Introduction
I recently received a new hard drive (a Intel X25-V) and needed to install Ubuntu on it. The only difference is that I this time decided to run a 64bit version instead. Up until now I have been reluctant to upgrade as flash and other required more work to get working but at the time write this there is really not that much of a difference anymore. In addition I can address all my 4GB memory without PAE.
There are always some quirks involved when setting up a new OS and beneath I have describe the problems I had and their solutions.
gkrellmtop
I absolutely love gkrellm for monitoring my system, see fullcirclemagazine.org. One of the plugins I really enjoy is gkrellmtop which lists the 3 most CPU intensive processes. Unfortunately I was not available from the repositories so I had to compile it my self.
I downloaded the project from http://sourceforge.net/projects/gkrelltop/. I got the relevant dependencies from the repositories.
root@bohr:~# aptitude install libglib2.0-dev buil-essential libgtk2.0-dev
And then it was the usual configure, make.
tjansson@euler:~/gkrelltop-2.2.13.orig$./configure tjansson@euler:~/gkrelltop-2.2.13.orig$make /usr/bin/gcc -g -DLINUX -DGKRELLM2 -fPIC -Wall `pkg-config gtk+-2.0 --cflags` -c top_three.c -o top_three.o /usr/bin/gcc -g -DLINUX -DGKRELLM2 -fPIC -Wall `pkg-config gtk+-2.0 --cflags` -c gkrelltop.c -o gkrelltop.o Makefile:100: Note: cannot compile server plugin. See configure.log. /usr/bin/gcc -g -DLINUX -DGKRELLM2 -fPIC -Wall `pkg-config gtk+-2.0 --cflags` -shared top_three.o gkrelltop.o -o gkrelltop.so tjansson@euler:~/gkrelltop-2.2.13.orig$ls config.guess configure configure.log gkrelltopd.c gkrelltop.o krell_image.xpm README top_three.c ttest.c config.sub configure.h gkrelltop.c gkrelltop.h gkrelltop.so Makefile support.h top_three.o
The file gkrelltop.so should now be moved to the gkrellm plugins folder:
tjansson@euler:~/gkrelltop-2.2.13.orig$mv gkrelltop.so ~/.gkrellm2/plugins/
Fanspeed control with pwmconfig and fancontrol
I wrote an article about using controlling fan speeds in Linux a while back, see Controlling fanspeeds in Linux on PWM motherboards, Thinkpads and ASUS Eee PC. It turns out that the module w83627ehf is broken in Ubuntu 9.10. So even though sensors-detect finds the chipset and the correct module lm-sensors can’t access it.
There are two solutions to this.
- Either one downloads lm-sensors 3.1.1 from https://launchpad.net/~ari-tczew/+archive/ppa/+packages and use the asus_atk0110 module instead of w83627ehf.
- Edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg to use the kernel option acpi_enforce_resources=lax (Note that this is not /boot/grub/menu.lst) as Ubuntu 9.10 uses grub 1.94.
I did the later and it worked fine.
ATI drivers
I should said that everything worked out of the box at first go. The problems started when I upgraded my graphics card from a ATI Radeon X1950XT to ATI Radeon HD 5850. After the hardware exchange my resolution of my screen was stuck at 1600×1200 and however I fiddled with xrandr I couldn’t set it back to 1920×1200 and seemed as if my card wasn’t recognized. The solution was to download the latest ati driver from their homepage:
support.amd.com
