Configuring 64-Bit Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

In a previous post, I described the steps I followed in setting up x64 Ubuntu 9.04 (as refined in a later post).  This post does the same for Ubuntu 9.10.  I won't re-describe steps that are already spelled out in some detail in that previous post and in the other webpages to which it refers.  I'll still provide most of the details here, just not as much in-depth explanation.

Deciding on a Clean Install.  I was installing on a machine where I had previously been running 9.04.  I installed 9.04 on top of 8.10 on that machine, and this seemed to lead to some unusual problems -- you know, the kind of issue that brings up almost nothing in a Google search.  The better approach was apparently to do a clean install.  So now it was time to do that, replacing 9.04 with 9.10.

My first question was, what should I preserve from my previous setup, and how can I preserve it?  One suggestion was to try this:

tar cf /media/[backup drive]/[backup folder]/[backup filename].tar /etc /home

That didn't work for me, as my /home directory contained 32GB.  Another post in that same thread suggested installing your stuff to a separate /home partition, so that your settings wouldn't be wiped out by future clean installations.  I found a guide to moving the /home partition.  I started to use GParted to make a 50GB /home partition.  I chose ext3 because ext4 still seemed to have some issues.  I discovered that Ubuntu's manual installer has an option not to format the partition you're installing to, so as to preserve your old settings.  I decided against both of these approaches because I did want to wipe out my old /home partition, with its mistakes and assorted junk.  So I installed Ubuntu as described in the previous post, working from a CD.  I went into System > Administration > Update Manager > Check.  This gave me 184 updates and a reboot.

Software Sources.  Next, I went into Applications > Ubuntu Software Center > Get Free Software > search for "restricted extras" > select Ubuntu restricted extras > Install.  Next, System > Administration > Hardware Drivers > NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 185) (because I had an NVIDIA video card) > Activate > Close.  Next, System > Administration > Software Sources > Ubuntu Software tab > Download From > Other > Select Best Server > Choose Server (whichever one it highlights) > Close.  Also, in Software Sources, go to the Other Software tab, select the two entries that are already there, and click Add to add more.  The additional lines come from the X-Updates website.  There, click on "Technical details about this PPA," specify Karmic, and copy the two deb lines there, one at a time, into the APT line, clicking "Add Source" after each.  Next, on that same webpage, follow the Signing Key instructions, just below the deb lines.  Click Close.  This will bring up "The information about available software is out-of-date."  Click Reload.  If you don't get a "Reload" option when you click Close, go back into Third-Party Software and unclick and then re-click some item and try again.

Synaptic.  I had read an upgrade tip that said I could automatically reinstall my installed Synaptic applications by using System > Administration Synaptic Package Manager > File > Save Markings As > Save full state and then, after the upgrade, use Synaptic > File > Read Markings.  I had saved as advised; now I tried the read (restore) step.  It did not work well for me.  After this and a few more misadventures, I wound up reinstalling Ubuntu from scratch.  For posterity, the next few paragraphs describe the failed approach.  After that, I describe the alternate approach, the one that I had used in previous installations. 


To try the Read Markings approach, I started by going to Places > Computer and double-clicking on the drive where I had saved the backup.  Then Apply.  But that gave me an error:  "Could not apply changes!  Fix broken packages first."  So I went into Synaptic > Edit > Fix broken packages.  That, in turn, generated this message:  "An error occurred.  The following details are provided:  E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages."  Adapting some older advice, I closed Synaptic and then typed this:

sudo -i
apt-get clean
apt-get autoclean
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

Now I tried Synaptic again.  The steps just taken did not seem to change anything; but after tinkering with the same options, Edit > Fix broken packages seemed to work, and Apply proceeded to download 259 files.  Since the more automated Markings approach seemed to work, the advice for the next installation would be to uninstall any unwanted packages before running the Save Markings step.

Instead of all that, on the second installation I selected and installed these packages from within Synaptic:  boinc; boinc-manager; fdutils (if you expect to be using a floppy drive); gparted; ntfs-config; ntfsprogs; p7zip-full; sysinfo; and webhttrack. (If numerous items come up in response to your search, click on the Package heading to sort them alphabetically. Also install other related packages, if given the option.) (If some of my later descriptions don't work for you, it may be because you didn't install one of these.)  For my e-mail, I preferred thunderbird, so I added that, and uninstalled evolution.  Some of these may ask if you want to "Mark additional required changes?" Click "Mark" and go on to the next one. Then click Apply. Some of these programs may already be shown as being installed on your system. If so, no problem.

Other Programs.  To install Google Earth, I didn't use a previous download (see above). Instead, I typed these two lines:  First, "wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/current/GoogleEarthLinux.bin," and then "sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin" (as always, without quotation marks).

I didn't have to install Firefox -- it came installed with Karmic -- but, as in the past, I hoped to speed up my customization by using the FEBE add-in.  I had made a FEBE backup before this reinstallation.  Now, to restore my previous settings, I installed FEBE.  Unfortunately, Firefox did not seem to be functioning properly. I address this set of problems in a separate post.  (I think the problem may have been that I tried to use a FEBE backup of a Windows XP Firefox installation.  Firefox on Ubuntu does not use the same add-ons.)  To have a browser, I downloaded 64-bit Opera.  (At this point, 64-bit Google Chrome was apparently unstable.)  Opera came as a .deb file, so I just double-clicked to install it.  On the reinstall, I didn't even bother with FEBE at this point; for the time being, I just used Opera in its basic form.

VMware Workstation 7 came as a .bundle file, which required the same installation steps as .bin files.  First, I typed "chmod +x" [filename] and then "./"[filename]. I designated "/home/[username]" as the installation directory.  (In all cases, fill in the bracketed names with your actual names.)

I didn't have any .tar files to install at this point.  If I had, my notes said I should have used tar -vxf filename.tar.gz (or possibly tar xvfz instead), tar xvf filename.tar, and tar yxf filename.tar.bz2.

Drive Automount.  I wanted some partitions to be mounted automatically at startup.  In the past, I had manually edited /etc/fstab to do this.  This time, I decided to try PySDM, which was apparently short for Python Storage Device Manager (System > Administration > Storage Device Manager).  Unfortunately, my efforts suggested there were serious bugs in PySDM, so I uninstalled it and edited fstab manually.  I began by typing "sudo ntfs-config" and then "sudo gedit /etc/fstab."  I also ran System > Administration > GParted for a GUI reference, to help me see what I was supposed to be doing.  I plugged in all of my USB drives, typed "sudo blkid" to get the universal identifier (UUID) for each partition, and copied and pasted that into fstab.  I refreshed GParted (Ctrl-R) and created a comment line for each partition shown in GParted.  This was about the point when things seemed so grotesquely screwed up (because of PySDM, it seemed) as to warrant a complete reinstallation.  When I rebooted, it looked like everything was getting automatically booted without a problem.  I saved a copy of my resulting fstab in case I had to reinstall again.  I noticed that the booted partitions were all represented by icons on the desktop.  I wanted to remove those, so I typed "gconf-editor" and went into apps/nautilus/desktop, unnclicked volumes_visible, and closed the Configuration Editor, and the icons were gone.



Miscellany.  Ubuntu 9.10 used Grub2, which no longer used menu.lst.  I heard it was no longer possible to edit the Grub menu to remove entries for older kernels; instead, you had to remove the whole kernel, and then the menu entry would go away too.  ||  In System > Preferences > Startup Applications, I added Thunderbird, Firefox, and VMware Workstation.

The next steps are going to be to restore my Thunderbird profile backup and finish the automation of the rsync scripts I have been playing with for some months now.  But those steps will have to come later.

Recognizing Partitions Automatically in Ubuntu 9.04

In Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), disk partitions normally remain unmounted until you mount them manually. One way to do this is to start Ubuntu's File Browser (also known as Nautilus). You can do this by choosing the Places > Computer menu option. In File Browser, just double-click on the drive you want to mount, and its name will appear under the File System > Media folder there in File Browser. You can also mount drives by typing commands into Ubuntu's command-line window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal). First, type "sudo mkdir /media/[drivename]" to create a mount point. After doing this for all unrecognized drives, type "sudo mount -a".

But instead of doing this sort of thing, I wanted the system to recognize my drives on bootup, so that I would not have to mount them manually each time I rebooted. In my first approach to this problem, I typed "sudo ntfs-config." This approach worked OK on one computer, where I was doing a clean installation -- where, that is, I had formatted the partition before installing 9.04 on it. But on another computer, I installed 9.04 on top of 8.04 without formatting the partition. This was advantageous in that it preserved lots of files and settings from before. The drawback was that I was running into funky problems with ntfs-config.

On this system, I got an error message when I ran ntfs-config. The message was, literally, "Error : An error occured when trying to configure [partition name], please retry. Thanks." (For those who are searching with the correct spelling, let me retype that error message: "Error: An error occurred when trying to configure . . . ." When I tried to examine the partition in GParted (i.e., System > Administration > Partition Editor (see above)), I got this: "Warning: Unable to read the contents of this file system!" The partition had been available a minute earlier, when I had booted into Windows XP, and I had shut down WinXP normally before rebooting into Ubuntu. So I didn't think the partition was truly hosed.

I found a very, very long thread on the subject, but post no. 2015 in that thread said the thread's advice was outdated for purposes of newer versions of Ubuntu. In another thread, someone said they got this error message after installing a newer version without formatting the partition, and solved it by deleting the mount points. I had a fresh backup of the partition in question, so I tried taking that approach. First, I opened File Browser and went to File System > Media > CURRENT. File Browser said that partition was empty. When I right-clicked on it, however, File Browser didn't give me an option of deleting it. Its Properties said it was owned by root, so I logged in as root (see above), typed "cd /media", typed "dir" to make sure CURRENT was there, typed "dir CURRENT" to make sure it was empty, and then typed "rm -r CURRENT" to delete it. I restarted the system, started File Browser, went to Computer (in the Tools bar), double-clicked on CURRENT, and it was there, with all its contents. CURRENT was formatted in ext3 (i.e., Linux). I had another partition that was having the same problem. It was formatted in NTFS (i.e., Windows). But now that I had rebooted, it too was available and looking fine.

I dropped this issue for the time being. Next day, when I rebooted, I found that, predictably, the various partitions were not mounted. In Terminal, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/fstab." My fstab file did not show the partitions I wanted to be mounted automatically. I reviewed one of my old posts on ntfs-3g. It seemed to say that ntfs-config was the solution. I tried running ntfs-config again. This time, it ran. It recognized two NTFS partitions. Now I just had two ext3 partitions to set up for automatic mounting. I went back into fstab and saw the lines that ntfs-config had added. I hadn't thought to save the fstab file from my previous installation; it would have been handy to copy over the relevant lines. From the previous post, I gathered that the trick was to write something like this in fstab:

/dev/sda3 /media/VMS ext3 defaults 0 0

for the VMS partition, and likewise for the other ext3 partition. I double-checked that I had the right device addresses by checking them in System > Administration > Partition Editor (i.e., GParted). I rebooted, but the ext3 partitions were still not automounted, though the NTFS partitions continued to be automounted nicely. I didn't know why the line just shown, for the VMS ext3 partition, did not work in fstab now; according to the old post, it had worked in Ubuntu 8.04. Ubuntu documentation said something about pysdm, so I looked into that. They suggested typing this into Terminal:

sudo apt-get install pysdm

but I saw it was available in Synaptic (i.e., Ubuntu's System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager menu pick), so I used that instead to install pysdm. I typed "pysdm" at the Terminal prompt, but got an error message indicating that I had to have root privileges, so I tried again with "sudo pysdm." (Also available via System > Administration > Storage Device Manager.) That gave me a Storage Device Manager (SDM) window that listed some, but not all, of my partitions. I noticed that, if I started pysdm while I still had the foregoing /dev/sda3 line for my VMS partition in my fstab file, SDM would not give me an option of configuring the VMS partition; but if I deleted that line from fstab and then started pysdm and clicked on sda3, SDM would give me a "Configure now?" dialog with the message, "/dev/sda3 hasn't been configured. Do you want to configure it now?" I said OK. I told it to set the mount point to File System > Media > VMS. Then I clicked on the Assistant button and saw that the option was checked that said "The file system is mounted at boot time." I also checked the option that said, "Check file system at mount time" on the options dialog's Mounting tab. I didn't change any other options. When I checked OK to leave Assistant, I saw an error message in Terminal: "wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda3, missing codepage or helper program, or other error." I went back into Assistant and removed the "Check file system" option I had just checked. This time, when I left Assistant, I got Warning messages that said, "Unknown option: rw" and "nouser is not suitable for user" and "Unknown option: async." I clicked on the "Set defaults" button in SDM and then clicked Apply. This produced no additional Warning messages in Terminal. Trying once more, I just went into Assistant and immediately executed, and this did produce the same Warning messages, plus an additional one that said, "Unknown option: defaults." I tried just emptying out the Options box altogether in SDM. Then I clicked Apply. I did the same with the other ext3 partition that was not yet mounting automatically. I restarted the system.

It occurred to me that I may not have restarted the system previously, but may merely have logged out and logged back in. Ubuntu 9.04 seemed to require two steps to reboot, and it seemed that I had forgotten to take that second step last time around. This occurred to me right around the time when I tried to restart the system and found that it froze with a black screen. Evidently my fstab file was not presently in an acceptable form. I punched the computer's reset button and rebooted with the Ubuntu installation CD, chose the "Try Ubuntu" option, and edited fstab as above. (Note that there's an fstab on the CD too; make sure you're editing the one on the hard drive.) I saw that I had failed to add the preferred mountpoint for one of my ext3 partitions: it said "/media/sdc5" instead of "/media/CURRENT." I fixed that and rebooted without the CD. This time, the system booted OK. But those two ext3 partitions were still not automounted.

In File System > media (i.e., /media), I noticed that there was a mount point for the VMS partition, but it had nothing in it. I typed "dir" to make sure there was nothing there, and then typed "sudo rm -r VMS" to delete it. I also deleted the "sc5" mountpoint mentioned above. In File Browser, I clicked on the Computer button at the top and then double-clicked on each of these two partitions (i.e., VMS and CURRENT) to create mountpoints (i.e., /media folders) for them. I tried rebooting again. They still weren't automounting, and the mount points I had created for them were gone, as I should have expected. Incidentally, at this point I discovered that the custom was apparently to mount fixed hard drives at /mnt, and use /media for removable hard drives.

About this time, I discovered that I had commented out the lines added by SDM (i.e., I put # signs (also called hash marks) in front of each of those lines). I forgot. I had done that to troubleshoot fstab, and then didn't go that route after all, and forgot to remove them. So I removed the hash marks now and rebooted. But that wasn't the solution. I re-ran SDM, went through more or less the steps described above, and rebooted. This time, it worked: the partitions were automounted, and their contents were visible. Not sure exactly what was different this time, but something was. So I guess the conclusion is, if it doesn't work in SDM the first time, tinker around for a while, reboot a couple of times, try SDM again, and reboot.