Ubuntu Fatal Error Grub Install EFI

 Well I ran into the grub install error during ubuntu install. Had to run around lot of hoops, installed boot repair etc. My learnings captured here for benefit of community.

1. Make sure secure boot is off in the bios. Sorry I do not know how to install with UEFI, I generally have only ubuntu and no dual boot. 

2. Make sure the start of the disk has a 200MB Fat 32 partition with boot flag set. 

3. Make sure there is a partition of 200 MB set with flag of boot_grub set.

All of these can be done using gparted prior to doing the install. 

Hope this helps some poor soul out there like me to debug the issue.

Best Ubuntu DLNA Client

So I have Kodi setup on my htpc. I want to use it as my central library and watch my family videos in all other room.

I kept searching for dlna client for ubuntu and every one suggested some plugin or use VLC.

Other plugins didn't work.

VLC did work but was taking long time to load vidoes.

So I installed kodi on my laptop too.

In the kodi there is option of sources from upnp. I select it and it showed me my htpc kodi server. I added it and Now I am all set.

Just setup your kodi source as upnp. Will try with other upnp server to see if it works with server like minidlna or mediatomb.

So afar I am really happy with kodi as server and client.

Kodi is best dlna client for ubuntu for sure.. :-)

Studio XPS M1330 best for linux

So far I have had 5 to 6 laptops on which I have had linux installed.

1. Acer aspire - some old model during 2006 year days, graphics card from SIS, had lots and lots of trouble in getting things working with ubuntu. Early days of ubuntu I think might be responsible. But from that time I decided I would never buy a product which has SIS. No support for linux.

2. Dell Inspiron - ATI graphics, in 2007 early months, had some problems with ATI as support for linux was nascent in those days. ATI support for latest graphics card for linux is crapy so if you are planning to buy a newer laptop with ATI then good luck with linux.

3. Lenovo T61 - good support, again ATI support was not good, with 3d acceleration etc it was not comparable to current laptop. But overall pretty decent, things worked out of the box.

4. Toshiba Protege M500 - Pretty old laptop, so no problem in getting linux work. Only problem being with mic for skype and audio muted if muted in windows and if logged in to linux. Jaunty or may be Heron fixed the issue. Still use it as it is my company laptop ;-).

5. Asus M51Ta- Night mare... no fault of asus though, ATI again, dual graphics card, it sucked big time in support. Would have preferred one single card instead of two.

6. Dell Studio XPS - boy does it work, every I mean everything, webcam, wireless, graphics card (Dual), bluetooth, mic, hdmi, even audio through hdmi... everything works right out of the box, drivers for nvidia installed but for graphics and drivers for broadcom wireless .... and it is like a breeze... has slight heating issues, would be doing copper mod shortly to reduce the heat, waiting for copper, thermal compound to be delivered... next upgrade on it would be an SSD drive.... but would wait for another 6 months for prices to go down....

Studio XPS M1330 highly recommended if you want every thing... I mean EVERYTHING to work out of the box on your computer using linux....

GO NVIDIA... ATI ... learn something from them...

Reduce Memory Usage Ubuntu/Kubuntu

So, I have one of my machine which has 1GB RAM... I know it is good enough for the work I do, but still being that fanatic of getting more RAM for my work, I did the following changes to increase the free RAM.

1. Disable unnecessary services. There are two places this needs to be done as some services use upstart and other are still using init.

2. Disable upstart processes. Browse to /etc/init and rename the files ending .conf to something else and that service would not start. Remember not all services should be disabled.

This is the screen shot of the services I have disabled. I have appended a ".no" to the file name.

3. Next is to install the software sysv-rc-conf.

Run it as root in a terminal and remove the check marks for those services which you do not need.

I generally remove bluetooth, blrtty, portmap, samba. Do not remove

bluetooth - if you are going to use bluetooth on your computer.

blrtty - if you are going to use the assistive technology features of the OS.

portmap - if you have done any port mapping on the computer.

samba - if you are going to share using samba with some windows computer.

After doing this, my memory consumption in KDE4 is 198 MB... went down from some 300MB odd which was earlier. Suprisingly, KDE4 is taking lot less memory compared to gnome. May be the new GDM is taking lot of memory.

I keep shuttling between KDE and Gnome from time to time, but off late have been using KDE4 for its widgets and cool features.

Change My RAID1 filesystem to Reiserfs

Well... I was not sure what was in my head when I first configured my raid1 some one year back... I kep one raid partition as ntfs... with the support of ntfs not so great and file system itself having issues with fragmentation, I think it was a very bad move...

Anyway... I corrected it today. I remove the ntfs and replaced with reiserfs... but not without hiccups..

here is the order in which I proceeded, posting for others if they also do such thing in future..

1. take back up of your data. do not do it on another ntfs, if possible get other linux drive and do it. And BIG NO to FAT32, it will not take files bigger than 4 GB.

2. edit your /etc/fstab and comment out the raid, reboot.

I did this step as it kept giving me error resource/device busy, please try again. Umount -f and mdadm --stop none of them were working.

3. After reboot, just type the following command.

mkfs.reiserfs /dev/mdxxx, replace xxx with the raid number you have.

There is no need to stop mdadm as it is not required.

4. Edit your /etc/fstab, uncomment the raid line. And this is very important, change the file system to match your file system.

Remember, previous step is very important.

5. Mount the file system again and

6. Copy your data again.

Installing Tomcat On 64 bit Linux

So am doing one project where I have to work on exposing spring bean as soap webservice, json, restful webservice and as ejb.

As tomcat being easy and free server to host, I went down to install it and run my project using tomcat.

I will put spring beans and other stuff later. I would start with the installation of the tomcat software on my ubuntu sorry kubuntu linux 64bit.

1. Get the tomcat binaries from tomcat download site.

2. Get the 64bit jdk from sun's java site. make sure you are downloading 64 bit version of the jdk. For tomcat you just need jre, but I am using jdk (it contains jre), the reason being I would be using the same to configure eclipse to use this jdk.

3. Make the jdk-6u17-linux-x64.bin executable. Depending on the release, the file name would be different.

chmod 755 jdk-6u17-linux-x64.bin
./jdk-6u17-linux-x64.bin


4. This will create the jdk folder and the required jar files.

5. Move the jdk folder to /opt folder. I prefer to do this as I keep all my installed software in /opt.

sudo mv jdk1.6.0_17 /opt

6. Now similarly extract the tomcat folder and put it in the /opt directory.

7. Now create a group named tomcat.

sudo groupadd tomcat

8. Now create a user named tomcat

sudo useradd -g tomcat -s /usr/sbin/nologin -m -d /home/tomcat tomcat

note that this user cannot login into a a shell, this is for security reasons. So no one can hack into and login into the system using tomcat id.

9. Now change the ownership of tomcat directory in /opt to tomcat.

sudo chown tomcat:tomcat -R tomcat.6.0.20

10. Now add yourself to the tomcat group, (required if you want to put the files in tomcat directory by copying, pasting)

usermod -G -a tomcat username

11. Now log out and login.

12. Browse to tomcat/bin directory. Open the setclasspath.sh file in your favorite text editor.

add variable following variables just under CLASSPATH = line.

JAVA_HOME=/opt/jdk1.6.0_17
JRE_HOME=${JAVA_HOME}/jre

Save the file.

13. Now run the command ./startup.sh. Your tomcat should be up and running. If not refer to the logs file under tomcat/logs directory for debugging.

to check if tomcat is up and running, open firefox or your favorite browser and go to url. http://localhost:8080/.

And you are all set now...

Hope this helps...

fix ati screen reset issue.

I have one of this 780g chipset htpc with ubuntu running on it. the issue I faced with latest ati driver was that resolution of the system used to go to 1080p every time I rebooted my machine. My computer is connected to a 720p TV so this made the reading of content a tad too difficult from the sofa. So I searched on the net for some time and found this awesome thread which saved my eyes the pain of squeaking...

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1226887

To summarise, you need to do the following...

Click System --> Perference --> Display... click "NO" ... now change the resolution to what you would like in my case 720p and that's it you are all set...

How To Install TVUPlayer On LINUX

I have installed latest version of TVU player on ubuntu jaunty. I am sure lot of people will like it as I know it is one of the program which is there on windows and there is no linux alternate.

So, here are the steps.

1. Go to the wine-doors site and download the latest version of wine doors. For ubuntu I downloaded the .deb file. You can install some other version based on your distro.

2. Now, once download is over, install the .deb file.

3. It will come as a menu in wine, click on wine-doors or from terminal you can run wine-doors command

4. When it starts for the first time give your information and make sure you check "I have a valid windows license". I have one on the same machine.

5. Now, wine doors will download package list.

6. Select the packages IE6, windows media player 9, msxml4, visual basic runtime 6, visual c++ runtime 6.

7. Wine doors will download the packages and install them.

8. Once packages are installed download the latest version of TVUplaer 2.4.1 from TVU site.

9. Install TVU Player.

10. Start TVU player. Select the channel you want.

11. Run your favourite media player and open url http://localhost:8901/

and enjoi...

Installing Linux On ASUS ...

As I had expected based on the forums and other places I have read that there would be issue in installing linux on this baby...

The laptop looks pretty good, not stylish or as designer as the laptops like dell studio or hp hdx or lenovo ideapad... but for lesser dough you cannot get them with this config...

Anyways that is beside the point... come back to the moot point...

I tried installing alpha of jaunty, intrepid with acpi=off and noapic as per some thread but no go on that... would get stuck on some step or the other on booting itself... never came to see gdm login... so thought would try fedora instead... fedora 10.1 installed without any issue with acpi=off... but then there were some update and everything went bonkers... so now I am stuck with vista... I wanted vista to play games...

now I am waiting for the new version of jaunty to come may be beta and I will give another try to it to see if it works... if it works then custom compile the kernel to get acpi on and then if there are any other updates then I will keep updating this blog...


I am waiting for

asus M51TA-X2 and kubuntu...

I am getting this new laptop ... well here is the config... I specifically bought this as it does not support linux, so would be fun installing and playing with it to make linux work :-)...

Model
Brand	ASUS
Series	M51 Series
Model	M51TA-X2
General
Operating System	Windows Vista Home Premium
CPU Type	AMD Turion X2 Ultra ZM-82 2.2G
Screen	15.4" WXGA+
Memory Size	4GB DDR2
Hard Disk	250GB
Optical Drive	DVD Super Multi
Graphics Card	ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650
Video Memory	512MB
Card slot	1 x Express Card
Other Features	30days Zero Bright Dot LCD
CPU
CPU Type	AMD Turion X2 Ultra
CPU Speed	ZM-82(2.20GHz)
CPU L2 Cache	2MB
Display
Screen Size	15.4"
Wide Screen Support	Yes
Display Type	Wide XGA+
Resolution	1440 x 900
Operating Systems
Operating System	Windows Vista Home Premium
Graphics
GPU/VPU	ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650
Video Memory	Dedicated 512MB
Graphic Type	Dedicated Card
Hard Drive
HDD	250GB
HD RPM	5400rpm
Memory
Memory	4GB
Optical Drive
Optical Drive Type	DVD Super Multi
Optical Drive Interface	Integrated
Communications
WLAN	802.11n Wireless LAN
Bluetooth	Yes
Ports
Card Slot	1 x Express Card
USB	4
IEEE 1394	1
Video Port	1 x VGA, 1 x HDMI
Other port	1 x E-SATA
Audio Ports	1 x Microphone-in jack 1 x Headphone-out jack (S/PDIF)
Audio
Audio	Integrated Sound card
Speaker	Internal Speakers
Input Device
Touchpad	Yes
Keyboard	Standard
Supplemental Drive
Card Reader	MMC, SD, MS/PRO
Webcam	1.3MP
Power
Battery	6-cell lithium ion
Manufacturer Warranty
Accidental Damage Warranty	1 year ASUS Accidental Damage Warranty - Drops, Fire, Spill, Surge for purchase after 9/10/07
Parts	2 years limited
Labor	2 years limited

Make Openoffice3 default in ubuntu removing Openoffice2.4

I am one of those who like to use latest version of the software which keeps me experimenting with new things every now and then.

So openoffice3 was released some time back and I wanted to make it as default for my kubuntu install. Here are the steps which I followed for the doing the same.

1. Download the .deb installer from open office.
2. Remove the previous version of openoffice. Open up synaptic, search for openoffice and then remove the one starting with openoffice. This will remove the existing 2.4 version from your computer.
3. Now, extract the tar file which you downloaded from openoffice.
4. Go to the DEBS folder and run the following command

sudo dpkg -i *.deb.

This will install everything... basically kitchen, sink everything.

5. You will still not get the menus in the office section of your applications. So, you go to desktop integration folder in the DEBS folder and again run the above command

sudo dpkg -i *.deb.

And you are all set. You may have to choose for open office for the file associated for open with for some time.

Till the backport repository has the openoffice3, this is the only way I can think of using openoffice3 as default.

Thanks to this post which helped me in setting up the things.

Error with Compiz Fusion Not Working

Well, compiz is one of the coolest thing which linux has got. It was working flawlessly on my lenovo t60 and suddenly one fine day everything went bonkers... I started recieving these dreaded messages.

libGL error: drmMap of framebuffer failed (Invalid argument)
libGL error: reverting to (slow) indirect rendering
compiz (core) - Fatal: No GLXFBConfig for default depth, this isn't going to work.
compiz (core) - Error: Failed to manage screen: 0
compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0

when I used to run compiz --replace command. I searched the net for some time and then gave up. I thought what updates came through which screwed this up.  I figured out I had only kde-core package and to upgrade to hardy I had to install kubuntu-desktop which inturn brings tons of other junk in xserver-xorg-video. So, I opened synaptic and remove all the chipset drivers. Do not remove fbdev else it will remove everything in xserver and your system will be in bonkers...

After doing that I just rebooted and yup.. my hunch was right... it was the other video drivers which were creating problem. Now, I am again running the compiz on my kde... and am loving it...

Boot Speed Ubuntu

I tried different tweaks from here. However, my boot speed was still slow, it was taking 2 minutes or so to go to gdm login. So, I was thinking how to increase it further.

I did the concurrency=Shell as mentioned in the post above. Still the boot speed was slow. I saw that there was a culprit which used to print "Reading files for boot" for close to 45 seconds during the boot, before it proceeded further. I was sure that it was one of the services which was creating problem. I was not able to locate which one though... so I left it at that suffering with 2 minutes for booting up.

Then one fine day, I saw my cpu usage remaining 100%, so I checked top and saw apport running on top. Now, what was this apport... some googling and got to the information that it is error reporting service ... I thought I will disable it. I disabled it and also avahi daemon (I frankly do not know what purpose it serves). I connect to my serves manually as I know about them. So, disabled that too. And next boot no line of "Reading files for boot" and my boot time went from 2 minutes to 45 seconds... that was great!!!! Nice find... thought would publish it.

Concurrency=Shell error fix in Gutsy 7.10 Ubuntu

Well, I was trying to get my ubuntu gutsy to boot up with concurrency=shell... well for those of you who are not aware, when you boot up there are lot of init script which run. By default they run serially so if you have more than one processor only one thread runs during init i.e. boot. Concurrency=shell will create new shell and these scripts are run in parallel.

So, how you do it? Well change the /etc/init.d/rc and change concurrency=none to concurrency=shell.

Now, when you do it, there would be a problem with HAL. This happens as dbus and hal has same script order and hence creates a problem.

to fix this issue,

rename the file in /etc/rc2.d/S12hal to etc/rc2.d/S13hal
rename the file in /etc/rc3.d/S12hal to etc/rc2.d/S13hal

And that it... you are all set... reboot and you will definitely see change in the boot up time.. Give it a try.

If things do not workout then just change the concurrency=shell to concurrency=none.