Intrepid Ibex alpha 5

Installed Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex alpha 5 tonight and everything seems to work right out of the box. Brilliant!
I got wireless with WPA, ati x700 graphics with compiz, boot splash is in place.
The one and only error in the system log is still the same as with alpha 3:

ker@ibex:~/down/apps$ grep error /var/log/messages 
Sep 16 23:19:52 ibex kernel: [    2.055919] uvesafb: probe of uvesafb.0 failed with error -22

I don't know whats wrong and I don't really care right now since everything seems to work.

I am getting slow performance from the wlan, intel ipw2200. There are tons of this

Sep 17 22:00:44 ibex kernel: [ 5372.327668] ipw2200: Firmware error detected.  Restarting.

in the log. After running

sudo modprobe ipw2200

it goes up to normal performance, for a while.

The alpha 3 post:
http://blog.vigstrom.se/2008/07/intrepid-ibex-alpha-3.html

By the way, instead of burning cds everytime I want to install I use one of 2 other methods:
1. usb stick with the live iso. I just format my 1GB stick with

mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb -I 

and then run unetbootin and point it to the desktop iso.
2. pxe boot. I have a pxe server running where I serve nfs mounted isos.
To avoid downloading full isos everytime there's a new ubuntu release I just use rsync and remount the isos.

http://blog.vigstrom.se/search/label/pxe%20install

grub vga modes

Here's a table of the grub vga modes you can use in your /boot/grub/grub.conf or menu.lst.

Color   | 640x480  800x600  1024x768 1280x1024
--------+-------------------------------------
 8bit   |   769      771       773      775
15bit   |   784      787       790      793
16bit   |   785      788       791      794
24bit   |   786      789       792      795

Debian/Ubuntu:
/boot/grub/menu.lst

RedHat/Fedora/CentOS
/boot/grub/grub.conf

Your kernel line may look like this:

kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-21-generic root=UUID=d82ba1ab-f84f-4354-b118-543a2804a26b ro quiet splash

On most systems you can just change the last splash (and quiet) to vga=791 or something from the table like:

kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-21-generic root=UUID=d82ba1ab-f84f-4354-b118-543a2804a26b ro vga=791

(The "quiet" gives less output on the screen while booting and "splash" loads a distribution specific graphic, sometimes animated but mostly boring)

If you get a blank screen while booting it may be because you don't have a working framebuffer.
I would search for the keywords framebuffer, linux, radeon, hp. But that's me and my computer.

VirtualBox on wireless

On my Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04.1:
After installing VirtualBox 2

Install the Proxy ARP bridging daemon:

apt-get install parprouted

Enable ip forwarding:

sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

Create a tap interface:

VBoxTunctl -b -u $USER

(It will create one interface everytime you run it, so the first one will be tap0)

Bring up the interface and give it an ip address:

ip link set tap0 up
ip addr add 192.168.0.20/24 dev tap0

Bind tap0 to the wireless interface (eth1 on the hp, wlan0 on my dell)

parprouted eth1 tap0

In VirtualBox, Settings, Network set the network adapter attached to "Host Interface" "tap0"
If the procedure works, script it!

If it's not working you may have to add a route before starting VirtualBox:

sudo route add -net 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 tap0

To delete taps do

sudo VBoxTunctl -d <tap>

VirtualBox problems

After changing network adapter and MAC address in the settings for the virtual machine, networking stopped working in the guest (Ubuntu server 8.0.4.1). "Failed to bring up eth0"
Turns out each time I changed the network adapter or MAC address a new entry was added in the Ubuntu guest systems /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules as a new interface; like eth0, then eth1, eth2 and so on.
After deleting the obsolete entries and changing the latest one with the correct macaddress to eth0 and restarted it worked again.

Build a stargate

Father-Son project of the month?

http://www.sg1archive.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=12501
http://members.optusnet.com.au/jimbeam99/stargatethingy.wmv