Penguin
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Notes for Ubuntu. Also see UbuntuBreezyNotes.

Hoary Hedgehog (5.04)

No DMA on IDE drives

You may have to manually add your ide chipset module to /etc/modules before ide-cd.

See http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=19519 for more information

'Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method.' message on bootup on AMD64

This is a known issue. see https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1659

Ubuntu broke my spatial nautilus

From the changelog:

* debian/patches/02_ubuntuspatial.patch:
    - changes to the spatial mode. Close the folders by default while browsing.
      You can set "/apps/nautilus/preferences/no_ubuntu_spatial" to get the
      previous spatial behaviour.

How to build your own Ubuntu installer CD

See UbuntuRemastering.

Missing Functionality

See the UbuntuPostInstall shell script for installing things such as:

  • media-related codecs (win32codecs/gstreamer-ffmpeg for WMV support, DVD CSS)
  • Java runtime
  • Flash and Adobe Acrobat Reader browser plugins

For playing DVDs, you will also need gstreamer0.8-a52dec (from Universe) to get the audio on some discs. Also, the de-CSS library from the post-install script above seems to be for debian sarge, not ubuntu hoary - you can get an ubuntu hoary version from our software archive. Download it and then install it with the command line "sudo dpkg -ilibdvdcss2_1.2.8-1_i386.deb".

Skype doesn't work

Skype doesn't play nicely with the default sound setup in Ubuntu hoary as it uses the old style OSS methods and requires exclusive access to /dev/dsp. If you have a sound card that does hardware mixing things seem to be significantly nicer, but if you've stuck on something like an IBM T42 Laptop without hardware mixing you'll have problems. There are several solutions.

  1. Stop esd before starting skype
  2. Setup ALSA software mixing

Stopping esd before starting skype works perfectly, but has the rather large downside of not being able to conveniently listen to mp3's etc while you have skype running. I have found the second method to be the most reliable and convenient.

Follow the instructions in this Ubuntu forums post to setup ALSA with dmix to provide software mixing support. Once you have done this you will be able to have both Skype and another application such as RhythmBox open at the same time, however only one of them will actually be able to generate sound at once, so.

To Place a call

  • Pause RhythmBox
  • Switch to Skype, place call
  • Hang Up
  • Play RhythmBox again, for some reason I often have to close RhythmBox before it will start playing again

To Answer an incoming call

  • Pause RhythmBox
  • Answer call, talk
  • Hangup
  • Play RhythmBox again, for some reason I often have to close RhythmBox before it will start playing again

Apart from having to close RhythmBox to get it to play again sometimes this solution seems to provide functionality equivalent to what you would expect to get with any other operating system.

Other Solutions

Google reveals a host of webpages that present other solutions for solving the Skype sound problems under Hoary (and other distributions). These seem to involve one of the following

  1. Replacing esound with polypaudio
  2. Piping skype thorugh esddsp

I didn't find either of these methods to work successfully on my hardware.

Setting up wireless networking

See UbuntuWirelessNetworkingNotes?

Other networking related issues

See UbuntuNetworkingNotes?

Installing packages asks for verification

Sometimes you may see the following query when installing a package: Install these packages without verification y/N??

See AptNotes for some solutions

Installing the KDE desktop

As of Breezy, you don't need to have universe on to install KDE. You can simply "apt-get install kde" and you will have a functioning desktop. For a bit more, you can "apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" for a full Kubuntu desktop, including things like Amarok and Konversation not included in a default KDE install.

This will fill your Gnome menus with messy KDE apps, but you can get rid of these by running the following:

sudo sed -i '/OnlyShowIn?=/d;$a\OnlyShowIn?=KDE;' \
    /usr/share/applications/kde/*.desktop