Those boot sectors assume your iPod has one of the factory disks installed. I’ve got an old 4th gen iPod that I converted to compact flash after its disk died. It happens to have an 8G CF card in there.

Since I don’t do Windows, I downloaded the 20G 4th gen bootsector, put that on the iPod, and used fdisk to change the size of the FAT32 partition. And that worked fine.

Here’s the link to an ISO with the DRAC5 source:

http://linux.dell.com/files/drac5/source/

The two most serious problems were atrocious Intel video performance, and ongoing sound issues. Thankfully, the Intel issues have been addressed. Specifically, a really nice Troubleshooting Intel Performance document by Bryce Harrington has appeared. It lays out what is happening (in short: major driver refactoring), why it is affecting performance on some hardware, and specifically what to check and how to work around speed issues.

I ended up going back to the xserver-xorg-video-intel-2.4 package which fixes my main issue – really slow workspace switches. Looks like kernel and X.org fixes have already made it to Karmic Koala, but I’m happy to use the older driver until Karmic is released.

As for tor, Jaunty packages are now available so to install tor, just add

deb     http://mirror.noreply.org/pub/tor jaunty main
deb-src http://mirror.noreply.org/pub/tor jaunty main

to your

/etc/apt/sources.list

and apt-get install tor.

Finally – there’s a better way to reload the sound modules:

alsa force-reload

1. Tor is not packaged anymore, apparently there is no Ubuntu maintainer. Upstream provides Ubuntu packages, but they have no jaunty package yet. So, we need to build from the intrepid source package. Add

  deb-src http://mirror.noreply.org/pub/tor intrepid main

to your /etc/apt/sources.list, and

  apt-get update
  cd /usr/src
  apt-get build-dep tor
  apt-get source tor -b

2. Bug 270046: Apparmor *still* fights with cups-pdf. This one’s been around since the Hardy days. You’d think it would be fixed by now… Specifically, print jobs to the PDF printer will just vanish because apparmor does not allow cupsd to save them in ~/PDF. Solution: disable apparmor for cupsd:

  apparmor_parser -R /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cupsd
  /etc/init.d/apparmor restart

3. Bug 339555: Intel video is really really really really slow. Case in point: workspace switching takes seconds. (Partial) fix: upgrade to a experimental 2.6.30rc3 kernel. Even with that kernel, video performance on this GM965/GL960 based system is still not what it should be. To be continued, no doubt.

4. Bug 334657: Subpixel/Lcd mode with VRGB/VBGR makes fonts on qt4 applications unreadable. Really, really unreadable. Fix: use experimental patched qt4-x11 packages.

5. Sound has been an issue on this laptop from day one. It’s a Dell inspiron 1420N that shipped with Ubuntu preinstalled, but at the time a special Dell-supplied kernel was necessary to get working sound. The sound hardware is

$ lspci -vnn
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller [8086:284b] (rev 02)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:01f3]
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 21
	Memory at fe9fc000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
	Capabilities: 
	Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
	Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel
$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: STAC92xx Analog [STAC92xx Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

First of all I had to add my user to the pulse-rt group – pulseaudio was complaining loudly about that in /var/log/syslog. That’s a Jaunty upgrade bug.

Secondly, for some reason I can not get sound to work until I unload the snd_hda_intel module and reload it. Sadly, that means closing all applications that are using the sound hardware – mpd, firefox, pidgin, the gnome volume control applet, etc. I don’t know what’s causing this, but I had the same problem on Intrepid after the last kernel upgrade. Again, to be continued.

The wrapping worked fine, but the Drupal cache really gets in the way sometimes. For instance, my legacy code does not use the drupal_set_message functions when a form submit fails. That means that the page that tells the user they made a mistake gets cached, leading to all sorts of unexpected results.

I looked around for a way to disable the Drupal cache for an entire module, but only found some results that didn’t quite do the trick. But then I stumbled across the CacheExclude module, which does exactly what I want. I didn’t want to include yet another module for something as simple as this, so just duplicated the ‘magic’ lines in my module:

function your_module_name_init() {
  // We don't want caching for this module
  if (drupal_match_path($_GET['q'],'url_to_your_module/*')) {
    $GLOBALS['conf']['cache'] = FALSE;
  }
}

And that does the trick. Now, I’m by no means a Drupal expert, so there may well be a better way to do this. Feel free to leave a comment if you know how.

Affiliated Mortgage Protection
292 Terminal Ave W,
Clark, NJ- 7066.
(732)-499-0700

We answered five of their calls the past three weeks, and each time asked them to stop calling. Apparently, they happily ignore these requests.

They called again this evening and the lady on the phone had the nerve to say that she would have to put me on hold to get taken off their list, because I would have to talk to a supervisor. I hung up. We’re on the do not call list, so I filed a complaint.

Anyway – no more. I decided to let Asterisk deal with them:

; Affiliated Mortgages.
exten => XXXXXXXXXX,n,GotoIf($["${CALLERID(num)}" = "7324990700"]?Telemarketer)

; Telemarketers. Let it ring for 5 minutes and then hang up on them.
exten => XXXXXXXXXX,n(Telemarketer),Ringing
exten => XXXXXXXXXX,n,Wait(300)
exten => XXXXXXXXXX,n,Hangup

Make sure you have

[general]
unanswered = yes

in your cdr.conf if you want to log the call attempts from frustrated telemarketers

http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R155882&formatcnt=2&libid=0&fileid=208066

Man – what a pile of crap. This thing is a self-extracting archive for rpm-based systems (redhat/suse). Fine – except that I run Debian on that machine. Anyway, you can run it with –extract to extract the contents:

./delldset_v1.4.0.8.bin --help

Command-line options for Dell System E-Support Tool (DSET)

Usage:
 [options...]

Options:

-h,--help        : Display command-line usage help
-i,--install     : Install/upgrade the DSET application
-v,--version     : Display version information
--list           : Display contents of package (+)
--extract
 : Extract files to specified path (+)

Using no options will display the interactive user
interface which will guide you through using DSET.

These contents are basically an rpm file and some support files:

-r-xr-xr-x  1 ward ward     4133 Apr  2  2007 Dell_License*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 ward ward     9909 May  8  2007 README*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 ward ward       58 May  8  2007 Version.txt*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 ward ward 15200341 May  9  2007 delldset-1.4.0-8.i386.rpm*
-rw-r--r--  1 ward ward 15187240 Oct 27 15:57 delldset_1.4.0-9_i386.deb
-r-xr-xr-x  1 ward ward    10271 Apr  2  2007 install.sh*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 ward ward      472 Apr  2  2007 sphelp.txt*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 ward ward       24 May  4  2005 test.sh*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 ward ward     9877 Apr  2  2007 utility.sh*

The rpm can be transformed into a .deb with alien:

$ alien delldset-1.4.0-8.i386.rpm
Warning: Skipping conversion of scripts in package delldset: postinst postrm preinst prerm
Warning: Use the --scripts parameter to include the scripts.
delldset_1.4.0-9_i386.deb generated
$ alien delldset-1.4.0-8.i386.rpm --scripts
delldset_1.4.0-9_i386.deb generated

Which installs fine – but you really want to be using a kernel that has ipmi functionality compiled as modules; otherwise the package will not install properly until you add

hapi.allow.user.mode=yes

to /etc/omreg.cfg. In any case, you need to have ipmi as modules for the rest of this sequence of commands, so you might as well boot into a stock Debian kernel.

You’ll probably want to have installed Dell’s open manage before you run the DSET report. To do that, add

  deb ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara

to your /etc/apt/sources.list file and

  apt-get update
  apt-get install dellomsa

So, then you would be ready to run the dellsysteminfo command but WAIT – don’t do it yet. That script is dangerous. It does stuff like this, probing for the running services (from /opt/dell/dset/bin/dell-sysreport.sh):

#Dell: Extra OS stuff we want

echo "     Getting status of services ..." ${TEE2LOG}

#Dell: SuSE doesn't have a "service status" method so do it the manual way
#catifexec "/sbin/service" "--status-all" 

rm -f $ROOT/service > /dev/null 2>&1 

SERVICEDIR=/etc/init.d 

#pushd ${SERVICEDIR} > /dev/null
          for SERVICE in `ls -1 ${SERVICEDIR}` ; do 

            case "${SERVICE}" in
#Skip over these "services" since they tend to hang some systems when requested for status
              functions | halt | killall | single| linuxconf| kudzu | bgpd | boot | reboot | single | nscd | \
                  halt.* | rc | boot.* | *rpmorig | *rpmnew | *rpmsave | *~ | *.orig)
      ;;
              *)
                if [ -x "${SERVICEDIR}/${SERVICE}" -a -f "${SERVICEDIR}/${SERVICE}" ]; then
        echo "Service Name: ${SERVICE}" >> $ROOT/service
                 /usr/bin/env -i LANG=$LANG PATH=$PATH TERM=$TERM "${SERVICEDIR}/${SERVICE}" status >> $ROOT/service 2>&1
    echo >> $ROOT/service
    echo "---------------------------------------------------------------------------" >> $ROOT/service
               fi
                ;;
            esac
          done
#popd > /dev/null

That didn’t go over too well on my system – a bunch of things stopped working (like the ‘w’ command), samba started segfaulting, etc. It’s clearly calling some init scripts that don’t deal well with being asked for a status.

So I commented out that part of the script, which made things a lot happier – but of course services are now not mentioned in the report.

The other problem with the dset package is that it is riddled with calls to awk, sort, etc with absolute paths. Seriously, this is not 1995. You’ll need to fix tons of calls – just grep for ‘/bin/awk’, ‘/bin/grep’, ‘/bin/sort’ etc in /opt/dell/dset.

When all that’s done, you can generate the report

  dellsysteminfo

which will drop a zip file with a horribly long name (including the use of round brackets, sigh) in /root/ with the password ‘dell’. Awesome security guys. Why is there even a password if it’s so trivial?

The Dell tech I’m e-mailing with (who is very helpful btw, this post is not a criticism about Dell’s support people – only about their GNU/Linux tools) said I’d need to upgrade the system bios and the ‘ESM’, which is the ’system firmware’. The former was easy with the help of this blog post. In a nutshell:

aptitude install libsmbios-bin libsmbios1 libsmbiosxml1
getSystemId

That will print out your ‘System ID’. Look up the latest system bios for that System ID at

  http://linux.dell.com/repo/software/bios-hdrs/

and download it. Then

modprobe dell_rbu
dellBiosUpdate -u -f bios.hdr

and reboot, at which point your bios will be upgraded if all goes well. Note that if your cmos battery is dead, you can’t upgrade your bios anymore because all the command line tool does is load it into ram and flip a switch to tell the bios to upgrade itself on the next boot; without cmos battery either that switch or the bios in ram may not survive a reboot.

So that worked fine. The ESM update was a little trickier. I downloaded another .BIN file from

http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=fr&l=fr&s=gen&releaseid=R147948&SystemID=PWE_PNT_2800&servicetag=8YGYQ1J&os=WNET&osl=fr&deviceid=5814&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=7&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=4&libid=29&fileid=196749

At least that thing didn’t try to do all sorts of rpm manipulations, it just runs a few scripts (again, you can verify with –extract).

The tricky thing here is that running the BIN file conflicts with the ipmi modules. Here’s what I did:

Boot into single user mode, and stop openmanage and ipmievd:

/etc/init.d/instsvcdrv stop
/etc/init.d/ipmievd stop

Then unload all ipmi modules:

rmmod ipmi_devintf
rmmod ipmi_si
rmmod ipmi_msghandler

Then start screen, and start the .BIN file. It will look around, cause the ipmi modules to be loaded again and if all is well ask you if you really want to update your ESM, [Y/N].

At this point, break out of screen with ctrl-a d, and unload the ipmi modules again (I kid you not!):

rmmod ipmi_devintf
rmmod ipmi_si
rmmod ipmi_msghandler

Now return to screen

screen -r

and press ‘Y’. Don’t worry, it’s going to load the ipmi modules yet again, and then starts printing dots on the screen as the upgrade progresses. It takes a while – at least 5 minutes on my system. So just wait until it is done.

Eventually the script said ‘update complete’. I read this trick with screen and the unloading of the ipmi modules somewhere on a dell wiki, but I can’t find the link now (sorry!) so I can’t give credit.

Anyway, and I was able to verify the upgrade with ipmitool (I upgraded to firmware revision 1.72):

# ipmitool -I open mc info
Device ID                 : 32
Device Revision           : 0
Firmware Revision         : 1.72
IPMI Version              : 1.5
Manufacturer ID           : 674
Manufacturer Name         : Unknown (0x2a2)
Product ID                : 0 (0x0000)
Device Available          : yes
Provides Device SDRs      : yes
Additional Device Support :
    Sensor Device
    SDR Repository Device
    SEL Device
    FRU Inventory Device
    IPMB Event Receiver
    Chassis Device
Aux Firmware Rev Info     :
    0x00
    0x00
    0x00
    0x00

So in the end I got almost everything to work (except for the dset output which is still partially missing). But seriously, this was way harder than it should be.

That DSET package is a total mess and needs some serious reworking.

The system bios upgrade procedure is elegant and simple – there Dell deserves credit.

The ESM upgrade… not so much. Seriously – what’s up with those ipmi modules getting in the way twice?

In a nutshell, I’d like Dell to hire some people to clean up the GNU/Linux tools they provide. But they have to be people who know about more than just rpm-based distros, and who are interested in truly cross-distribution solutions and want to work with all (popular) distributions. Basically, if Dell can get their tools into Debian, Fedora and OpenSuse, things will trickle down to almost every other popular flavor of GNU/Linux. There is a lot of work to do…

It’s a pleasant, concise explanation of what free software is all about, why it’s important, and how the GNU project fits in to all this. Happy birthday GNU!

And if that’s not enough FSF-related news for you, you can read more about what it is we do on a day to day basis.

I configured an XPS 1530n with the following specs, which are available both with Ubuntu and Windows:

The Ubuntu version comes with:

The Windows version ships with:

The only other configuration difference was that Windows users need to pay $25 extra for a recycle kit, and are not given the ‘plant a tree for me’ option. I guess it costs extra to dispose of all that proprietary software

There were a few options available on the Windows version that are not yet on the Ubuntu version – presumably because free software drivers are still missing for that hardware.

The verdict? Financially, the Ubuntu machine is a way better deal:

  XPS 1530 with Ubuntu: $1,518
  XPS 1530 with Windows: $1,788

On top of the substantial price difference, the Windows version comes with the cheapest, most basic version of Windows Vista pre-installed, as well as the NO office software option. This is a very basic setup, software-wise. You’ll also need to shell out extra bucks for antivirus software.

Compare that with the Ubuntu version which ships with a very powerful operating system and ton of extra software, including Open Office. And you get a major operating system release every 6 months for free!

Now if only Dell would start selling more of their systems without Windows around the world – they are still not available in large parts of Europe, for instance…

You

  apt-get update
  apt-get upgrade
  apt-get install update-manager-core

and then

  do-release-upgrade -d

You go get a cup of tea, and come back to

# do-release-upgrade -d
Checking for a new ubuntu release
Done Upgrade tool signature
Done Upgrade tool
Done downloading
extracting 'hardy.tar.gz'
authenticate 'hardy.tar.gz' against 'hardy.tar.gz.gpg' 

Reading cache

Checking package manager
Reading package lists: Done
...
...
Done http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/restricted Sources
Done http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy-updates/universe Sources
Done downloading            

Error during update 

A problem occurred during the update. This is usually some sort of
network problem, please check your network connection and retry. 

W:Failed to fetch
http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-security/main/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-security/restricted/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-security/universe/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-security/main/source/Sources.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-security/restricted/source/Sources.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-security/universe/source/Sources.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/restricted/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/universe/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/multiverse/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/source/Sources.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/restricted/source/Sources.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/universe/source/Sources.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-updates/main/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-updates/restricted/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-updates/universe/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-updates/multiverse/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-updates/main/source/Sources.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-updates/restricted/source/Sources.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, W:Failed to fetch
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy-updates/universe/source/Sources.bz2
Hash Sum mismatch
, E:Some index files failed to download, they have been ignored, or
old ones used instead. 

Restoring original system state

Aborting
Reading package lists: Done
Building dependency tree: Done
Building dependency tree: Done
Building dependency tree: Done

So you check the documentation at http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading and http://help.ubuntu.com/community/HardyUpgrades. Nothing different. You try a different mirror. Same problem. What’s going on?

You google around a bit until you stumble across https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager-core/+bug/223741 with a comment from 2008-07-17:

Using the ‘-d’ flag now causes Packages.bz2 and Sources.bz2 Hash Sum mismatch’s. “sudo do-release-upgrade” by itself now works. Please modify the upgrade instructions on http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading as this is causing considerable problems with folks trying to upgrade. I’ve just tested on a 6.04.2 (fresh) install and the following works:

sudo aptitude upgrade
sudo aptitude dist-upgrade
sudo aptitude install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade

Ergo, drop the ‘-d’ and all will be well. Would sure be nice if the docs could be updated…