cyborgworkshop.org

I’m having some serious stability issues with all of my ubuntu VMs on ESXi. After a period of several days, they have all locked up with a message about the mtp driver having read errors, or something along those lines. The short summary is that it looks like the scsi disk (emulated by ESXi, actually an iscsi LUN) becomes unavailable and lots of sense key errors are generated. The VM goes to 100% CPU and I have to reboot the entire ESXi server to recover. In the meantime, my SAN, Fedora, Solaris and Windows VMs never skip a beat.  I’ve rebuilt the VM several times with different version of ubuntu in the 8.x line and different patch revisions, but have finally gave up. I’m back on Fedora and we’ll see if it remains stable.

Another failure of Ubuntu 8.10,   they forgot to include the /etc/X11/rgb.txt file. All of the symlinks on the filesystem that refer to that file still exist, but not the file itself.  This gives TK applications, like crossover office and wish, all sorts of trouble and will give you odd errors like the “Black” error. To fix it, download the rgb.txt file from here,  put it in /etc/X11 and log out of X windows.  I’m giving ubuntu one last shot before I kick it to the curb.

This has got to be one of the most disappointing bugs I have ever seen. Ubuntu 8.10 was shipped with the inability to be configured with a static IP address. As soon as you reboot, the configuration goes back to DHCP! This really blows my mind and has me thinking hard about picking a new distribution.  In the meantime, you can work around this monumental snafu by following these directions.

vi the /etc/network/interfaces file.

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

delete anything talking about eth0 and in this in it’s place.

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (Your IP)
netmask xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (Your netmask)
gateway xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (Your default router or gateway)

Now edit /etc/resolv.conf

sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf

And add the following

nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (The IP of your DNS server)
search abc.def.com (your domain, ala cyborgworkshop.org)

This is the last part. we have to get rid of the network manager that runs at boot and is the cause of all of this embarrassment, so run the following.

sudo update-rc.d –f NetworkManager remove

Reboot and you should be good to go.

My laptop locks up tight as a drum as soon as the SDHC driver (for my built in card reader) loads. Ubuntu 8.04 seemed to have taken care of that issue and had the SDHC module blacklisted for me so I had no issues at all. 8.10 is not so nice. You have two options.
If you are upgrading with a dist-upgrade and have NOT rebooted yet,  edit your /etc/modules.d/blacklist file and add

sdhc blacklist

to the end of the file. If you have already rebooted, and hence are hung, pop an ubuntu 8.10 CD into the drive, boot to “repair a broken system” and then edit that file.

Installing the Arduino IDE on Ubuntu 8.04 is pretty easy, you just need to make sure that you have 3 packages installed.

• gcc-avr
• avr-libc
• sun java

Technically, you should be able to get away with the gcj java runtime, but if you have a bug with the IDE, you’ll be encouraged to install Sun jre right off the bat. So, with that, install the compiler and libraries first.

sudo apt-get install gcc-avr avr-libc

Next, Sun Java

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

And lastly, download the arduino IDE, unzip it and run it. I like to store my code in my dropbox accountto keep things safe and synched between machines.