Month: March 2013

I've been very happy with Ubuntu for quite some time – moving through its various versions before settling on Xubuntu for my laptop because I loath Unity and Gnome was getting as bad, and Kubuntu seemed to have apps crashing on me every few minutes.

I got Xubuntu installed on a HP G7 dual boot with Win 7 with UEFI boot without any real problems so when we got a new laptop with Win 8 I thought this would be as easy.

Nope – I wasted hours trying to get things to work properly and it never did. 

There is this long standing belief that Linux is for geeks and its all command line and hacking of configuration files. This actually isn't true – the modern distros are very GUI friendly and the installation is slick…… well its not true until it comes to dual booting Windows 8 and Linux on UEFI hardware… How  do Canonical (and other distro companies) expect to get Joe Public to try Linux when to get it to work you have to do:

: We need to install boot-repair now. Ensure you're connected to the internet and then open a terminal and type the following commands:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair && sudo apt-get update

     sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

This should add the necessary repo, update, download and install boot-repair and then run it.

Step 9: In boot-repair, click 'Advanced Options', and then the 'Grub location' tab.

Step 10: You should see a separate /boot/efi partiton. Make sure the correct one is ticked and selected.

If you aren't sure which is your EFI partition, open another terminal and enter:

    sudo parted /dev/sda print

(assuming your drive is on sda of course)

You should see which is which on the list this creates.

Step 11: Click 'Apply' in boot-repair. It takes a while to complete the process, and partway through will give you some commands to remove and re-install GRUB. Follow the instructions to the letter until the process completes.

Step 12: Reboot, go back into the bios and change the bios mode back to UEFI. Save and exit and you should now find yourself with a GRUB menu within EFI.

Of course it might not work or if you are lucky it might work but your boot menu is a stupid length with all sorts of odd entries on it because there is a bug in grub2's os-prober whcih creates the wrong style (BIOS) chain boot entry

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1024383

This is a bug that is critical and has been open since July last year but has no-one assigned to it.

So you can turn off os-prober to eliminate the rogue entries in one of two ways:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true

or turn off executable bit
sudo chmod a-x /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober

and then re-run the update-grub process.
sudo update-grub
 

Seriously? You expect Joe Public to start manually adding repositories and running utilities from the command line, and then possibly editing configuration files just to get it to boot properly?   Isn't this just what you've all been saying you don't need to do to get Linux working nowadays…..

No wonder there was a large lump in the bedding

Two of the Android Apps (DAAP and SharePlay) are quite able to crash it. Luckily I can just ssh onto the server and restart it and with the db_rebuild level set to 2 it only takes a few minutes (as it adds the directories for file monitoring) for it to start up compared to several hours for the stock version

Forked-Daapd Success!  Well its now working I think – 4 levels of DB rebuild from completely rebuild every time to do absolutely nothing every time (handy for totally static collections). Right now I'm doing a complete DB rebuild as I've messed a few things up then I'll back the songs DB up and then try each of the rebuilds and do some timings.

it hasn't. I  can have the DB do a complete rebuild at start or just do a rescan but the other options for the moment don't work. This is because its dispatching processes and so my flag variables are getting picked up as being set by the dispatched processes when they really shouldn't be.

I've got a a few things to try to see if I can get that bit to work but to be honest if I have to live with a rescan at start up its not that bad.. well it wont be if the bug with it crashing when you pause tracks in iTunes 11 can be resolved… if it can't then its a complete and utter pain.

Well the crash course in Git and some head scratching as I tried to remember what little C skills I have has paid off. I've now got a modified and working Forked-Daapd server running and its all stored in GitGub.

Now all I need to do is work out how to fix the daap server from crashing when you pause tracks in iTunes11 

Went mad and decided to try to fix some of the problems in the now unsupported forked-daapd application in Ubuntu 12.0.4 C is not my forte and trying to work out what is going on in code using GCD concepts and which is pretty much stripped of comments is not easy.