Category Archives: computers

Ubuntu install, GRUB rescue error

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Xubuntu_screen

Obviously this picture is taken after the grub is rescued.

The subject line will make sense for those who desperately need this post.  I apologize to my normal friends for a line that looks like sheer insane babble. But such is life for us who dabble in the wild world of Linux, the free and rapidly mutating operating system for personal computers.

The version of Ubuntu that is realeased today is 9.10 (year 2009, month 10), nickname Karmic Koala.  I used the 9.10 RC (release candidate) that was available for download some time before release day.  It is stable and contains pretty much the same as the final version, with only a few downloads to bring it up to date after.  If you get it to run in the first place, that is.  I did not, at first.

It looked easy enough.  I booted from the live cd and chose install.  I answered some questions about localization and such, and then accepted its proposal to share the machine between Vista (which was installed on this laptop already) and Xubuntu (Ubuntu with a faster, smaller user interface).   It worked for a long time partitioning the disk, setting up the new and improved file system, ext4.  It is said to be faster and more secure than ext3, which is itself pretty good. Anyway, I wrongly suspected ext4 when things went bad. This happened when I rebooted the machine after the install.  Linux is much less hungry for reboots than Windows, but after a brand new install you still have to do it.  I did, and the operating system did not start. Actually, neither Xubuntu nor Vista.  Instead I got a black screen with the text

GRUB rescue>

I booted with the live CD, which lets you run Linux anyway but is fairly slow since it runs off a CD rather than a hard disk.  Still, I got online and could Google for  GRUB Rescue, GRUB install etc.  (GRUB is the programs that runs as soon as the machine starts waking up. It lets you choose which operating system to run, in my case it should have given me a choice between Vista and Xubuntu.) Unfortunately the sites I found were all extremely technical or did not work.  I tried to use the Find command to locate the existing Grub, but got an error message. I tried creating it in the most common position, but got another error message.  And of course when I rebooted I still got the Grub rescue message.

I looked through a couple technical-looking guides, and tried using something called grub-install, but it required information I did not have about the device names of the hard drives. There are no doubt ways to find this out, but then I would have to Google for that separately, and know the right keywords to search for.  Luckily I followed a guide that used fdisk -l (l for list, not the number 1) to create a list of those names.  And behold, the partition names fell neatly into two groups, that seemed to correspond to two hard disks.  But I had only one, right?

Turns out that Xubuntu had installed itself on my external hard drive, a WD Passport, which uses USB to connect to the laptop.  It was entirely on that drive, including the actual GRUB code.  The boot sector only linked to that … but it ran before the USB drive was connected, right after the machine booted.  So it linked to the empty void.  No wonder the machine panicked!

I ran the install again, this time without the USB drive attached.  This time it took a piece of the internal hard drive. I had to do it all over again, although it took less time than it had on the external disk.  Now it worked perfectly.  Of course, part of the Passport is now set up with a big Linux partition.  I will consider what to do with that when, or if, I need the space.  There is still plenty left.

I wish you all a happy new Linux!

New router – sort of

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di090708

New router. And hopefully better.

Continued from yesterday.

It was a good thing I had the old D-Link router lying in the cupboard, since otherwise I would have been limited to one computer at a time like other humans.  With the spare router in use, however, I no longer had a spare router.  So I went to the electronics shop today looking for a new one.

I first looked for one of those that send signals through the mains wiring rather than radio waves, but there was none. I guess it is an idea whose time has gone.  But there were several models of both D-Link and Jensen (the one that stopped working was a Jensen. The ones they sell now boast a 20 year warranty.  Perhaps the one I had also had that, but the receipt was no doubt lost in the move is not before.) There was also an even more obscure brand than Jensen, so obscure that I don’t even remember it now.  That’s a pretty strong hint that I did not buy that brand.  In the end, I bought another D-link.  While I liked Jensen better, and they certainly are easier to set up and control, I have a deep distrust in electronics that are on the verge of catching fire even during normal use.  After all, I am descended from thousands of people who did not die in fires, or at least not before passing on their genes.  In this particular regard I would like to follow in their footsteps.

The old D-Link router is remarkably cool.  Mostly in the temperature sense, although the design is also more attractive than the flat square-edged block I’ve grown used to over the years. The new model looks different, unfortunately, even smaller and almost as square, but with pretty green lights in front.  It is also faster in its wireless transfer, although I am not sure if the receiving units on the old computers at least can handle more speed.  The latest laptop probably can, though. One of the attractions of a wireless network is being able to escape the heat in the underground basement with a good laptop and still have access not only to Internet but to all my music and all my documents through the local network.  Although today was not hot enough to warrant hiding in the washer room, such days may soon come again.  It was warmer than yesterday already.

The new router, despite being even smaller and having a stronger signal, is barely lukewarm. I am not too happy about it having a stronger signal either, it being barely a yard away from my brain.  On the other hand, my old PC in the living room now has Very Good signal instead of varying between Low and Very Low, with the occasional No Signal. (And that was with the Jensen.  With the old D-Link there was now no hint that the network even existed.)   Perhaps I should spend more time in the living room now?  It is for the most part cooler too.

I had to change the password of my local network. I suppose I could have just left it open, so any neighbors could benefit from the amazing upgraded capacity as well.  (No reason before to worry about that when I barely had signal in the living room.)  But this is not only a connection of Internet access, but also a local network. While I don’t begrudge my neighbors my music or my anime collection, I would have had to find some way to password protect the folder with sexy pictures of myself and the imaginary girlfriend.  (Just because you’re imaginary does not mean you can’t be sexy. In fact, I suspect the only sexy pictures of me are imaginary too…)

Anyway, the old router goes back to the cupboard, the new router works like a charm, Opera Unite still doesn’t work (but then again it hasn’t after the first few days) and I have to find out again, for the third time, how to make the same hole in all three of the firewalls between my computer and the Internet:  The Windows firewall, the router firewall and the modem firewall. At least there should only be one new unit to learn this time. Whee.

The packaging claims that it also supports Wii, Xbox Live and PS3, so perhaps it also supports the Nintendo DS, which I never got to run before.  Then again the old network supported the PSP, not that I use the PSP except a brief burst a couple times a year.

But right now, I want to be lazy.

Thunder and router

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di090707

Old router brought back after years in a dusty plastic bag.

Last night as I was about to go to bed, very sleepy, I thought I heard far-off thunder.  I turned off all the computers and the network (router and ADSL modem) and disconnected them from the mains.  I did not however unplug the phone cables.  Perhaps I should have, but probably it would have made no difference.

When I woke up, it had rained but was already clearing up.  The air stayed cooler both indoors and outdoors for all of the day.  But I could not connect to the Internet.  I decided to give it time and went to work. It has happened before during thunderstorm season that the ISP’s node has been out of commission for a few hours.  But when I returned, I still could not get online.

Still, there was something strange going on.  My Winamp Remote icon in the Windows tray showed that I was connected, although I had been unable to connect to it from work.  (I often play music at work from my hard disk at home, now that I have transferred all my CDs to hard disk.) When I tried to load a page, it started, seemed to load a tiny bit of it, but then gave up.  And when I ran network diagnosis on the Vista machine, it said I was connected to the Internet after I fiddled a bit with the cables.  (I am not sure that was actually necessary.)  I even got City of Heroes running on that machine. It took some tries to get connected, but once it hooked up, the speed was just fine.  Still, I could not load web pages on any of my computers, nor connect the LiveJournal client or Opera Unite.  Something was amiss.

I unplugged the WAN cable from the home network router and plugged it straight in my main PC.  It warned me that there might be limited or no connection, but moments later I could connect to everything at the speed I have purchased and then some. Of course the other machines were now disconnected from the Net.  The main problem with this was that I could not dualbox in City of Heroes.

Lately, after  days of a strict Sims 3 gaming diet, I have returned to City of Heroes. My imaginary girlfriend, who for good measure roleplays my imaginary wife in that particular game, has several characters around level 30 on Virtue, the unofficial official roleplaying server.  (There are no official roleplaying servers, but the players have decided on this one for roleplaying.) Anyway, level 30 is a good time to start on the zone Brickstown, which has a nice mix of smaller and larger groups of villains shortly after you leave the train station. Well, the short of it is that my imaginary female companion has mostly support characters, defenders and controllers, which are not all that good at playing alone.  Sometimes she gets a spot on some random team, but if not I will log on one of my official characters and help her out. I have a number of tankers and scrappers on Virtue, which go well with her defenders and controllers respectively.  (By “her” I am referring to an imaginary player, but the dynamic would be the same with real players.)

Because of all this I really wanted to have at least two computers online, but I could only get one to work.  On the other hand, when the router was connected, I could call up shared files on another local computer in the blink of an eye.  Clearly both the router and the ADSL modem worked, but somehow it seemed that they hated each other’s guts.  I could even connect to the modem through the router from my PC, so clearly the connection was there. But the router did not want to route data to and from the Internet.

I am not sure the thunder was part of this at all, truth to tell. The surge would have needed to go through the modem without hurting it, then hitting the router, yet doing so little damage that it could do anything else than load web pages.  Suspicious.  If we exclude malicious intent, the most likely cause is probably overheating.  The Jensen router is very compact and gets hot even in winter. In summer it is disturbingly hot to the touch and could really have needed some cooling.  It may be too late now, however.

Around bedtime I decided to fetch the old router, which I had stopped using sometime before I moved here.  The problem was that its wireless network was very weak and had a ridiculously small radius, something like the size of my previous living room.  I did not get a good connection from my bedroom. There may have been other issues too, but if so I have forgotten them.  One nice thing about it is, it is much less hot.  I unplugged the old and plugged everything into the even older, which had spent the last several years in a dusty plastic bag in my cupboard. It did not work.  I was not too surprised.  I had a new ISP since then, probably two.  I found the user manual (which was on a CD) and managed to log into the router. Here I changed the setup from PPPOE to Dynamic something, and within a minute the computers were connected!  Good as new!

Happy ending, except that I was now extremely sleepy again and also felt a little sick. I went to bed, the computers happily chatting with the Internet.

To be continued?

Widescreen monitor day 2

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di090527

Not quite worth it.

Yesterday I listed various good things about the widescreen monitor I bought then.  Today I will talk about what didn’t work so well.  Initially, Sims 2.

That is not really a big deal if you have two fairly good computers, as I have. In fact, I usually play Sims 2 on the other computer. It is slightly slower, but it is out to the side so I can keep half an eye on it but still do my writing on the primary computer.  The only reason I played it on the quad-core computer this time was that I wanted to see how it looked in high-resolution widescreen, and then it looked so good I wanted to continue to see it that way.  That was not to be, however.  After a while, it crashed.

The first crash came unexpected, and with a tiny cryptic error message saying something about 3D.  I’ve gotten used to playing for half an hour or more between saving, so I lost some progress.  And a few minutes later it crashed again.

After a few crashes, I gave in and installed the specific drivers for this monitor, from the CD that was hidden at the bottom of the box. Until then, the monitor had shown up as generic plug-and-play monitor. I hoped the problem would be solved now. Also, occasionally when changing screen resolution (including going into Sims 2) it would crash iexplore.exe, which includes the start menu and the task bar, as well as any folders that happened to be open at the time.  I would then have to close it using task manager.  (This is on Windows XP, I am not sure you can close Vista with the task manager. Then again I am not sure you need to.)  I expected all these problems to be fixed by installing the driver.

As you can guess, I was wrong.  But more than that, the next or second crash took Windows with it.  It showed a Blue Screen of Death blaming a driver named NV4_disp.dll.  So I went online and looked for a solution to this.  There were many different solutions, none of which worked.  The most common was to delete all graphics drivers and remove all traces of them and then install the newest driver for the video card.  I already did this a few days ago to get Age of Conan to work.  Doing it again had of course no effect on the Bluescreen.

(Incidentally, I have not tried AoC in widescreen. I am sure the game supports it, but one day of AoC was enough for me for now. If I enjoyed heart-pounding danger, senseless murderous violence and barely censored adult content in a disturbingly lifelike world, I would go to bed earlier so I could remember my dreams.)

Unfortunately I have not found any solution to the NV4_disp problem. What I have found out is that it takes too much time to play Sims 2 on my main machine so I can’t do anything else while the game runs.  So I have moved it back to the computer where it belongs. Although I do miss the big pretty highly detailed screen while playing it.  There is a tiny little temptation to replace the old LCD monitor for that machine with a large new widescreen too. It was an early model, and there are no Vista drivers to it at all.  And isn’t the picture getting a bit dark?…

Widescreen monitor

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di090526

With the onset of summer heat, what could be cooler than to replace my last CRT monitor with a new energy-saving LCD monitor?  Especially if it has twice the screen area despite taking up less space on my desk.

So after a LiveJournal friend assured me that City of Heroes runs great on widescreen monitors, and knowing that Sims 2 does the same, I went to my favorite electronics shop. They had a HPw2228 at a rather affordable price (by Norwegian standards), certainly much less than I used to pay for smaller monitors in the past.  And I have very good experiences with HP products in general.

Despite my reference to summer heat, it was actually raining today. No great loss, since it did not rain hard and I would have been drenched in sweat even if I was not drenched in rain.  The monitor is not THAT heavy, at least compared to the old CRT, but when you carry them for some minutes it starts becoming quite good exercise.  So much more since my arms are less exercised than most of my body.

I came home unharmed and switched the monitors. I did not even turn off the computer or log out, although I did save stuff.  That was probably a wise decision, since iexplore.exe died on the spot, taking with it the startup menu and the task bar.  Luckily I could still log off in a dignified manner using ctrl-alt-del and choosing the appropriate menu choice, in this case restart.  The machine recognized the monitor without me running the CD that came with it.  Well, perhaps not perfectly.  I have had one more iexplore crash since, and several Sims 2 crashes.  I may eventually install the driver, perhaps. Actually I don’t plan to use this machine much for Sims 2, but I do it now because I wanted to look at it.  It is awesome. These things are seriously habit-forming.

They are also known to increase productivity more than an increase in processor speed or hard disk space, according to a study a decade or two ago.  Being able to see more stuff on the screen at the same time is quite useful, sight being by far our most information-dense sense. It certainly helps when playing City of Heroes, but the study was about office work. Having reference works open while you write seems another obvious use.

Hopefully this will be enough justification for now. It is midnight again!

Why public libraries?

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di090404

That was perhaps not what he expected her to show him, but even so, there are many good things to see in the library.

No, I am not trying to make an end to them, although I suppose that is what would happen if people started thinking. (Because when people start thinking, they usually stop soon.) Every civilized country has public libraries, even that bastion of capitalism where you are otherwise supposed to earn your own way through life and where copyrights just go on and on for generations after the author’s passing. So why?

“Why” can mean “what was the cause” or “what is the purpose”. For the current libraries, the cause is probably that there have always been libraries, or at least for so long that people have forgotten their purpose. But the purpose certainly seems to be to let people read books for free.

Now there are two ways of reading library books: Either at the library, or you can borrow them home with you. If you borrow them, you have to return them after a few weeks. But there is nothing to stop you from coming to the library every single day and read the same book, unless someone else has got to it first. So clearly the purpose of returning the books is not to limit access to reading, but simply to keep the costs down by letting many people read the same book.

Enter the Internet. I know I have written about this before, but it is so long ago that perhaps I am saying this in a different way. Or at the very least, since then Google has continued to scan millions of books from around the world. But I know I said the same thing then as now: If libraries had been invented now, they would have been forbidden. If we had known the value of reading today as we did when it was new, they would be freely available on the Internet.

Now you may argue that if people can afford Internet access, then they can also afford to buy their own books. This is less and less true for each passing years, as computer and internet access become cheaper and cheater and more and more fundamentally necessary for a normal life – while books become more expensive if anything. But it is also a moot point from the “Internet=library” point of view. In all the years I used public libraries, I never had to present documentation of my poverty. It was probably assumed that if I really loved a book and had the money to buy it, I would.

Certainly this is the assumption of Baen Free Library. In fact, they claim on the very first page that they expect to make money of it, both the publishing house itself and the authors who participate. Ironically, such a transparent self-interest may deter some who would otherwise have acted in sympathy, but it is the more commendable for honesty. As Flint – himself an accomplished writer – says, what author would not be happy to see someone checking his book out of a public library? There may be such cretins, says Flint, but their books probably would get little love from those who got a chance to break them open before buying them.

(Incidentally, the music “pirates” have argued along the same line for years, but their pleas fall on deaf ears. Seriously, how many CDs have you bought without having heard at least one of the tracks beforehand? The notion that radio stations should pay to play music rather than getting paid for it is utterly, clinically insane. It is as if newspapers should pay to print advertisements. Of course, with modern file sharing technology, the advertisement IS the product. A golden age of opportunity has passed for the recording labels. But if the experience of Baen is anything to go by, the recording companies are still shooting themselves in the foot. Or, as a Norwegian commenter put it, shooting their prosthesis, as the foot is shot to pieces long ago.

Then again, perhaps books are different, appealing to the more intellectual in particular. (Although, if you randomly sample a bookstore, it is hard to give credit to that theory.) In any case, if free books in the library are a good thing, then free books on the Internet should also be a good thing. In fact, since most people still find reading paper easier than reading computer screens, people are unlikely to commit the crime of reading books just to taunt the authors or publishers. Their motivations are probably at least as good as (or at least stronger than) the average library visitor.

It is no big surprise that the US government prefers to let Google do the job. But it is rather amusing (in a scornful way) that the social democrat countries of Europe are unwilling to build good public libraries on the Net. Especially if you have a language different from the emerging World Language, your only realistic hope of delaying its death is to throw at your public every word and sentence available in the local tongue. In fact, you should probably pay them to read if you value your national heritage so much.

Anyway, I’ve already mentioned Baen, a pretty limited initiative. I’ll also remind you of Questia which is a partly free and partly paid library, with a particular angle toward students and the academia. But the tidal wave that may eventually absorb the phenomenon of books into the bitstream is Google Book Search. Despite the unassuming name, Google has scanned and stored literally millions of books, some of which can be read in their entirety or even printed out. (Please, think of the trees!)

I can’t say I mind too much that governments make themselves less relevant. The time is drawing near when governments as we know them will come to an end. The next level of consciousness will have no need for such structures, but will cooperate seamlessly like members of one loving family. It will probably not be in my time, more’s the pity. But all things will either change or end, most likely within this century. The age of books is also coming to an end, but not because we throw them away. Rather, they become drawn into the noosphere, and like ourselves they become gradually less physical, less confined in space and time. Our fates are linked, for without the books, our cultural evolution would have been incredibly hard or perhaps even impossible. The world we know, we owe to the book. In some form, it will always be with us, until the end of the world as we know it.

Out of sync and shape

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di090403 I have reason to believe that the word “headdesk” did not exist until the coming of  computer networks…

This morning I decided to skip the Holosync session. After all, I had slept 7 hours, slightly more than I usually did before I even started these experiments. Besides, I was planning to do a 40-minute LifeFlow 10 today, the first of these. The demos have tended to make me more sleepy rather than less, but that would be a concern for the afternoon when I did that brainwave entrainment.

But already on the commute bus to work I became very sleepy and napped for much of the way.  This is something that rarely ever happened even before I started syncing in the morning.  Perhaps if I slept only half the night or if I got up very early. But I was actually half an hour late (thank you, large intestine) and had slept for 7 hours.  Huh.  At work I became sleepy again after lunch, although 10 minutes of focused counting meditation cleared that up.  Still, later in the workday I became sleepy AGAIN and napped for 10-15 minutes.   Either the brain does get used to the morning sync or it has a really good placebo effect!

Still haven’t gotten along to testing the “industrial strength” version of LifeFlow as of 20:10 (8:10 PM DST). This is because of the Linux laptop.  I have used it almost exclusively to play music at work for a good while now, but I can do that with the Vista laptop.  It just isn’t as easy with iTunes as it is with Amarok, the KDE music player. Well, that probably does not tell you much unless you came here by searching for Amarok, KDE, or “Linux music” – and I sincerely hope this entry is many pages down on any of those searches!

Anyway, I don’t play much music anymore. It happens, but it has diminished greatly of late, and more so now that I can directly hack into my brainwaves with low-frequency sound effects. Between this and the speeches of the “researchers” in this area, my “recently played” list looks nothing like its old self.  So I took the old HP pavilion ze5600 with me home finally.

This ties in with my rant about Norton antivirus, last seen in my March 27 entry.   With my relationship to  Symantec back to enemy level (I know it’s been there once before) there is only a firewall between me and an Internet raging with worms.  Unlike viruses, which passively drift along with stuff you download (mail included), worms are actively trying to get into your computer and infect it through any one of the many thousand ports that opens you to the Internet.  The obvious solution is to have a firewall, which closes all these ports (think of them as small holes that worms may worm their way through).  My router does indeed have a great firewall, but… it gets in the way of downloading Japanese cartoons.

I have had neither the time nor the inclination lately to watch such “anime” as it is called.  But this is things that have come and gone in the past, although the fad seems to be slightly weaker each time it returns.  It seems like a reasonable goal to at least complete the series I have begun.  Besides, while it may be technically illegal, I still see it as a valuable cultural exchange that I should encourage. After all, it is not like you could rent these in your video store – or indeed any video store in the western world.  Some of them are even hard to find in Japan anymore.

Anyway, the short of it is that someone needs to run BitTorrent without a firewall, and if that someone is me, the worms don’t die.  This is where Linux comes in.   The small laptop has Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows, which means worms won’t work on it.  The two operating systems may do many of the same things, but they are very different inside.  Worms are all written for Windows, except possibly one or two for Mac.  Linux has simply too many different variants to be worth writing a worm for. It is not that it is impossible, perhaps not even harder than for Windows, but you will only infect a few machines, and then they change again.   So, by putting my Linux laptop on the network, I can download and upload anime without getting worms.

Of course, first I had to get the machine home. It is just a laptop, and I carried it in a suitable box along with cables and such.  It was not really heavy, but it still felt heavy after I had carried it long enough.  (I walk about 15 minutes from work to the bus station, and around 10 minutes from the bus stop home.)  My arms are ridiculously weaker than my legs now after I have not trained with the bow since I moved here, or years anyway.  I really should starting carrying a box with a laptop to work and back every day, except it would look kind of weird in the long run.

Connecting the laptop to the Internet was a snap, literally. I just snapped into place the network cable that I had once used for the Dell laptop.  (Unfortunately I never managed to get the Dell to run Ubuntu or Xubuntu, and then it kind of died. Or at least its screen did.)

Connecting to the home network, however, was surprisingly difficult.  I know I have done it before with an earlier laptop.  And the Ubuntu installation on Trine the tri-core computer accesses the network without a second thought.  But the laptop simply could not open the network named “ITLAND”, although it managed to see that it was there.  (It also saw a network named “WORKGROUP” that is the default Windows network, I believe, but that I thought I had removed.  This cannot be opened either.

I manage to set up access to one shared folder by using another alternative (Linux is big on alternatives). I used the choice “Connect to server” and gave the internal IP adress for the computer where my anime is stored, and the folder name on the network.  So I got around it that way.  I was also able to connect to part of the network for a while by running the network wizard on the Windows XP machine again with the same network name as originally and no other changes.  But it faded after a while, for unknown reasons.  I will probably continue to hack on it from time to time, but the temporary solution is good enough for what I wanted to do right away,  get more episodes of Astro Fighter Sunred, an old parody on the Japanese version of super heroes.

Why do I have to hack and rig these things anyway?  I should be able to rent the anime I want to see directly from the Japanese company that holds the copyright, and stream it directly to my computer using safe, reliable components of the world’s leading operating system.  There should be no need to hack, fudge, jury-rig or improvise, rely on the kindness of strangers and tiptoe on the shady side of the law.  Come the revolution, this is all going to change! But for now, Linux is the most revolutionary we have. And it gets the job done, with a little help from the Google.