decided to try using Windows Easy Transfer, which advertises that it can transfer, "User Accounts, Documents, Music, Pictures...And More". My old laptop and the new laptop are both Windows 7 and come with Windows Easy Transfer pre-installed.
It's fairly straightforward, you start it on the source PC, and you get a pass key, start in on the new PC and you enter the pass key, once you do that you can choose what folders basically from the old computer you want to transfer. In my case I did a wireless connection. When you select a user account to migrate it pre-selects all their Documents, Pictures and Music libraries (under C:\users\.. ), for Shared files it selects Public libraries and also what appears to be any folder on C:\ that is not part of the default Windows install. This means a lot of garbage may be brought along from the old PC, it's not always clear on where programs store their files. Unselected the options for Program Data and Windows settings, I was unsure what files this would actually bring. In total I had 60+ GB of data to transfer.
After you select the folders and start the transfer the program on both PCs tells you not to use anything. I assume this is to prevent you from moving or changing files on either side during the move.
The transfer ran a full day before the new PC crashed giving me a helpful "Operating System Not Found" prompt. I had to restart that PC and there doesn't seem to be anyway to recover the state of the transfer. Worse, there isn't a report of the files moved, so I didn't really know what had completed. I could see most of the files on the new PC, and new it was almost done, so I didn't have to re-run the whole thing again. I just resumed from shared folders that I saw were missing.
One confusing thing was that it didn't actually transfer the Windows user accounts I had selected. It copied all the files from the old user accounts into my current user on the new PC (which happened to be a different user that I didn't want to keep). So you still have to manually set up any new users in the Control Panel.
Step 2: Install software
Basically I knew what I needed for my projects, Windows Easy Transfer also provided a report of all the software from the old PC that I didn't have. It's helpful as a reference.
Step 3: Fixes:
So far other than missing license keys and other things I had to dig through my email or memory to get back, one major issue was with Windows Live Photo Gallery. The the database that WLPG stores ratings and metadata (person, descriptive and geotags) for image formats that don't support it is not moved during the transfer.
Other people have had the same issue:
How to transfer image tags from Vista Photo Gallery to Windows 7 Live Photo Gallery
The ultimate answer involves some scary manipulation of the hard disk volume id, but ok:
Migrating Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery database
Some helpful details about where WLPG stores files and it's database.
http://johnfederico.net/2009/07/27/windows-live-photo-gallery/
As I mentioned in my own experience of upgrading to Windows 7, I also transferred the old Windows Vista desktop backgrounds and user icons.
I got a new Sony Vaio S-series. This model is one of the few Windows 7 PCs that have a full HD resolution screen, 1920x1080. (I am envious of the MacBook Pro Retina displays). I looked at Windows 8 PCs as well, but couldn't stomach the "start" display, I wasn't interested in touch screen features.
Step 1: Transfer Files
I decided to try using Windows Easy Transfer, which advertises that it can transfer, "User Accounts, Documents, Music, Pictures...And More". My old laptop and the new laptop are both Windows 7 and come with Windows Easy Transfer pre-installed.
It's fairly straightforward, you start it on the source PC, and you get a pass key, start in on the new PC and you enter the pass key, once you do that you can choose what folders basically from the old computer you want to transfer. In my case I did a wireless connection. When you select a user account to migrate it pre-selects all their Documents, Pictures and Music libraries (under C:\users\.. ), for Shared files it selects Public libraries and also what appears to be any folder on C:\ that is not part of the default Windows install. This means a lot of garbage may be brought along from the old PC, it's not always clear on where programs store their files. Unselected the options for Program Data and Windows settings, I was unsure what files this would actually bring. In total I had 60+ GB of data to transfer.
After you select the folders and start the transfer the program on both PCs tells you not to use anything. I assume this is to prevent you from moving or changing files on either side during the move.
The transfer ran a full day before the new PC crashed giving me a helpful "Operating System Not Found" prompt. I had to restart that PC and there doesn't seem to be anyway to recover the state of the transfer. Worse, there isn't a report of the files moved, so I didn't really know what had completed. I could see most of the files on the new PC, and new it was almost done, so I didn't have to re-run the whole thing again. I just resumed from shared folders that I saw were missing.
One confusing thing was that it didn't actually transfer the Windows user accounts I had selected. It copied all the files from the old user accounts into my current user on the new PC (which happened to be a different user that I didn't want to keep). So you still have to manually set up any new users in the Control Panel.
Step 2: Install software
Basically I knew what I needed for my projects, Windows Easy Transfer also provided a report of all the software from the old PC that I didn't have. It's helpful as a reference.
Step 3: Fixes:
So far other than missing license keys and other things I had to dig through my email or memory to get back, one major issue was with Windows Live Photo Gallery. The the database that WLPG stores ratings and metadata (person, descriptive and geotags) for image formats that don't support it is not moved during the transfer.
Other people have had the same issue:
How to transfer image tags from Vista Photo Gallery to Windows 7 Live Photo Gallery
The ultimate answer involves some scary manipulation of the hard disk volume id, but ok:
Migrating Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery database
Some helpful details about where WLPG stores files and it's database.
http://johnfederico.net/2009/07/27/windows-live-photo-gallery/
As I mentioned in my own experience of upgrading to Windows 7, I also transferred the old Windows Vista desktop backgrounds and user icons.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Uninstalling Xubuntu from Ubuntu 12.04
I have been trying to learn to love Ubuntu 12.04 since my previous upgrade experience. It has been no easy task.
Among other things, my PC is not cutting edge, but even running Firefox was beginning to slow down to a crawl. I have not yet determined if this was due to some specific software or driver error, the Gnome 3/Unity interface, or other background tasks fault.
Getting desperate I have been looking around for lighter weight alternatives. I tried installing Xubuntu, which is supposed to be much more bare bones than the flashy Unity desktop.
I installed it
That was all fine and good. I restarted and went into the Xubuntu desktop. First of all, what I didn't realize, and my mistake for being ignorant, it kind of adds a lot of other software into your system, changes the boot screen, and generally is a bit more invasive that I liked. In the end, it was performing better, but due to some persistent graphics issues I have been having with Ubuntu I couldn't see the whole desktop after logging in. From what I could see of the desktop it looks a lot like the Linux experience I had in the mid-2000's on Red Hat or SuSE distros, pretty bare-bones, almost Windows 95-ish. Not saying it's awful, but I almost have to say I like Windows 7 more now. At least it was fast!
So, how to uninstall?
Well it's more difficult than it might seem. I have followed these excellently well-documented steps
The one comment I had, (which I could not post, apparently my email or website flags me as a spammer) is that GEdit 3 which come with Ubuntu 12.04 does not have the Regular Expression find and replace capabilities shown in those steps. You must additionally go and install a Gedit regex replace plugin to do so.
For now, I am using the Unity 2d interface. It looks almost the same for me, feels pretty quick. I'll stick with it. Not saying I would rule out a switch to Xubuntu or another desktop in the future if unity continues to be trouble.
Among other things, my PC is not cutting edge, but even running Firefox was beginning to slow down to a crawl. I have not yet determined if this was due to some specific software or driver error, the Gnome 3/Unity interface, or other background tasks fault.
Getting desperate I have been looking around for lighter weight alternatives. I tried installing Xubuntu, which is supposed to be much more bare bones than the flashy Unity desktop.
I installed it
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktopThat was all fine and good. I restarted and went into the Xubuntu desktop. First of all, what I didn't realize, and my mistake for being ignorant, it kind of adds a lot of other software into your system, changes the boot screen, and generally is a bit more invasive that I liked. In the end, it was performing better, but due to some persistent graphics issues I have been having with Ubuntu I couldn't see the whole desktop after logging in. From what I could see of the desktop it looks a lot like the Linux experience I had in the mid-2000's on Red Hat or SuSE distros, pretty bare-bones, almost Windows 95-ish. Not saying it's awful, but I almost have to say I like Windows 7 more now. At least it was fast!
So, how to uninstall?
Well it's more difficult than it might seem. I have followed these excellently well-documented steps
The one comment I had, (which I could not post, apparently my email or website flags me as a spammer) is that GEdit 3 which come with Ubuntu 12.04 does not have the Regular Expression find and replace capabilities shown in those steps. You must additionally go and install a Gedit regex replace plugin to do so.
For now, I am using the Unity 2d interface. It looks almost the same for me, feels pretty quick. I'll stick with it. Not saying I would rule out a switch to Xubuntu or another desktop in the future if unity continues to be trouble.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Things you shouldn't do: or how I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04: Precise Pangolin
 |
| A Pangolin |
There was just one more problem. Update Manager had a little tiny message above the normal dialog to select packages. It said something like "Upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS". So my desktop was on 10.04. I had actually recently tried out the new version of Ubuntu on a VM using their prepackaged all-in-one Windows installer "Wubi". I didn't like it, and found the performance was horrible on my Windows 7 laptop. Opening a folder a document would take 30 seconds and literally lock me out of doing anything else. I wasn't crazy about the new "Unity" style OS face lift they now package. But regardless of that experience, I am now a well trained animal, and when my computer's operating system tells me I should upgrade, and they make it so easy to accept it, newer is always better, always more security issues resolved, defects fixed, I mean why wouldn't I want to upgrade? So I couldn't help myself after a couple of days I went back and started the upgrade process.
It ran all night long. Not necessarily because it took that long, but because every so often in the upgrade process it would sit waiting for a user prompt, usually for some third-party software license exception. Finally at the end of the process I had a new looking default desktop background, everything seemed great with the upgrade. It asked me to reboot and...
.jpg "Ubuntu desktop background") |
| Approximation of the Ubuntu screen after upgrade |
So first and foremost I was looking into similar related problems like screen resolutions not being detected. I found a few tips, for example editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and manually specify the Screen subsection with your resolution modes. However, of course, in the Try out Ubuntu from the Live CD none of your hard disks partitions are mounted. Even worse, in my case, I couldn't directly mount my partition containing my existing OS and data (/dev/sda5) was of type lvm2, which of course, the default Ubuntu doesn't have the packages for it. Somebody has gone through something similar and I was able to do those steps in the Live CD Ubuntu, the only difference is that I would mount the partitions as rw:
sudo mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/fcroot -o rw,user
...So that was half the battle. But once I had done that, I tried the edit to xorg.conf. I saved the file and rebooted. Still got the same "Not optimum mode" message on my monitor. I tried a few settings, but no luck. I decided to try a more radical solution: A reinstall using thie Live CD without overwriting my existing partitions and data. Unfortunately. Due to having the "lvm2" partition that contained my logical volumes from my existing install the installer doesn't recognize these are a partition! So I had to go into the Try Ubuntu option first, and then follow all the steps described above to install lvm2 and activate my Logical Group in the lvm2 partition, then try the install.
I went through the entire install and ended up with a error that it was unable to install the Bootloader! Great! I went through an exercise to resize partitions thinking that might be the cause see:
lvm-resizing-guide ,linux-lvm-resizing-partitions (note Ubuntu 12.04 ships with GParted v0.11 which doesn't support the lvm2 file system format!, so in my Live CD OS I had to uninstall that and manually install the 0.14 version.). However after all that, I ended up using these steps to successfully manually install the Grub boot loader and use the Boot Repair program. After all this work I ended up with the same result as my upgrade, I was unable to see anything when I logged in as a guest (didn't recognize my actual admin user and password).
At this point after struggling with it for two days, I've decided to just do a reinstall. I don't know who or what installed the LVM partition, or where the boot loader should go. So I just went with a straight up new install of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Desktop edition over my existing PC and I told it to reformat my HDD
After reinstalling clean. I had still got the Not Optimum Mode from my monitor during boot up. But from the login screen onwards everything looked ok. I did start getting new errors from Ubuntu telling me that jockey-gtk had crashed. Always helpfully I did a good search and located a few similar bug reports on the ubuntu forums. Seems to be an Nvidia driver issue. So I did an
apt-get update andapt-get upgradeto make sure I had all the latest packages. Then run sudo jockey-gtk, this prompts me to install Additional Drivers, I selected (version current)[Recommended], it installed the Nvidia driver, but didn't solve the problem in the boot screen and then I get a "The application Compiz has closed unexpectedly." error and a really messed up garbled background instead of the desktop, looking at the error details, it said that I had "obsolete packages" and that I should update "unity, libunity-core-5.05, unity-common and unity-services". So I rebooted this time into "Unity 2D" and did the update manager which had a ton of updates (funny, why didn't apt-get upgrade install these before?)
Even after all this, I was still getting weird Not optimum messages on my monitor on shut downs and start ups. Seems that I was hitting some flavor of this problem. What worked for me. Use your own judgement was to first edit the /etc/default/grub config file
sudo gedit /etc/default/grubChange
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash" (removed quiet).Some answers for related questions tell you to set nomodeset. I tried this but had negative results...
Uncomment and change
GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024Default was something like 640x480, the 1280 resolution was the "optimum" resolution displayed by monitor in the error messages I was getting in start up.
Next update grub
sudo update-grubI think followed steps in the above linked question's answer for the purple start up screen to force the graphics drivers to be loaded in start up by configuring
/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash.
Lastly, the other quirk which apparently is benign? Was that in the System Settings > Details it was reporting an "Unknown" graphics driver. This is apparently due to a missing library(?) mesa-utils that is needed for displaying the graphics driver information:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/151608/details-window-showing-unknown-driver-for-graphics
So following the steps:
sudo apt-get install mesa-utilsSolved that issue. A few reboots later and the splash screen came up and the login works fine on my brand new re-installed Ubuntu 12.04. Gotta love "Linux for Human Beings".
Edit: Courtesy of this Google+ post when #Linux briefly trended
 |
| Linux... |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)