Exit Gutsy, Enter Hardy II

Installation is complete.
I ran into some problems.

0) The wifi driver was broken. I have a broadcom (0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 01)) and they changed the bcm43xx driver (it was deprecated) for the b43 driver. The installation went wrong somewhere and the driver wasn’t working. The solution was to use b43-fwcutter (I compiled, but I’m pretty sure it is in the repos) and then this:

EDIT: wordpress seems to be messing up the aligment, I will fix this later, check out the solution on the original site [0] for now:

export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w “$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR” wl_apsta.o

This creates another small problem: my wireless device was eth1, but after this eth1 was useless and instead I had to use wlan0_rename. I corrected this behaviour following the solution I found here [1]:

1. go to /etc/udev/rules.d
2. sudo nano 70-persistent-net.rules
3. comment out the line
# PCI device 0×14e4:0×4318 (bcm43xx)
# SUBSYSTEM==”net”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTRS{address}==”00:0e:9b:bf:af:f4″, NAME=”eth1″ <this line
4. save, exit back to terminal
5. sudo rmmod b43
6. sudo modprobe b43
7. udev will add a line like this to the aforementioned file:
# PCI device 0×14e4:0×4318 (b43-pci-bridge)
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTR{address}==”00:0e:9b:bf:af:f4″, ATTR{type}==”1″, NAME=”wlan0″

Now the Network Manager shows the wlan0 interface correctly as wireless adaptor.

That got my wireless connection working again. The only weird thing is that I have a useless wmaster0 device now…

1) For some reason whenever I tried to sudo I got a “unable to resolve host” sign. I had to correct a problem with /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname
My /etc/hostname now has this one line (one word actually) it says “MyPrecious” (no quotations marks, of course). That’s my lappy’s name ^_^
My /etc/hosts file has this as its first line: “127.0.0.1 localhost MyPrecious” (again, no quotation marks). Everything’s solved, I can sudo and have a nice name for my comp at the same time
The best way to solve this (without having to use sudo, that is) is through the recovery mode or with a live cd.

2) Kicker seems to freeze when kde loads, but I don’t remember if this happened right after hardy or after I installed some apps (Knemo). I just kill kicker and reload it for now. EDIT: this seems to be fglrx related, go figure…

3) This is serious business. I have an ATI card, x1400 mobility… I’m using the privative drivers the open ones weren’t working for me when I started with Kubuntu, during Feisty, and I never gave them another try. The thing is that for some reason I can’t close my laptop’s lid, otherwise everything freezes. I’m still looking for a solution for this one.

EDIT 0: most of my games are segfaulting and I still can’t fix the lid problem. I’m pretty pissed at AMD right now. We need __better__ drivers.

EDIT 1: games aren’t segfaulting anymore and I got fglrx running again (and I’m able to close the lid). I don’t know what solved it since I tried a gazillion different things. We __still__ need better drivers (free ones would be definitely better).

[0] http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/udev/+bug/202575

Exit Gutsy, Enter Hardy

I’m a happy user of Lignux Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, who decided to upgrade to the beta version of 8.04 Hardy Heron.
Here are my views on the upgrade process:

0) My KDE is in Spanish, so I find it weird when I get something like this:

Se van a desinstalar 76 paquetes. Se van a instalar 179 paquetes nuevos. Se van a actualizar 1695 paquetes. Debe descargar un total de 2287M. This download will take about 14 horas 12 minutos with your connection. Fetchin and installing the upgrade can take several hours. Once the download has finished, the process cannot be cancelled.

Why do you get such a mixture of languages?

1) The message said the download would take 14 hours and 12 minutes, but the progress bar has an estimated time and it hasn’t gone over 6 hours so far, so where does that 14 hour estimate come from?

I’ll continue with my comments after the download is done… in 6 or 14 hours…

EDIT 0: I left and when I came back Xorg was using 99% of processor power and nothing was responding, I had to restart (probably a full restart wasn’t necessary, just X, but I decided to test some grub things too). After booting I ran kdesudo “adept_manager –dist-upgrade-devel” again and it downloaded a couple of things more and now it is in the “Downloading and installing upgrades” phase.

EDIT 1: Pre-installing took a while longer than expected since I have automatic bug report retrieval (and Hardy still has many bugs, so the bug retrieval took some extra time). The estimated time for upgrade completion is 50 minutes.