Off you go… into the purple yonder!

I upgraded my laptop to Jaunty Jackalope. Here’s the list of issues (and solutions) I’ve run into:

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.

I have a legacy php application that had to be integrated into a Drupal site, so I wrapped it in a simple drupal module. The code needs to run for anonymous users.

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_of_your_module/*')) {
    $GLOBALS['conf']['cache'] = FALSE;
  }
}

In that snippet, you’ll want to change ‘url_of_your_module’ to a string unique to the path of your module. For instance, if your module lives a http://my.web.site/the-wrapped-module/, then you could put ‘the-wrapped-module’ in the place of ‘url_of_your_module’.

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.