Mysteriously Hanging Ubuntu

tim — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:55:49 +0000

My Asus EEE 1000h had this really irritating but intermittent bug — it would hang occasionally when I was using it. The keyboard was dead, but a) mouse clicks would still work, and b) I could Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X or Ctrl-Alt-Fn to go to a terminal. So, it wasn’t an absolute showstopper, but it was definitely something that could really ruin your flow; you’d have to hope everything was saved, restart X, reload everything, so on and so forth.

I googled for this to no avail, but finally, finally, while researching something else, managed to find out what it was. It turns out that I was accidentally activating SCIM (the input method editor for other languages) with Ctrl-Space or Alt-Space. This was despite the fact that I had SCIM specifically disabled in System -> Administration -> Language Support. Apparently, some versions of Hardy screwed up the SCIM settings.

So, the magic command for anyone googling this:

for conf in ja_JP ko_KR zh_CN zh_HK zh_SG zh_TW all_ALL; do if LC_ALL=C update-alternatives --display xinput-${conf} | grep -q 'status is manual' && LC_ALL=C update-alternatives --display xinput-${conf} | grep -q 'currently points to .*scim-bridge'; then update-alternatives --auto xinput-${conf}; fi; done

More details: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/scim/+bug/199030

Fedora 9 On EEE (and: Ubuntu Is Not Always The Answer)

tim — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:43:18 +0000

I used to use Red Hat back when I had to compile special modules for my CD-ROM player, and I flirted with Gentoo for a while until I managed to irretrievably kill my installation with an emerge, but Ubuntu really seems to hit the sweet spot with regards to ease of use and functionality.

However, it turns out that Ubuntu is not always the answer, which surprised me immensely. The steps for getting Ubuntu 8.04 onto a USB stick are tedious, and even worse, they don’t appear to work. So with repeated attempts I was unable to get Ubuntu live mode to boot at all.

Now, compare the the procedure for getting Fedora 9 onto a USB stick. One command, non destructive, with an optional overlay for persistent mode. It’s clean and easy, and Fedora 9 is an eminently respectable operating system — it even booted on my EEE PC without any problems while properly detecting screen size and audio.

Wireless on the EEE PC / Fedora 9

I wanted to get my USB stick to work perfectly with my EEE PC, so the wireless had to be fixed. To get the wireless running on stock Fedora 9 means following the steps on this site, but there are a few problems. The kernel for the live CD is different than the kernel used by Livna, so if you don’t want to rebuild a kernel, you’ll need to:

wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/releases/9/Everything/i386/os/Packages/kernel-devel-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686.rpm
rpm -ivh kernel-devel-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686.rpm
wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/releases/9/Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/kernel-headers-2.6.25-14.fc9.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh kernel-headers-2.6.25-14.fc9.x86_64.rpm

… and then go through the steps for building madwifi from source.

brool » eee

Mysteriously Hanging Ubuntu

Fedora 9 On EEE (and: Ubuntu Is Not Always The Answer)

Wireless on the EEE PC / Fedora 9