Ubuntu 9.10 and some issues

and so finally i got my harddisk back from my friend and decided to upgrade my machine to the latest Ubuntu 9.10 aka Karmic Koala. For the Jaunty release I had problems with the Live CD. It wont boot properly. It would most often boot into a black screen and the LED on the CD drive will show no activity. I finally ended up doing a direct install without trying out the Live CD.

The Karmic Koala was no different. It refused to boot into the Live CD environment. Black Screen came up a couple of times. Tried Direct Install and that too failed thrice in between the installation. The machine would just hang up! Luckily my roomies had laptop which helped to check online about these CDs which refused to boot. Found some boot parameters noapic and nolapic which i had to pass in order to get the Live CD working.

The Installation was successful with the parameters but then the hard disk installation started behaving exactly like the Live CD. I should have passed the boot parameters but tried a reinstall once to see if that fixes it. No go. the noapic and nolapic parameters where handy when i passed them from GRUB and i got the desktop running fine but the parameters passed that way are only temporary. I had to make them permanent. It was then that i found out how much they have changed in GRUB2.

There is no easy menu.lst file which you can edit and hack your way into GRUB. There are atleast 3 different files I needed to work upon to get this thing going. GRUB2 works like this. Instead of a menu.lst we have a grub.cfg in /boot/grub. This file is readonly and is updated by sudo update-grub command. The settings related to GRUB file is in /etc/default/grub and there are some files in /etc/grub.d which are read during the grub update. A fix on ubuntuforums.org suggested to modify the 40_custom file and issue an update-grub command. I did that but ended up my custom entries below the main grub ones. to get them on top i will have to change 07_custom. That doesn't help of course as grub just picks up the first one in its path. besides there was always the problem of updating my list with every kernel change. so i was searching for something like the menu.lst file where you give in the parameters to the kernel. on scanning the grub parameters in /etc/default/grub i came across "quiet splash" value for one of the parameters. I gave in my parameters just after the "quiet splash", saved the file and issued an update-grub. I could see in grub.cfg that the kernel got appended with my values. This time around the machine booted into the desktop just fine.

Installation of all the necessary apps took almost one day. Everything was fine but the suspend and hibernate still refused to work. I suspect its something with the noapic and nolapic i passed but I have left them for time being as i dont use them on a daily basis.

One issue that i faced yesterday was with VLC. The sound output was flaky and choppy a bit. As if i am trying to play an old vinyl cassette. The files were fine in other players. Upon a little investigation found out the culprit. Pulseaudio. Seems ubuntu developers had done a shabby job of integrating it with ubuntu. I tried removing vlc-plugin-pulse but lost my sound in VLC. I tried few other things and in the end what worked for me was this. I removed the vlc-plugin-pulse and set the audio output in VLC to Unix OSS sound. then closed the VLC and installed the vlc-plugin-pulse again. This time around i didnt change the audio output to pulseaudio but kept the Unix OSS sound and voila! no jerks and tears from VLC. Audio is working fine now on VLC.

Another victim of Pulseaudio was my fav game Urban Terror. The sound kept irritating me like hell. It would start and stop and feel jerky all around. luckily found a solution for this too. installing libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio solved the sound troubles with UrT. This apparently works for Quake games too.

There is one thing i haven't tested yet and that is Skype. I hope the sound in Skype just works fine. Will test it today :).

update: Skype works. beautifully.