Zubuntu Initial Teething Problems Options

[speculatrix]

EDIT! Totally rewritten after discovered my tar.gz was corrupted. Apologies to all for misleading information

----

OK, so, after backing up my old angstrom install (which took a while as it was behaving oddly), I downloaded the zubuntu install file, and use the android install tools.

Notes

1/ I had to rename the .tar.gz to android-root.tar.gz and not android-rootfs.tar.gz as specified.
2/ when it says "reformat hard drive" it also wipes all partitions and creates one big one, so if you did have a separate /home, make sure you back it up
3/ you'll need quite a big SD or CF card to store the install files, they're quite big! It will also take quite a long time to unpack.


Good things
1/ my wired CF ethernet worked easily - had to set static IP because dhclient fails with "Can't create addrlist socket".
2/ my prism2 (zonet mercury zcf1100) CF card is detected
3/ usb keyboard worked fine

Problems

1/ pccardctl or cardctl is missing --edit-- FIXED! installed pcmciautils package
2/ the kernel has orinoco/hermes drivers, these are useless, you'll want hostap, so create /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-hostap file containing lines:

CODE

blacklist orinoco_plx
blacklist orinoco_cs
blacklist orinoco_pci
blacklist hermes

Paul

Reason for edit: highighting rewrite

[cortez]

Way to go Paul, this is the kind of response I need right now.

In the meantime I've fixed a few things:
* rotation - fixed
* desktop background - fixed
* pccardctl - added

Keep those reports coming in, they are most helpful!

[speculatrix]

good news... moving the battery compartment slider is detected and it suspends properly.

[speculatrix]

good news... I got wifi working using a static address and WEP. However, the odd thing is, I have to ping the zaurus from the gateway before the zaurus will see it! It turns out that dhclient is also broken when I invoke it for wlan0, I get

CODE

wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Can't create addrlist socket
Failed to bring up wlan0.

it's probably related to the problem when I was using my CF ethernet card above.

Meanwhile, if I run kismet, if spews out

CODE

SKB BUG: Invalid truesize (320) len=222, sizeof(sk_buff)=160

len is sometimes 228. The odd thing is that it still scans and shows wifi access points! When kismet exits I get a coredump. One good thing is that kismet has been pre-set to log to /var/log/kismet, whereas I hate the normal default which is to plonk the files in current working directory.

[speculatrix]

BTW, I don't know if this is significant, but when I first had wired networking up, I did an apt-get-upgrade and GLIB was updated; I rebooted afterwards. I am wondering if this is affecting the dhclient?

[speculatrix]

I note that you can only get X started as root - when I created a non-priv user all I got was the black/white background of no window manager. Luckily I could ssh in (installed dropbear) and kill it. Worked OK as root, had to run "ts_calibrate" before the touch screen made sense!

So, I copied various things from root's home dir to my user's home dir, change ownership of course, and then whilst it came up with the window manager etc, the pointer calibration was totally wrong.

So, went back to root user. It had come up in portrait mode, so I tried commenting out xrandr in root's .xinitrc, but it didnt make a difference.

So far then only minor niggles, I feel that with a bit of tweaking it should be really good! Excellent, well done Cortez.

Anyone going to join us for the ride?

[speculatrix]

One odd thing. I can't control screen brightness, and sometimes the screen suddenly dims or brightens. It's not a screen-saver effect as it happens during use.

[cortez]

Way to go Paul, keep them coming!

For the rotation to work you need to install x11-xserver-utils, since xrandr isn't installed. For screen-brightness use xbindkeys. First do a "xbindkeys --defaults > /root/.xbindkeysrc", then map de Fn-3 and Fn-4 keys using xbindkeys-config to "display-brightness.sh down" and "display-brightness.sh up". I recognize the effect you describe where the screen dims and brightens. This happens when the battery is almost empty

Cheers,
cortez

[speculatrix]

(edit: ps, installing xrandr worked. I no longer have a cricked neck looking at my Z sideways!)

excellent; I've never played with X11 keyboard mapping so using what you wrote, I found http://www.linux.com/feature/59494 and added these lines to the .xbindkeysrc file and ran xbindkeys

CODE

#Fn 3
"display-brightness.sh down"
   m:0x40 + c:12

#Fn 4
"display-brightness.sh up"
   m:0x40 + c:13

the flickering occurred even when external power was connected!

unfortunately, your display-brightness.sh was b0rked - it had dos CR/LF, so I removed them. I noticed something odd when I tried increasing the brightness, found a few bugs in the script and also that the corgi-bl driver reports max-brightness wrongly, so I rewrote it...

CODE

#!/bin/sh
# display-brightness.sh
# simple script to set display-brightness for zaurus clamshell
# author: patrick steiner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
# modified by: Ian Munsie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
# modified by: Paul M "speculatrix" - for Spitz/Zubuntu
# version: 1.02 | 15/12/2008 21:48 GMT

STEP=5
MAX_BRIGHTNESS=15
MIN_BRIGHTNESS=2

DRIVER="`ls /sys/class/backlight/|head -n 1`"
BRIGHTNESS_FILE="/sys/class/backlight/$DRIVER/brightness"
BRIGHTNESS=`cat /sys/class/backlight/$DRIVER/actual_brightness`
# this gives bad number - 15 is max, 16 is off!
#MAX_BRIGHTNESS=`cat /sys/class/backlight/$DRIVER/max_brightness`

POWER_FILE="/sys/class/backlight/$DRIVER/bl_power"
POWER_ON=0
#POWER_OFF=1

if [ ! -n "$1" ]; then
    echo "max / current"
    echo "$MAX_BRIGHTNESS / $ACTUAL_BRIGHTNESS"
elif [ "$1" = "up" ]; then
    test -x /usr/bin/bl && bl on
    echo $POWER_ON >> $POWER_FILE
    if [ $BRIGHTNESS -lt $MAX_BRIGHTNESS ]; then
        let BRIGHTNESS=$BRIGHTNESS+$STEP
        if [ $BRIGHTNESS -ge $MAX_BRIGHTNESS ]; then
            let BRIGHTNESS=$MAX_BRIGHTNESS
        fi
        echo $BRIGHTNESS >> $BRIGHTNESS_FILE
    fi
elif [ "$1" = "down" ]; then
    test -x /usr/bin/bl && bl on
    echo $POWER_ON >> $POWER_FILE
    if [ $BRIGHTNESS -gt $MIN_BRIGHTNESS ]; then
        let BRIGHTNESS=$BRIGHTNESS-$STEP
        if [ $BRIGHTNESS -le $MIN_BRIGHTNESS ]; then
            let BRIGHTNESS=$MIN_BRIGHTNESS
        fi
        echo $BRIGHTNESS >> $BRIGHTNESS_FILE
    fi
else
    echo -e "\nUsage:\n\t `basename $0` [up | down]\n"
fi

I found that when X is running, even the lightweight lxde , it runs very low on memory, so I added a swapfile (I previously had a swap partition but the install killed that :-)..

CODE

# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         62136      60764       1372          0        176      12340
-/+ buffers/cache:      48248      13888
Swap:            0          0          0
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/.swap bs=1024 count=65536
# mkswap /.swap
# swapon /.swap
# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         62136      60496       1640          0        436      11916
-/+ buffers/cache:      48144      13992
Swap:        65528          0      65528

[speculatrix]

BTW, is there a battery status app?

BTW2, is sound meant to work? I fired up audacious and it appears to play but no sound comes out?

BTW3, it's very slow, but I found a process called ts_keyswas eating 80% of the CPU all the time, so I killed it and it's slightly better!

BTW4, the wifi client GUI doesn't do anything, if you hit prefs it eventually pops up a window, which is empty. takes forever to close!
--edit-- I killed off the wicd app and the background daemon, it seems to make things run a bit faster!

BTW5, many of the apps have tiny tiny window decorations - audacious for example takes a very steady hand to operate - had to recal my pointer to be able to use it!

[speculatrix]

good news! firefox runs, the speed isn't great but it is relatively useable. I am posting this very message using it. I note it's firefox3b5.

[djsb]

Hi,
I'd like to give the Ubuntu installation a try when it's a bit more stable.
Can someone do a step by step guide for beginners like me.
At the moment I'm using Cacko on an SL-C3100 (completely standard).
I have a Belkin USB 10/100 ethernet adaptor (F5D5050) that I can connect to my home
network router and an ADSL internet connection. Do I need a anything else to get started?
I'm running Ubuntu edgy on my desktop PC if that helps.

David.

[zthird]

for my 860 I had to readd the commented out MAX_BRIGHTNESS line as 15 was almost half the actual working max of 47 and updated the ACTUAL_BRIGHTNESS variable to BRIGHTNESS for the status report

CODE

#!/bin/sh
# display-brightness.sh
# simple script to set display-brightness for zaurus clamshell
# author: patrick steiner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
# modified by: Ian Munsie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
# modified by: Paul M "speculatrix" - for Spitz/Zubuntu
# version: 1.02 | 15/12/2008 21:48 GMT

STEP=5
MIN_BRIGHTNESS=2

DRIVER="`ls /sys/class/backlight/|head -n 1`"
BRIGHTNESS_FILE="/sys/class/backlight/$DRIVER/brightness"
BRIGHTNESS=`cat /sys/class/backlight/$DRIVER/actual_brightness`
# needed for 860 (at least)
MAX_BRIGHTNESS=`cat /sys/class/backlight/$DRIVER/max_brightness`

POWER_FILE="/sys/class/backlight/$DRIVER/bl_power"
POWER_ON=0
#POWER_OFF=1

if [ ! -n "$1" ]; then
    echo "max / current"
    echo "$MAX_BRIGHTNESS / $BRIGHTNESS"
elif [ "$1" = "up" ]; then
    test -x /usr/bin/bl && bl on
    echo $POWER_ON >> $POWER_FILE
    if [ $BRIGHTNESS -lt $MAX_BRIGHTNESS ]; then
        let BRIGHTNESS=$BRIGHTNESS+$STEP
        if [ $BRIGHTNESS -ge $MAX_BRIGHTNESS ]; then
            let BRIGHTNESS=$MAX_BRIGHTNESS
        fi
        echo $BRIGHTNESS >> $BRIGHTNESS_FILE
    fi
elif [ "$1" = "down" ]; then
    test -x /usr/bin/bl && bl on
    echo $POWER_ON >> $POWER_FILE
    if [ $BRIGHTNESS -gt $MIN_BRIGHTNESS ]; then
        let BRIGHTNESS=$BRIGHTNESS-$STEP
        if [ $BRIGHTNESS -le $MIN_BRIGHTNESS ]; then
            let BRIGHTNESS=$MIN_BRIGHTNESS
        fi
        echo $BRIGHTNESS >> $BRIGHTNESS_FILE
    fi
else
    echo -e "\nUsage:\n\t `basename $0` [up | down]\n"
fi