Posts Tagged ‘Ubuntu 9.10’

GRUB error: invalid signature

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Posted 15 Mar 2010 — by Arun
Category Linux, Ubuntu

I have a dual boot system with Ubuntu 9.10 and Windows 7. Everything was working fine until last week. I tried to boot into Windows and I got Invalid Signature error when I selected Windows in the GRUB menu. Ubuntu part worked fine. After Googling, this is how I fixed it.

Open a terminal (Application – Accessories – Terminal). Type the following commands (highlighted in BOLD) one by one in the terminal and press enter. It will ask for password the first time you try. Enter your login password.

  • sudo apt-get install os-prober  (If it’s already installed, then fine)
  • sudo os-prober    (It should find both Ubuntu and Windows)
  • sudo mv /boot/grub/device.map /boot/grub/device.map.bak  (Take a backup)
  • sudo update-grub

Exit the terminal by entering exit. Reboot the system and it should work fine.

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How to install OpenOffice 3.2 in Ubuntu 9.10

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Posted 22 Feb 2010 — by Arun
Category Linux, Ubuntu

OpenOffice 3.2 was released 10 days back. It has some new enhancements including faster startup. I wanted to install the new version, but it won’t get into Ubuntu repositories soon. Here is what I did to install OpenOffice 3.2 in my Ubuntu 9.10 desktop. The steps below will remove the current installation of OpenOffice and installs the new one.

  1. Go to OpenOffice website and click on “I want to download OpenOffice.org”. If you use the Firefox browser in your Ubuntu installation, it will download the file “filename_deb.tar.gz”. When I used the Google Chrome browser, I believe I got a non deb version. Make sure you get the deb version. My download includes Java JRE, so it took longer to download than the non JRE version.
  2. Once you download the file, go to the downloaded directory using Nautilus and double click the downloaded file. The file extractor will show a directory OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.9483 or something similar to that. Extract the directory to wherever you want (Desktop or Download folder or Home folder etc.).
  3. Open a terminal by clicking Application -> Accessories -> Terminal.
  4. Copy, paste the highlighted command in the terminal and press the enter key. (don’t include the quotes for any of the commands in this tutorial). This command will remove the current installation of OpenOffice. Say ‘Y’ if it asks for confimation. “sudo apt-get remove openoffice*.*”
  5. Now copy and paste the following command and press enter. “sudo dpkg -i ~/directory_name/OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.9483/DEBS/*.deb” where directory_name is the directory where you extracted the downloaded file. If you had extracted it to the desktop, then enter sudo dpkg -i ~/Desktop/OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.9483/DEBS/*.deb. If you extracted it to your home directory, then enter sudo dpkg -i ~/OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.9483/DEBS/*.deb. ‘~’ stands for home directory. This will install all installation files under that directory.
  6. Copy and paste the following command in the terminal and press enter. This command will install OpenOffice integration package for Ubuntu since we uninstalled the OpenOffice that came with Ubuntu. “sudo dpkg -i ~/directory_name/OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.9483/DEBS/desktop-integration/openoffice.org3.2-debian-menus_3.2-9472_all.deb“. Again the directory_name is where the file was extracted.
  7. Type exit and press enter to exit the terminal.

You can now open the new version of OpenOffice from Applications – Office menu. You are all set. When you open the Office applications the 1st time, it might ask you to enter your name and register the application.

Credit: Ubuntu Forums.
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iPod support in Ubuntu 9.10

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Posted 22 Dec 2009 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

I have a weird thing happening in my Ubuntu desktop since the time Ubuntu moved to Brasero as their default CD/DVD writer. I had written about this 8 months back here. I have a Gateway GT5628 Quad core desktop which I bought 8 months back. The desktop has SATA hard drive, but PATA DVD writer (Optiarc AD-7173A). I initially thought it was something to do with the particular DVD drive model, so I added an additional DVD writer (Lite on) I had which was from a different company. Both models are PATA. Whenever I insert a store bought DVD or CD, the system would hang after few seconds or a minute. Home made CDs and DVDs are fine. I have w32codecs, libdvdread4, libdvdcss2 etc installed. If I uninstall Brasero including the libbrasero-media0 file, then everything works fine.

The problem now is, when I uninstall libbrasero-media0 file, it uninstalls Rhythmbox also. Rhythmbox is the only GNOME media player that supports iPod without any issues in Ubuntu 9.10. I tried GTKPod, Banshee and Songbird and iPod doesn’t work with any of them in Ubuntu 9.10. You can get it to work with Banshee with a workaround, but that’s a pain doing it every time you want to update your iPod. I installed Amarok, but I haven’t tried it yet. Does anyone know how to install Rhythmbox without installing the brasero file or any other application that is good and works with iPods in Ubuntu 9.10? Does anyone know why the system hangs if I insert a legal DVD?

Update: The system hangs even after I uninstalled Brasero. I believe the problem has something to do with DVD writer being PATA and hard drive being SATA. I have ordered a new SATA drive which is on it’s way. I’ll let you know once I get the drive.

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How to install and use KVPNC in Ubuntu

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Posted 20 Nov 2009 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

If you don’t want to undergo the manual installation and configuration of Cisco VPN or VPNC as described here, then there is a good GUI solution in the form of KVPNC. It’s primarily developed for KDE, but it works well with Ubuntu. This guide is based on Ubuntu 9.10. You do need to download the pcf file (Profile file) from your employer. Open Synaptic package manager from System – Administration – Synaptic Package manager and query for VPNC. Select VPNC and KVPNC, mark them for installation and click the Apply button. Once installed, go to Applications – Internet and click on KVPNC. If you don’t see it there, log out and log back in.

Once you start KVPNC, it will ask you to setup the new profile. If not, click on New Profile (Wizard) icon in the KVPNC windows (shown below)

KVpnc

Click Next

Kvpnc

Select Cisco (proprietary) if you are using the enterprise connection or select the one that’s appropriate to you. I select Cisco (proprietary). Click Next.

Kvpnc

Select import PCF file. Make sure  you have downloaded the PCF file. Click Next.

Kvpnc

Click the small disk icon, go to the directory where you downloaded the file and select it. If it’s not showing any directory under your home directory, then click on File System on the left, then select home, then your username directory and you should be able to see other directories under your home directory. Click Next once you select the pcf file.

Kvpnc

It’ll ask f0r username and password. Enter the username and password you use to login to VPN or your network. There is an option to save the password if you want. I left the NT domain name for authentication blank. Click Next.

Kvpnc

Leave the defaults. Click Next.

Kvpnc

Check the box Connect after creating new profile. Click Next.

Kpvnc

Click Finish.

KVpnc

it will now ask you to enter the group password. If it doesn’t connect to the profile automatically, then select the profile from the drop down list under Profile: option and click connect. To get the group password, open a text editor (Application – Accessories – Text Editor). Using the text editor, open the pcf file you downloaded. In the pcf file, you will see a line with the name group password and a list of long characters. Copy the characters after the word group password, go to this link and paste it. Click the button Decode and it’ll decode and give you the group password. Enter that group password in the KVPNC screen. Make sure your network password is still there below the group password, under password row. Click OK. It should connect and you’ll see a small icon in the taskbar at the top right corner, next to the Logout button.

Kvpnc

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Ubuntu 9.10 microphone setup

5 Comments
Posted 06 Nov 2009 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

With Ubuntu 9.10, based on my experience, sounds work at the same time for multiple devices. If you have Ubuntu 9.10 and Skype 2.1 beta, all you have to do to get the microphone to work is, right click on the volume icon in the top panel next to the date & time, select preferences, click on the input tab, uncheck the mute option next to input volume, if it’s checked. Now talk over the microphone and see if there are any movements in the bars next to input level. If not, click on the connector option and try with other options available there. For me, the default option and Microphone 1 didn’t work. Microphone 2 worked. You’ll see the movement in the vertical bars next to input level. Once you get that working, Skype should work fine.

Sound Preferences

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Ubuntu 9.10 what I like…

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Posted 03 Nov 2009 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

Here is the quick summary of what I like (some dislikes) in Ubuntu 9.10.

  • Webcam video quality is very good. Video quality was bad in the last 2 versions of Ubuntu, but it’s back to normal.
  • Pulse audio works with multiple sound devices without installing new packages.
  • Skype 2.1 beta sound and video worked very good (It didn’t work in the previous version of Ubuntu).
  • Empathy IM provides voice and video chat with GTalk, MSN users which is good. Empathy refused to start after a day or two. Not sure why, but I had to reinstall Ubuntu for a different problem and Empathy is working fine. Will watch it for few days.
  • Boot process is faster than Ubuntu 9.04.
  • Login process is longer than Ubuntu 9.04. I think they moved some stuff from boot to login time.
  • Shutdown is lightning fast.
  • Boot logo doesn’t show any progress bar, so you won’t know how far the boot process has progressed. It boots pretty fast, so it may not be a big deal.
  • New icon theme is very good. It shows thumbnails inside each directory’s icon if there are files present.
  • Banshee didn’t recognize my iPod.

I will write more about my experience as I use it. Based on my experience in the past couple of days, I would say Ubuntu has improved a lot in terms of hardware support and usability. Continue the good work.

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10 minutes experience with Kubuntu 9.10

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Posted 30 Oct 2009 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

I wanted to give Kubuntu a try in my laptop after I gave it a try and was dissatisfied and removed it when Kubuntu 9.04 was released. There were lots of bugs and for a laptop, using the widget for wireless connection was a pain. I have written about it in my blog post here. KDE underwent a lot of bug fixes and new features since then, so I thought I would download and give it a try. I downloaded Kubuntu 9.10 yesterday and installed it my laptop.

The installation was fine though I got some errors when the Live CD booted and shutdown. The new installer looked promising, but it needs some fine tuning. My laptop’s default resolution is 1680*1050 and the installer was using a lower resolution. This resulted in installer text/options etc. overlapping in some cases. One example is, when you create a username and password,  you’ll see 3 or 4 options at the bottom on how you want to login. The 3rd option which encrypts your home directory wasn’t clear.

Once installed, the boot process was very fast. It’s faster than Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.04. The old network manager is back and auto starts, so that’s good. Though I could click the network manager icon and select create a network and select the wireless network I want, I think it’s not as user friendly as Ubuntu. It would be nice if it could give you the available networks directly rather than going through a set of clicks.

Plasma got lots of widgets including some for social networking like Twitter, Facebook etc. It has more widgets now than the screen allows. It’s getting much better. The other thing I like in KDE is the ease of installing and changing themes and wallpapers. You can just right click the desktop, select desktop settings and you will see an option there to get new themes and wallpapers.

Konqueror is getting better, but I don’t feel comfortable with it as much as Firefox. Kubuntu prompted me to install additional plugins for Konqueror to play video and other stuff, which is good. I thought I would give Arora a try since it was the default browser in the alpha stages of Kubuntu 9.10 before they went back to Konqueror. Arora starts pretty fast, but I’m not sure if it loads pages faster than Firefox or not. It also lacks the amount of extensions that Firefox offers including security related ones. For Firefox fans, there is an option in the internet menu that will install Firefox if you need.

I used it only for 10 minutes and it impressed me. I would like to use it little more and see if I’m comfortable continuing it. I believe KDE team and Kubuntu team are making a good progress compared to the amount of support they get.

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Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

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Posted 29 Oct 2009 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

Ubuntu team has released their next iteration of Ubuntu OS, Ubuntu 9.10, code named Karmic Koala. I have already covered extensively the new features in Ubuntu 9.10 during the alpha, beta and RC cycles. Here is a short list of new features in Ubuntu 9.10.

  • Empathy has replaced Pidgin as the default instant messaging client, introducing the Telepathy framework.
  • Ubuntu includes Mozilla Firefox 3.5 for browsing
  • Faster boot with Upstart
  • Ubuntu 9.10 includes the Ubuntu Software Center. It’s supposed to be a replacement for multiple software installation options currently available in Ubuntu.
  • Includes the latest GNOME 2.28 desktop.
  • Ext4 and GRUB 2 by default for new installations.
  • Improvements to AppArmor and Uncomplicated Firewall.
  • The gdm 2.27.91 login manager is a complete rewrite compared to the version in earlier Ubuntu releases.
  • Ubuntu 9.10 includes alpha images for the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and Amazon’s EC2.
  • Underlying technology for power management, laptop Hotkeys, and handling storage devices and cameras maps was moved from “hal” (which is going to be deprecated soon) to “DeviceKit-power”, “DeviceKit-disks” and “udev”.
  • Karmic uses GCC-4.4 as the default compiler.
  • Ubuntu One gives 2 GB of online storage to sync and backup your files.
  • Evince, the GNOME document viewer, now ships with an enforcing AppArmor profile. This greatly increases security by protecting you against flaws in the historically problematic PDF and image libraries.
  • Ubuntu 9.10 includes the 2.6.31-14.48 kernel based on 2.6.31.1.
  • The Intel video driver has switched from the “EXA” acceleration method to the new “UXA”, solving major performance problems of Ubuntu 9.04.

For known issues with Ubuntu 9.10, click here. You can download Ubuntu from here.

Kubuntu team has released Kubuntu 9.10. Here are the new features in Kubuntu 9.10:

  • KDE 4.3
  • Kubuntu Netbook Edition for 9.10 is optimised for netbook systems.
  • This release has an emphasis on connecting you to your online social networks.
  • OpenOffice KDE integration
  • KDE & Gnome desktop now share an official FreeDesktop standard for desktop notifications. The notification bubbles generated by KDE or Gnome applications now appear natively on the other desktop.
  • New installer
  • Amarok 2.2
  • Kubuntu 9.10 includes the latest release of KPackageKit.
  • K3b, the popular CD and DVD burning application has now been ported to KDE 4.
  • User management tool from the KDE 3 days has been resurrected for Kubuntu 9.10.
  • The Network Manager applet offers a more robust networking experience than it did in Kubuntu 9.04.
  • GTK+ integration
  • Installing this popular web browser will be a piece of cake in Kubuntu 9.10.
  • For those who prefer the old KDE 3 desktop a Kubuntu KDE 3 Remix is available.

Here are the known issues in Kubuntu:

  • The KPackageKit package manager used in Kubuntu 9.10 does not notify users if the packages they are installing come from repositories that are not secured with PGP. Users that wish to be informed of any packages installed from unsigned sources should use the apt-get command line tool as a workaround. (Launchpad bug)
  • KNetworkManager cannot connect to a wireless network with a hidden SSID. Install network-manager-gnome via a wired connection as a workaround. (Launchpad bug)
  • The “Hardware Drivers” package in Kubuntu (jockey-kde) requires a local package cache to function properly. Immediately after a new installation, this might not exist. If running jockey-kde after installing Kubuntu, first ensure there is a local package cache by running KPackageKit (K-Menu -> System Settings -> Add and Remove Software) and clicking on software updates or in a Konsole shell doing “sudo apt-get update” before running jockey-kde. (Launchpad bug)
  • For Kubuntu Netbook Edition, users who wish to run Wubi from a USB disk that has persistent storage enabled will need to run it with the –force-wubi option from the Windows command line. (Launchpad bug)
  • When using the OEM installation option on Kubuntu Netbook Edition, no “prepare for shipping” icon is placed on the desktop. Users who are doing OEM installations with Kubuntu Netbook Edition can access this feature under by choosing System->Prepare for shipping … from the main bar. (Launchpad Bug)

You can download Kubuntu from here.

ubuntu910

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Didn’t know this before about Ubuntu

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Posted 27 Oct 2009 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

I didn’t know the bullet points before, until I stumbled upon this BBC article.

  • The French national police force runs its operations on Ubuntu
  • Computer systems supporting Spanish schools run on Ubuntu
  • Wikipedia runs hundreds of its servers on Ubuntu
  • San Francisco International Airport computer system is based on Ubuntu
  • Dell China has more than 40 models with Ubuntu available
  • 12 million active users

That’s cool. There might be more. Let me know. I’ll add it to the list.

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Ubuntu 9.10 Release Candidate available

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Posted 22 Oct 2009 — by Arun
Category General

Ubuntu has released the release candidate of Ubuntu 9.10, a week before the final release. You can download it from here. Here are the known issues in Ubuntu 9.10. Please go through this if you are planning to upgrade or install before the final release.

  • When creating LUKS encrypted partitions, some earlier versions of cryptsetup did not wipe out any pre-existing filesystem metadata on the partition. The current version of blkid used in the Ubuntu 9.10 RC will refuse to export a UUID for a partition containing more than one type of metadata signature. This means that encrypted disks may fail to be decrypted at boot time, possibly preventing the system from booting at all. Users of LUKS system-level disk encryption are advised to wait until the Ubuntu 9.10 final release before upgrading.
  • Empathy’s MSN messaging support is provided by telepathy-butterfly, the version included in karmic advertises it supports Audio/Video chat however for stability reasons it has been disabled in Karmic. If you wish to test MSN AV support in Empathy, please install telepathy-butterfly from https://edge.launchpad.net/~telepathy/+archive/ppa and report bugs.
  • Installing on Marvell Dove boards requires a network connection. This will be fixed immediately after RC.
  • The default partitioning recipe in the installer will in some cases allocate a swap partition that is smaller than the physical memory in the system. This will prevent the use of hibernation (suspend-to-disk) because the system image will not fit in the swap partition. If you intend to use hibernation with your system, you should ensure that the swap partition’s size is at least as large as the system’s physical RAM.
  • After installation from the Ubuntu 9.10 Release Candidate, other installed operating systems are not correctly displayed in the boot menu. To correct this, users should run sudo update-grub from the commandline after rebooting to their installed Ubuntu system.
  • Ubuntu 9.10 enables the CRDA wireless regulatory framework for controlling which wireless channels are usable and visible in a particular location. If you previously had to use the module option similar to that below in /etc/modprobe.d/options to allow access to certain channels in your locality then you may find that wireless will not function at all: * options cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU You should remove this kernel module option on upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 and use the iw reg command instead.
  • A bug in the apt package included in the Ubuntu 9.10 Beta prevents automatic notification of available package updates. Users who have installed or upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 prior to the Release Candidate should ensure that updates are being made available by running update-manager manually, clicking Check, and installing the presented updates.
  • The wacom driver in Ubuntu 9.10 supports automatic configuration, but it conflicts with manual device entries for wacom tablets in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, causing the X server to crash either on startup or shutdown. Please comment out or remove the entries from xorg.conf to get rid of the crashes.
  • In Ubuntu 9.10 MySQL 5.1 has been promoted as the default MySQL server. MySQL 5.0 is still available from the universe repository though. Performing an upgrade via update-manager will correctly handle the transition from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1. However using a dist-upgrade will not: mysql-server-5.0 will be upgraded instead of being replaced by mysql-server-5.1. If MySQL 5.0 needs to be kept the mysql-server and mysql-client packages should be removed before the upgrade is started.
  • If MySQL has been setup to use the MySQL Cluster engine (NDB engine) upgrade to MySQL 5.1 will not work since the mysql-dfsg-5.1 packages don’t support MySQL Cluster. Instead mysql-server and mysql-client should be removed before upgrade and mysql-server-5.0 should be kept. update-manager will automatically take care of this situation. Note that MySQL 5.0 is in universe and thus won’t have have the same maintenance coverage as MySQL 5.1 (which is in main).
  • The avahi-daemon package, which implements the mDNS “zeroconf” standard, includes a check to avoid running when a conflicting .local DNS domain is present. It is reported that some ISPs advertise such a .local domain on their networks, which will leave Ubuntu 9.10 hosts unable to see names advertised on the local network
  • The kpackagekit package manager used in Kubuntu 9.10 does not notify users if the packages they are installing come from repositories that are not secured with PGP. Users who have unsigned package repositories in their /etc/apt/sources.list configuration and wish to be informed of any packages installed from these sources should use the apt-get commandline tool as a workaround.
  • The upstart init system in Ubuntu 9.10 fails to work on the sparc architecture due to an undiagnosed SIGBUS error. Users of Ubuntu on sparc are advised to remain on Ubuntu 9.04 instead of upgrading to 9.10.

Source: Ubuntu

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