I had a heck of a time trying to get this to work every time I tried to enable the restricted driver so I could run the enhanced UI all that would happen when rebooting is I’d get a message indicating that we were going to use Low-Resolution.
Things got disparate when I brought my two Dell’s from NXP home and wanted to hook them up to my linux box. So I searched the net and ran across Alberto Milone’s Envy package. To get the enhanced UI going I needed to install xserver-xgl.
sudo apt-get install xserver-xgl
This was found when executing compiz from the command line and an error is seen “Xgl: not present”. After installing I still have a couple of complaints; first X thinks the display is 3200×1600 and tends to put things in the middle of the display. Secondly, the menu bars at the top and bottom extend across both screens. On windows the system understands that there are two screens and it works better.
Many times my laptop is continuously accessing the hard disk. The cause appears to be two fold. First updatedb is run by the daily cron job. Since I don’t use locate very often and I turn of my computer everyday everytime I turn on the computer updatedb is run and it hammers the disk drive.
To disable updatedb I made /etc/cron.daily/slocate non executable
sudo chmod -x /etc/cron.daily/slocate
The second is an apparent bug in hard disk drives that have smart control, see here, here, and here. An easy solution for me was to just create/add to /sbin/setup.sh:
#!/bin/sh
smartctl -s on /dev/hda
hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda
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Actually, building the kernel wasn’t hard. I cloned linus’ tree then used the existing configuration from /boot as the starting point. I then enabled keyspan support and oprofile, but it wouldn’t boot.
The problem was I needed to have an initrd image, after several tries it turns out with ubuntu there is a script, update-initramfs that does the trick. I ran
update-initramfs -c -v -k 2.6.24-rc2
This command built the image and put it in /boot, I then updated /boot/grub/menu.list to:
title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel vmlinuz
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=UUID=90ea4e0b-25cb-4fce-8b06-7f9b318ae304 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-rc2
That did the trick.
Putty is sometimes slow to prompt for the password, today I finally determined what the problem was, it is apparently doing a reverse dns lookup when I ssh into an address and of course a 192.168.0.133 can’t be found. I fixed it by adding entries for the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts for myself and the other computer.
127.0.0.1 iris2
192.168.0.103 iris2
192.168.0.133 ic2d1
I discovered this because I was playing around with the simple webserver.py from and it was taking 5 seconds to respond. Using google I searched for:
BaseHTTPRequestHandler send_response slow
And looked at the first entry which was:
http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/3481
Here they explained that trac could also be slow because of reverse dns lookup. After some searching I figured out that /etc/hosts was used for local lookups so I added an entry for 192.168.0.103 iris2 and 192.168.0.133 ic2d1. This resolved the issue for the webserver. It then dawned on me that this might also be the problem on Putty.
I searched on google for:
windows xp hosts
And found this:
http://www.accs-net.com/hosts/how_to_use_hosts.html
Which says that the hosts file is in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc. Well there was no such file, so I added it and sure enough, that fixed Putty.