Ubuntu 10.04 Reinstallation: Another Go

I had previously installed Ubuntu 10.04 once or twice.  This post provides a synthesis of the process, done on a Windows XP dual-boot machine.

Things to Save

The first thing to think about was, What did I want to save from my previous installation?  I was already keeping my data in an NTFS partition that WinXP recognized as D:.  I had named that partition DATA in both operating systems (OSs).  So I did not have most of my data on the root (commonly referred to with a simple slash, "/") partition containing my Ubuntu program installation.  The main exception was what Ubuntu knows as the /home partition.  (This and other Ubuntu folders, being included on a partition formatted in ext3 or ext4, were invisible to Windows.)  The /home partition was the default location for user data files.  My own files -- documents, PDFs, etc. -- were no longer there, but Ubuntu would still save various settings and other things there.  So I decided to try create a new /home partition, and copy the old /home folder's contents to the new /home partition, before reinstalling Ubuntu.  That little effort became the subject of a separate post.

Just in case, I saved my open tabs in Firefox (Ubuntu) using an extension whose name was not visible to me at this writing -- called (I believe) CopyAllURLs.  I also used the FEBE addon to save my complete Firefox setup; and since FEBE had failed in the past, I used the InfoLister addon to save at least the list of addons that I had currently installed.  I had previously saved their settings separately, for those addons (e.g., Tab Mix Plus, Forecastfox) that allowed me to do so.  I saved all of these things to my data drive, not to the Ubuntu programs drive that I was about to wipe out.  All of these steps proved to be unnecessary:  the separate /home partition (below) saved my entire Firefox setup just as I had left it.

I started up Chrome and Opera, both of which I had installed on this machine, and saved a list of their open URLs.  This, too, was unnecessary, thanks to the separate /home partition.  I had already migrated my email and contacts from Thunderbird (Ubuntu) to the Windows portable version of Thunderbird.

There was another thing to save, but I forgot until too late.  I should have run the installed-software command to make a current list of the programs I had installed on Ubuntu.  Instead, I was going to have to use the older list that I had saved some months earlier, and any programs installed since then would have to be rediscovered and reinstalled one at a time.

I should also have saved /etc/fstab.  My set of hard drive partitions had mostly not changed.  I could have just edited that instead of starting over from scratch (below).

That was pretty much all that I needed to save from the old Ubuntu programs partition that I was about to wipe out.  Most of my work was done in Windows virtual machines running on VMware Workstation, and those were on a separate partition already.  So now it was time to begin the installation.

Installation from CD

This time, I installed Ubuntu 10.04 from scratch, using the CD.  Previous inquiries had suggested that the PAE-enabled kernel would be installed automatically when installing from the CD.  (PAE allowed 32-bit Ubuntu to access RAM well beyond the 4GB theoretical limit -- apparently up to 64GB.)  By right-clicking on individual items in the partition install screen during installation, I manually designated a 30GB root ("/") partition for programs.  The installer automatically detected my previously formatted 5GB swap partition.  It seemed that people were still having problems with ext4, so I formatted the root partition as ext3.  At reboot, GRUB did say that I was installing a PAE kernel, so that was good.

Installing Software

Now I ran the second half of the installed-software command (above) to restore the set of programs that I had installed on Ubuntu at various points.  This involved using Nautilus to put a copy of my installed-software list someplace accessible (I chose my Desktop), using "cd ~/Desktop" as the short way of getting to the desktop, and then typing the necessary commands:

sudo dpkg --set-selections < installed-software
sudo apt-get install dselect
sudo dselect

This gave me a menu, from which I chose option 3, "Install and upgrade wanted packages."  It did so.  It took about an hour.  During the process, it asked "Do you want to erase any previously downloaded .deb files?"  My search yielded no clear answer to this question.  I guessed, from a couple of things I saw in that search, that this was like the question that came up in some Windows installations (in Microsoft Office, perhaps), where you would have the option of keeping downloads on the hard drive to make future fixes or upgrades faster, at the expense of consuming additional disk space.  I tried the Yes option.  It paused for a minute and then put me back at the menu.  So I guess it deleted some .deb files.  Anyway, the installed packages included ntfs-config, so now I could run that ("sudo ntfs-config"), so that Ubuntu would recognize my NTFS (Windows) partitions and put appropriate entries in /etc/fstab.  So then /home would be recognized on reboot.

Unfortunately, something in the install-software process screwed up my system, leading to a "udevadm" error message and a whole separate post.  But then, when I rebooted, I had another problem.  I was looking at a nearly blank screen.  It just showed the name of Ubuntu across the top ("Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS P4 tty1," where P4 was the name of my computer) and then gave me a simple login prompt:  "P4 login."  I wasn't sure what to search for, to solve this problem, so I booted with the alternative installation CD and chose the "Rescue a broken system" option.  Ultimately, it gave me two basic options:  either reinstall GRUB or execute a shell in my Ubuntu program partition (in my case, /dev/sdb8).  I had no idea what to type at the prompt, and I didn't seem to be having a GRUB problem, so I tried a search; but it turned up stuff dealing with monitor problems.  I tried another search and came across the idea that I could just type "startx" to open the graphical user interface (GUI), so I rebooted, entered my username and password at that prompt, and then typed startx.  But this gave me some error messages:  "Failed to open device," "No valid modes," and "Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration."

Basically, it seemed that the installed-software process had messed up my system.  So I started over, installing Ubuntu from scratch, and this time I didn't use the installed-software option.  I had to go back through the process of setting up my separate /home partition, and then I worked manually through the installed-software process.  That entailed setting up my repositories.  After that process, some programs were still not installed.  Drawing upon my previous installation and its follow-on comments (as well as notes in a few other posts), I used System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager to install acroread, adobe-flashplugin, boinc, dvgrab, fdutils, gparted, mplayer, nautilus-open-terminal, ntfsprogs, p7zip-full, sysinfo, ubuntu-tweak, unetbootin, and webhttrack.  Then I installed several programs that I had downloaded separately, on the assumption they were not available via Synaptic.  These included VMware Workstation 7, which I installed, as I had learned to do, by typing "sh VMware-Workstation-Full-7.1.0-261024.i386.bundle" in the folder containing that downloaded bundle file.  The simple "sudo sh" prefix was also adequate for installing my separate .bin downloads (i.e., GoogleEarthLinux.bin).  I installed Beyond Compare, Opera, and Google Chrome by just double-clicking on the .deb downloads.

Settings and Adjustments

Creating the separate /home partition had preserved most of my Nautilus settings, but I still had to tweak a few of those manually.  It had not saved my monitor driver settings, so now I went into System > Administration > Hardware Drivers, searched for available drivers and, for my machine, found NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (current version) > Activate. This, like other installation and activation steps, would work only when there was no other Synaptic or software installer running.  I rebooted to activate the hardware driver.  Unfortunately, I was still getting some bad ghosting.  Tightening my video cable connectors solved the problem.

Most of my newly installed programs did not require immediate configuration.  To configure BOINC, I went to Applications > System Tools > BOINC Manager > Next > Choose a Project > World Community Grid > Next, and then went into Advanced > Settings to adjust my preferences.

GRUB2 had lost the setting by which it would remember which operating system I had booted last, and would reboot that one instead of defaulting to Ubuntu, so I typed "sudo gedit /etc/default/grub"; I changed one line to say GRUB_DEFAULT=saved instead of GRUB_DEFAULT=0; I added another line, right after it, that said "GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true"; I saved and closed that file; and then I typed "sudo update-grub."

Following a previous post, I pruned the list of entries shown in the GRUB2 menu at bootup.  First, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/grub.d/10_linux" and added a line, immediately after the comments section at the top, that said "GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_RECOVERY=true" (without quotes, as always).  That would prevent me from seeing the "recovery" versions of Linux kernels in that menu.  At the end of that same file, I searched for the place that had these two lines:

list=`echo $list | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -vx $linux | tr '\n' ' '`
done

and changed it by inserting another list line between those two:

list=`echo $list | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -vx $linux | tr '\n' ' '`
list=`version_find_latest $list`
done

(Note that backticks ( ` ) are not the same as single quotes ( ' ) in such files.)  This, I hoped, would show me just the one or two most recent Linux kernels.  Finally, I saved and closed 10_linux and modified its companion file with this command:  "sudo chmod -x /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+."  This command would hopefully prevent me from seeing the memtest options in the GRUB2 menu.  I rebooted and confirmed that it worked.

Other settings did remain intact via the preserved /home partition.  Unlike the steps described in the previous installation and in another tweak post, I did not have to make manual adjustments to prevent icons for mounted drives from appearing on the desktop.  My previous list of programs that should run at startup remained intact.  Gedit was still my default crontab editor.  The permissions giving me access to various partitions as ordinary user, not root, were still in place.  My VMware settings seemed to have been preserved, except for what may have been a few new root-level settings in the new version of VMware Workstation that I had just installed.

When these steps were complete, I ran Update Manager one last time, rebooted, and confirmed that everything looked good.  Then I rebooted with a CD and made an Acronis disk image on a separate partition.  Done!

Firefox and FEBE Problems in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic)

As noted in a previous post, I was having problems with using FEBE to restore a profile with all of my settings and add-ons preset.  This post describes the steps I took in a failed effort to fix that problem.

I completely uninstalled Firefox, first, by searching for it in Synaptic and marking it (3.5.7) for complete removal and clicking Apply, and then by navigating to Home in Nautilus and deleting the .mozilla/firefox folder.  It was a hidden folder, so in Nautilus I had to set View > Show Hidden Files to see it.  Then I reinstalled Firefox 3.5.7 in Synaptic and reinstalled FEBE.  To run FEBE in Firefox, I selected Tools > FEBE > Restore Profile (kill the pop-up reminders) > Create new profile (I called mine Working).  This gave me a box that offered to let me name a new profile, but that was not taking any text input.

With the aid of the tutorial, I discovered that closing Firefox would actually not close the Restore Profile window.  Now I was able to create my new profile and then Start Profile Restore.  Again, it did what it did before:  "Profile restore in progress ... Please wait" continued for much longer than the "minute or two" recommended by the tutorial, and the hard drive light was not running. I killed FEBE and restarted Firefox.  It did not show FEBE as being installed.  It did show other extensions (Tools > Add-ons) that it had not shown previously.

I installed FEBE again, this time from within the Add-ons window instead of from the Mozilla webpage, and again restarted Firefox.  Now Firefox showed only the two add-ons (FEBE 6.3.2 and Ubuntu Firefox Modifications 0.8) that it had shown at the start.  I went through the profile restore steps again.  To get the "Start profile restore" button to light up, I had to switch back and forth between the default and Working profiles.  Then I started the restore again.  Again, no action.  After a minute or two, I killed it and tried restoring a different profile.  Still nothing.

Another flaky thing that Firefox was doing:  it was opening a tiny window sometimes.  This little window could be expanded, but there was nothing in it.  In Synaptic, I did a Quick Search for Firefox and uninstalled all versions that were installed.  I then reinstalled 3.5.7 and tried again in FEBE.  Still no profile restore.  At this point, I gave up and reinstalled.

Configuring 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 with Vista Dual-Boot

I had a Compaq CQ60-420US laptop. It had come with Vista pre-installed. I didn't like that, so I wiped it off. This led to a whole ordeal in trying to get the hard drive to work with WinXP, for which I had developed lots of tricks and tweaks. That effort ultimately failed, and I wound up with Vista back on the thing after all. I had wanted to get away from dual booting, but I still needed some flavor of Windows for the occasional hardware interaction, e.g., updating the BIOS and other firmware. So for now, I was going to leave Vista in place and set up a 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) dual-boot with it. This post describes the process of setting up that dual boot. A review of some guides gave me the general impression that installing a Vista-Ubuntu dual boot was much like installing a WinXP-Ubuntu dual boot, unless you used the wubi alternative. The approach I took was as follows:

1. With Vista already installed, insert the Ubuntu program CD, reboot, and go through the ordinary installation sequence. If you do nothing, the CD will pretty much take you right to the Install icon. If your BIOS isn't set to boot from CD before hard drive, hit F2 or Esc or Del or F8 or whatever key it is that gets you into your BIOS setup, promptly after the computer first starts up, and adjust the boot priority there.
2. You may find that the bootable Gparted CD provides a clearer view of hard drive partitions than does the partitioner in the Ubuntu installer. If the partitioning step leaves you dazed and confused, you may want to back up, download Gparted, burn yourself a CD, boot with that first, set up your partitions as you like, and then come back into the Ubuntu installation process. Note: if you're going to run Windows in a virtual machine, you may want to give it an NTFS partition somewhere, so you have a place to store data. Windows can't read Linux (e.g., ext3) partitions.
3. After the initial installation, make sure that Vista starts up OK. No point spending hours refining a system that isn't ready for prime time. Then restart and go into Ubuntu, and make various adjustments, including these: (a) Nautilus > View > Show Hidden Files. (b) Nautilus > Edit > Preferences > Behavior > Always open in browser windows.
4. Go through the steps described in my previous post on configuring Ubuntu 9.04 (including comments). That post updates the first part of an earlier post on how to configure 9.04. After running updates, type "sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst" and put # symbols in front of each line (i.e., older Ubuntu kernels) that you don't want to appear in the GRUB menu.
5. Before continuing with items in that earlier post (as explained in more detail there), I initially thought that the next step would be to install and configure Thunderbird (just plain old thunderbird, not mozilla-thunderbird) and Lightning-extension via Synaptic. But then I decided I would just use web-based e-mail and calendaring (probably via Gmail) on the laptop, and would download and archive my e-mails solely on my desktop, thereby sparing the need to synchronize the two computers.
6. Now refer back to the earlier post, to install programs that came via individual downloads rather than through Synaptic. For me, these included Google Desktop for Linux, Adobe Reader, and VMware Workstation 6.5.3.
7. I installed .deb files by double-clicking on them in Nautilus, and .bin and .bundle files by running "chmod +x [filename]" and then "sudo ./[filename]." I didn't have any .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 files to install this time, but if I had, I would have moved them to my /home/[username] folder, navigated there in Terminal, and then used a tar unpack command (e.g., tar -vxf [or tar xvfz] filename.tar.gz, or tar xvf filename.tar, or tar yxf filename.tar.bz2).
8. To install Google Earth, continuing to follow my previous notes, I typed two lines: "wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/current/GoogleEarthLinux.bin" and then "sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin." This gave me a Google Earth installation, but with flickering and basically nonfunctioning display. I tried System > Administration > Update Manager, and at first that program assured me that my system was up-to-date; but when I made it check again, it reported errors related to Wine and Opera. I ignored these for now, since they did not seem relevant. People seemed to be experimenting with the flickering video problem in Google Earth. There was a relatively complex tutorial that apparently fixed it in some cases, at the risk of messing up the system. Choosing instead an easy fix that seemed to work for some, I went to System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects and downgraded from Extra to Normal. That didn't help. Following another tip, I downgraded further, from Normal to None (i.e., no visual effects), and also turned off the Atmosphere feature in Google Earth (View > Atmosphere). That fixed it.
9. To configure Firefox, I went to another computer and used the FEBE extension to make a full backup of that machine's Firefox installation. I copied the folder containing the FEBE backup to the target computer (i.e., the one where I've been doing all this installation stuff). I installed FEBE in Firefox on the target machine, restarted Firefox, started to watch the tutorial on restoring with FEBE, turned to the instructions on manually restoring with FEBE, and then took these steps on the target machine: Close Firefox. Go to the FEBE backup directory (i.e., the one where I put the FEBE backup folder that I copied over from the other computer). Copy its .fbu file (in my case, profileFx3{default}.fbu) and rename the copy as a .zip file. I called it FEBErestore.zip. Extract the contents of the .zip file (creating, in my case, a folder called FEBErestore). Move the contents of the FEBE restore folder to the Firefox profile folder, which I found in Nautilus at File System/home/ray/.mozilla/firefox/[random name].default. In my case, for example, I moved the contents of the FEBErestore folder to this .default folder. When it told me that a folder already exists, I said Merge All, and Replace All for the "file already exists" message. During this process, I got an "Error while copying 'febe.jar'" message. The details of the error said "Permission denied." I canceled and tried again as root (type "sudo nautilus" and then do the move in the Nautilus session that opens that way). That worked. Then I closed everything else and started Firefox and, yeah, it looked like all the extensions were there, configured and everything.

This was the extent of my Ubuntu configuration for now. During these processes, I came across some miscellaneous issues:

• I wanted to change login passwords. This, I thought, would be under System > Administration but no, eventually I found it instead under Applications > Accessories. Double-clicking on that did not work; I had to right-click and choose Change Password; but then the password that I changed it to did not work for login. I thought the problem might be that I hit Enter instead of clicking on the button after doing the change; that is, possibly the default was Cancel rather than Change. I could not tell; neither button seemed to be highlighted by default. So then it turned out that I had changed the password to unlock the keyring, rather than the password to log in. It looked like I had changed that properly, second time around; but still no.
• As in other Ubuntu installations, panels did not readily allow me to move icons to the locations I would designate. Sometimes they would not move; sometimes they would not go exactly where I indicated. On the bottom panel, for example, I could not rearrange them in the far right corner. It turned out to be easier to move things *out of* the corner (where the Windows system tray would be) than to move them *into* the corner. It turned out that I had to unlock every item that I wanted to drag another icon past. Tooltips came up, irritatingly enough, when I was trying to move icons, making it difficult to see what I was doing.
• The bottom panel failed to show icons or buttons for my currently running programs. The solution was to right-click on the bottom panel, choose Add to Panel, and choose Window List. But then, on reboot, it did not work again. I fixed it by right-clicking on the end of the Window List item on the bottom panel and checking Lock to Panel.
• When trying to view the contents of some hard drive partitions, such as a partition I called DATA, I got "Cannot mount volume. You are not privileged to mount the volume 'DATA'. Following my previous notes, in Terminal I typed "sudo mkdir /media/DATA," thinking that perhaps I had not yet created the mount point, but this gave me "cannot create directory `/media/DATA': File exists." I typed "sudo nautilus," went to File System > /media/DATA > right-click > Properties, and verified that I (i.e., user "ray", not just root) had full permissions. I typed "sudo fdisk -l" (that's an L, not a one) to get a list of devices. That showed that the DATA partition was being recognized as an NTFS device at /dev/sda4. I typed "sudo gedit /etc/fstab" and saw that there was no line in the fstab file for /dev/sda4. Following some notes from a few months earlier, I typed "sudo ntfs-config." (Note that this was one of the programs I had installed from Synaptic, above.) This detected the VISTA programs partition (i.e., drive C in Windows), but not the DATA partition. I ran ntfs-config again. This time, it didn't mention the VISTA drive, but as before it did give me the option to enable an internal drive. I accepted that. Now I saw that there was indeed a line for the DATA partition as well. While I was here, I used blkid to find the UUIDs for each partition (e.g., "sudo blkid") and replaced that portion of the relevant line in fstab. For example, the line that previously read "/dev/sda1 /media/VISTA ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0" now began with "UUID=19142FAA142F8D35" instead of "dev/sda1." Following the format of other lines in fstab, I preceded this one with a line that said, "# Entry for /dev/sda1 : " and followed a similar procedure for the DATA partition. I rebooted and was now able to view the NTFS-formatted VISTA and DATA partitions. On second thought, I went back into fstab and removed the line for the VISTA partition, since I didn't expect to need it normally in Ubuntu and didn't want to expose it to accidental deletions and such.

This seemed to give me a basic working dual-boot 64-bit system. The next step, for me, was to configure VMware, so that I could run any Windows program within Ubuntu.