Mounting FAT32 partition automatically at boot

In Gutsy, all my partitions would be mounted automatically at boot. At the time I was thinking that I want that for my FAT32 partition, which I store most files on, but not for my NTFS (windows) partition, which I generally don’t need access to.

After installing Hardy, things have changed around and neither of those two partitions are mounted automatically. They mount when I choose them in the “Places” menu. That is good for the NTFS partition, but quite annoying with the FAT32 partition, as I have photos, music files, wallpapers, etc on there. Which means, to play a song I first have to click on the drive to mount it and then load the media player (banshee, or…). Also, my wallpaper doesn’t show up until I have clicked on (i.e. mounted) the partition.

So, after some searching, I found some instructions about how to edit the /etc/fstab file. This page here is quite useful among others: http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

It seems that the fstab file has changed somewhat with Hardy, and the changes seem pretty difficult to understand for a newbie like me, but I decided to try it out following the somewhat older instructions. This is what I have done:

• backup fstab: sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.backup
• make a directory to mount the partition in: sudo mkdir /media/fat-partition
• find out about my partitions: sudo fdisk -l
• edit fstab: sudo gedit /etc/fstab
  …added the line: /dev/sda3 /media/fat-partition vfat defaults,nosuid,nodev 0 0
• save and reboot

…I am writing this just before the reboot, so lets see what happens…

UPDATE: at first it seemed to work… but then it didn’t. I have postponed solving this issue until after the Intrepid Ibex upgrade. Perhaps it won’t even be there anymore.

Linking master and headphone volume to volume buttons

It is quite simple to get the external media volume buttons to apply to both master volume and headphone volume simultaneously.

Go to > System > Preferences > Sound and select both Master and Headphne (using Ctrl + click) under Default Mixer Tracks.

That’s it.

(Trying BloGTK for posting this entry)
More on this here http://freemor.wordpress.com/2008/04/13/using-blogtk-with-wordpresscom

Hardy Heron / Ubuntu 8.04 install

I have just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04, and thus there are some new things to blog about.

I could not actually upgrade, as I got this error every time I tried:
Could not calculate the upgrade
A unresolvable [sic] problem occurred while calculating the upgrade.

So, guessing that it may be caused by “unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu” I uninstalled/disabled the following:
BlueMarine, easyTAG, Firefox add-ons, flashplugin-nonfree, Flock, Gnomad, GQview, gstreamer plugins bad, ugly and ffmpeg, gxine, libdvdread3, LightZone, MPlayer, multiverse sources, NVidia restricted drivers, Picasa, pysdm, Skype, Sun Java, VLC
Still, every time I tried upgrading the same error popped up.

So, instead I did a fresh install of Ubuntu, which went well. I don’t find the partitioning part well done for someone who’d like to keep his existing Windows installation. I chose manual configuration, deleted the existing Ubuntu (7.10) partition, and chose to reformat it as ext3 as root partition… all the while not being sure whether I was doing the right thing…

To-do list

Now that I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04, here’s a note to myself of things I can think of now that I still need to do:

• Keep windows in /boot/grub/menu.lst

Every time there is a kernel upgrade (or after upgrading to Feisty), the menu.lst file gets changed. That file lists what operating systems choices GRUB lists upon bootup. I dual-boot between Ubuntu and WinXP. After every upgrade, however, WinXP gets deleted from the list. I have learnt to backup the old menu.lst and restore the appropriate lines of code to it afterwards, but it is annoying. So I have to find out how to tell Ubuntu to keep that choice there when upgrading.

• Does linux keep all the old kernels around? (i.e. there are more and more options in GRUB) Can I get rid of old ones and save disk space?
• Wireless networking

Before the Feisty upgrade NetworkManager has given me all sorts of headaches when trying to connect to wireless networks. Need to investigate situation now and see what needs to be done…

• Have DVD’s autorun in VLC player instead of gXine.
• Move the home folde to a different partition… maybe
• Get rid of the icons for my different partitions on the desktop

I can access them through the > Places menu. However, do show icons for inserted media such as CDs or USB sticks. Also, I want to make the “DellUtility” Partition, that presumably is factory installed from Dell, totally disappear from view.

• Install beagle, tracker, … desktop search?
• Experiment with desktop effects?

…I’m sure there will be more.

Upgraded to Feisty

I have just upgraded to Feisty Fawn (i.e. Ubuntu 7.04) and it all went so smoothly there is nothing to write home about. I’m almost disappointed
I took an hour of letting the upgrade tool do its work.

The only small annoyance that I have noticed so far is that it changes menu.lst the way it always does when you do a kernel upgrade. It takes Windows off the list, which is quite annoying for a dual-booter like me. More in another post.

Editing /boot/grub/menu.lst to change the GRUB boot menu

I have an Ubuntu/WinXP dual-boot machine. The GRUB bootloader menu allows me to boot into several Ubuntu options or into WinXP. Unless I have to fix something (which I hope I won’t have to), I only ever choose the main Ubuntu option or WinXP. These options are, however, at either ends of the list. I’d prefer them to be next to each other for quick access.

Here’s a helpful reference. And here’s what I did:

The GRUB boot menu configuration is in the file
/boot/grub/menu.ls

1. backup menu.ls:
sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst-backup

2. edit menu.ls:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

3. Move the paragraph with the WinXP options up the list.

4. Change default to 1 (was 0)
default 1

5. comment out the lines about “Other operating systems“

So now I have the following options when booting:

• Microsoft Windows XP Professional
• Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-generic
• Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-generic (recovery mode)
• Ubuntu, memtest86+

…and the second option is automatically selected and boots-up after 10 seconds if I don’t do anything.

Here is the contents of the resulting file (showing only the uncommented lines)

default 1

timeout 10

title Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root (hd0,1)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-generic
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=/dev/sda5 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-generic
quiet
savedefault
boot

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=/dev/sda5 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-generic
boot

title Ubuntu, memtest86+
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet
boot

I should emphasize the importance of the first step, i.e. backing up the original menu.ls file. I’d like to quote a comment on a relevant website here for future reference:

TuxGirl wrote: As a side note, I think it’s important to mention that, if you do manage to completely mess up your grub.conf [or menu.ls] file to the point that your machine won’t boot, you can fix it by booting into a livecd (like the Ubuntu livecd or Knoppix or DSL or *something*), and then copying your backup grub.conf [or menu.ls] over while in there. In fact, this method is great whenever you do something to your system that makes it temporarily unusable.

Bongo man conquered

That was simple enough…
> System > Administration > Login Window … > Accessibility …uncheck “Login screen ready”

(i.e. this is to stop ubuntu from playing those bongo drums when the login screen appears.)

Flash 9

Tried to install the flash plugin for firefox following the instructions in the ubuntu documentation. Installing it through Synaptic seemed to work fine, but running firefox afterwards made no diffrence. Flash seemed to be non-existant in firefox.

Instead, these instructions to install the latest flash 9 plugin for firefox worked just great!

Playing music and video

Music
Installed banshee and all the plugins noted on this page.
i.e. gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly \
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse \
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

…the result: banshee plays ogg, mp3, wma, wv… maybe even more. All is well.

Video
Totem, using gstreamer, seems to work quite well and I don’t want to change that. I.e. I don’t want to change totem to xine, however it seems I need xine to play DVDs properly. So I installed gxine and all it comes with through Synaptic separately from totem. I now have both totem “movie player” and gxine available.

To install libdvdcss2 follow this.
sudo apt-get install libdvdread3
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

All DVDs seem to play properly now in gxine, including menus, language and subtitle choosing. However, with all of them the screen flickers black intermittently. Some DVDs more, some less. It is more pronounced at larger viewing, e.g. fullscreen.

Apart from that, most - but not all - mpg, avi, asf, wmv are playing happily in totem-gstreamer.

Lastly, some autorun settings:
> System > Preferences > Removable Drives and Media
DVD autorun to use GXine: gxine dvd:///dev/dvd
Audio CDs autorun Banshee: banshee --play --audio-cd /dev/hdc

Issues with autoplaying audio CDs with banshee:
When inserting an audio CD, banshee starts, but then comes up with an error: Playback error: Resource not found. see screenshot:

However, the CD appears correctly in banshee, including lookup of titles etc, and pressing play plays it fine.
However, volume seems to be turned up to maximum at this point, even if it wasn’t before.

In conclusion: A lot of progress with playing multimedia, but some issues still need to be investigated:
- Intermittent black flickers when playing DVDs
- Banshee Resource not found error & subsequent max volume on Edgy

Solving the “grey image” problem

It turns out that my previous attempt at getting the Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000 to show video instead of a grey image only failed because it did not include the sudo command enough. So, following these instructions, which are almost identical, did the trick! Time to get a beer…

Here are the instructions in short, but it’s probably better to get it from the original source:

Install build-essential and the kernel-headers for your kernel (for me this was linux-headers-2.6.17-10-generic and it was already installed).

Download latest driver from www.saillard.org/linux/pwc (http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/files/pwc-10.0.12-rc1.tar.bz2 for me)

Unpack and go into extracted directory

make

sudo modprobe -r pwc

sudo cp pwc.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/media/video/pwc/pwc.ko.saillard

cd /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/media/video/pwc

sudo mv pwc.ko pwc.ko.ubuntu

sudo ln -s pwc.ko.saillard pwc.ko

sudo depmod -a

sudo modprobe pwc

…et voilà.