It should save the shots into your ’Pictures’ directory without launching the GUI now (see Bug #928364). Is that what’s not happening?

Not reproducible under Unity 3D.

I noticed my laptop’s wireless interface is named eth1, whereas the wireless on a netbook is named wlan0 (both have a wired eth0 in addition to wireless).

I suppose both are set by /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules:

# PCI device 0x8086:0x1043 (ipw2100)
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTR{address}==” (the MAC address) ”, ATTR{dev_id}==”0x0″, ATTR{type}==”1″, KERNEL==”eth*”, NAME=”eth1″

vs.

# PCI device 0x168c:0x001c (ath5k)
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTR{address}==” (the MAC address) ”, ATTR{dev_id}==”0x0″, ATTR{type}==”1″, KERNEL==”wlan*”, NAME=”wlan0″

Is there a reasoning behind calling ipw2100’s interface eth1 and not wlan0? Is there any reason I shouldn’t change the name (by editing 70-persistent-net.rules to name the ipw2100 interface ”wlan0”, to make the two systems more alike)? I’m not sure I’ll actually do that, but was interested in what the difference means from both theoretical and practical points of view.

This is apparently caused by something not in Chromium itself: it’s not reproducible in a VM running Oneiric, with 17.0.963.26 from ppa:chromium-daily/dev nor with Chrome 17.0.96356. It *is* reproducible in Precise with the latter too, but not reproducible with Firefox nor Epiphany. In Precise with Chromium 17, it’s reproducible with a temporary profile and a guest login also.

With Chromium 17, I can no longer drag ’n’ drop tabs to reorganize them in an existing window: the tabs area no longer lets me drop tabs onto it, so each tab I pick up gets a new window when dropped. Dragging the tab from the new window into the old won’t work either (cannot drop the tab into where the tabs area should be).

I left an old netbook to do an ”apt-get -y dist-upgrade” overnight, and when I returned to it the next morning, the upgrades were unfinished because libc upgrade was waiting for me to respond to ”Restart services during package upgrades without asking?”

It looks like the question is prioritized depending on whether the upgrade is done on desktop or not, and if it’s not, the priority is set critical. According to documentation [1], critical is for ”Items that will probably break the system without user intervention.” I don’t think restart-without-asking satisfies that condition.

* [1] http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/debconf_specification.html#AEN101

With both 3.2.0-16 and 3.2.0-17, what I said in #8 still holds, with -16 and -17 behaving just as -15 did. 3.2.0-17 added something interesting though: booting 3.2.0-17-pae in recovery mode ”breaks” the -pae’s like (non-recovery booting) 3.2.0-14-pae does. To be sure, I tried recovery booting other kernels going back to 3.2.0-14, and couldn’t reproduce this with them (not even with 3.2.0-14-pae!) . Recovery booting 3.2.0-17 non-pae also doesn’t bring it on, it’s just recovery booting 3.2.0-17-pae.

The steps to reproducing this freeze with 3.2.0-17 are:
1. Boot 3.2.0-17-pae in recovery mode.
2. In the recovery menu, select ”root”.
3. From the root prompt, just reboot.
4. Boot 3.2.0-17-pae (normally).

The ”fix” also still holds: just boot a non-pae kernel once, and the pae’s again work.

After dozens and dozens of boots with the 3.2.0-14 and 3.2.0-15 kernels, here’s what I know.

1. This *is* tied to wistron_btns as I reported. Without it, boot never fails (the way I initially reported, though I’ll redefine what ”fails” means further below).
2. With non-pae kernels, boot never fails.
3. With 3.2.0-14-pae, the boot always fails.
4. A cold boot with 3.2.0-15-pae never fails.
5. A re-boot with 3.2.0-15-pae after a *non-failing* boot never fails.
6. A re-boot of 3.2.0-15-pae, after a *failing* boot (of 3.2.0-14-pae for instance), is *almost* sure to fail. I’d give it a 10% chance of not failing.

If you put it another way, this appears is pretty interesting:
1. You can ”break” 3.2.0-15-pae by booting 3.2.0-14-pae first.
2. You ”fix” a thus ”broken” 3.2.0-15-pae by booting a non-pae kernel.

I suspect this brokenness is actually hidden in the hardware, in something (the wifi key perhaps?) controlled by wistron_btns. Booting 3.2.0-14-pae puts the controller(?) in a ”broken” state from which 3.2.0-15-pae can’t recover, but a non-pae kernel can. And though 3.2.0-15-pae can’t recover a ”broken” controller, it also cannot put it into that ”broken” state (which is a good turn of development).

So now, about that ”fails” part.

I discovered by accident that although the system appears to freeze in boots I referred to as ”fails”, it has in fact been brought down to *almost* complete halt, but *just* almost. If I’m patient enough to wait, it does actually boot into LDM, from where I can switch to another VT and log in… slooooooowly.

Thus I was able to find out what’s going on that makes it so slow:

jani@amilo:~$ head dmesg.fail
stron_btns: Unknown key code 10
[ 1011.554522] wistron_btns: Unknown key code 10
[ 1011.554722] wistron_btns: Unknown key code 10
[ 1011.554921] wistron_btns: Unknown key code 10
[ 1011.555120] wistron_btns: Unknown key code 10
[ 1011.555320] wistron_btns: Unknown key code 10
[ 1011.555518] wistron_btns: Unknown key code 10
[ 1011.555717] wistron_btns: Unknown key code 10
[ 1011.555916] wistron_btns: Unknown key code 10
[ 1011.556134] wistron_btns: Unknown key code 10
jani@amilo:~$ grep wistron dmesg.fail | wc -l
2520

Note that this is unrelated to pressing any actual physical buttons. It’ wistron_btns misbehaving under the conditions I described above.

jani@amilo:~$ LC_ALL=C aptitude show linux-image-3.2.0-14-generic-pae | grep ”more then”
Geared toward 32 bit desktop systems with more then 4GB RAM.

I believe the fix is to ’s/more then/more than/’ in DEBIAN/control.

Hi komputes.

The difference between a normal boot and a recovery mode boot is (among other things) in the parameters that are passed on to the Linux kernel. A normal boot uses Kernel Based Mode-setting (KMS) whereas in recovery mode KMS is turned off by default to make sure it causes no problems in case recovery mode is needed.

From the Release Notes of Ubuntu 10.04:

”Ubuntu 10.04 LTS enables the new kernel-mode-setting (KMS) technology by default on most common video chipsets. While this is a major step forward for the graphics architecture in Ubuntu, in some rare cases KMS will prevent your video output from working correctly, or from working at all. If you need to disable KMS, you can do so by booting with the nomodeset option.” https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidLynx/ReleaseNotes#Working_around_bugs_in_the_new_kernel_video_architecture

I believe the nomodeset parameter is behind the low graphics mode you’re seeing in recovery mode and therefore intentional, as visually unappealing as it may be.