Linux and ATI drivers – Hangs on screensaver

I’ve an ATI graphics card. When going away for a while, Kubuntu could lock up with a black screen when the powersave mode of the graphics card/monitor kicked in.

This is a known, as far as I know issue with ATI drivers.

I could reboot the system cleanly throught the magic keys ALT- BUSIER mnemonic, but it was pretty annoying. The XOrg log show something like: [fglrx] ASIC hang happened.

Doing this, sudo aticonfig –auto-powerstates=off –effective=startup solved the issue so far..

Windows 7 – Um substituto: Mais seguro, mais rápido, e gratuito

O Windows Vista já foi rei, mas agora tem um substituto: O Windows 7. Segundo parece resolve todos os problemas que há/havia no Vista… Apesar do Windows Vista ser um flop, é preciso compreender que só falhando é que se aprende alguma coisa, pelo que o falhanço do Vista pode ter impactos positivos no Windows 7 e que segundo o que anda para aí na Net, é o que parece…

No entanto, o Windows continua a ser um sistema operativo cujo objectivo base é um negócio e por isso alguém tem de pagar o esforço dessas melhorias. Quem pagaou o XP, o Vista e outro software MS terá agora de pagar o Windows 7…

Assim se vamos mudar, porque não mudar de vez? É certo que é preciso mudar de forma de pensar, de trabalhar e mesmo de usar um computador. Pessoas que encontram dificuldades no Windows, perdoam e esquecem essas dificuldades, mas noutros sistemas operativos alternativos já não….

Sistemas Windows com vírus, cavalos de troia, contas de home banking acedidas indevidamente, insegurança nativa que facilita a vida ao utilizador, mas torna o sistema inseguro, etc, são o dia a dia destes utilizadores. No entanto não desistem e continuam a usar o Windows porque pensam que não há alternativa…

No fim chega tudo a um ponto que se tem de perguntar:

- Confia no Windows para manter a sua informação confidencial e longe de acessos indevidos?

- Confia no Internet Explorer para aceder às suas contas de home banking?

- Num sistema fechado, como sabe que está seguro? É como viver numa casa onde toda a manutenção é feita por pessoal que não se conhece e não se vê…

Assim se vai experimentar o Windows 7, que tem uma licença gratuita até Junho de 2010, porque não experimenta o Kubuntu 9.04 que tem licença gratuita, até onde você quiser?

Experimentar não custa, e verá que algumas ideias do Windows 7, até foram baseadas onde realmente acontece a inovação: o KDE 4.2.

E-Mail problems: a detective story

Few weeks ago, the company where I work for changed the internet provider. Faster access, lower price, you know the drill.

But problems started to appear, namely DNS issues, that took some time to solve, but at the end it worked ok.

Anyway, complains started to appear that people have send e-mails to us, and they were never answered or received…

A quick check on the Postfix logs, showed that those customers where always disconnected:

The smtp transaction was something like:

connect from smtp.domain.com[X.Y.Z.L]
lost connection after DATA (0 bytes) from smtp.domain.com[X.Y.Z.L]
disconnect from smtp.domain.com[X.Y.Z.L]

So It looked like those customer servers connected and disconnected after a few seconds.

A quick search on Google (:-) ) showed that it might be a Firewall issue, a MTU issue or a Postfix bug (!).

We’ve checked, and double checked the firewall. It was ok, and anyway it wouldn’t explain why other server had no problem connecting and transfering mail.

The MTU issue: Ok, we’ve changed the Internet Provider, but all our firewall interfaces are on Ethernet. Anyway we’ve changed the MTU to 1492: ifconfig eth0 mtu 1492. It didn’t solved.Back to square zero.

Postfix bug: It has been working fine on the last 6 months, so very strange… We’ve disable PostGrey (the GLD Daemon). Not a greylisting issue. Bummer.

So we enabled the Postfix debuging features by adding the line: debug_peer_list = smtp.domain.com ( instructions here: http://www.postfix.org/DEBUG_README.html ) and waited for a connection.

Anyway to cut a long story short, we’ve found out that all SMTP transaction was OK until the DATA portion, where it looked that the other e-mail server disconnected. What we did see was that we had a long list o RBL’s to check, and it was taking to long to check every one of them, so it looked like the other e-mail server disconnected after a time-out period even during the email transfer process. I think that is a bug on the other peer, but the issue was ours…

So we’ve cut to half our RBL list, only keeping NJABL, Spamcop and Spamhaus lists, and the servers with problems started to connect and transfer right away the stacked queued messages to us.

Moral of the story: The longer the RBL list the longer the time to process incoming data. Some email servers will just “barf” at these long times.

Right now: Zero problems.

SD cards…

Ok. It’s official: TakeMs cards are a piece of junk. And Media Markt sold also this piece of junk.

Next time I’ll spend my money on some know brand…

The history? Canon Legria HF-200 can only recognize 1GB of a 4GB. By the way this piece of junk is Class 6 card…

My Nikon D80 can use the card with the full 4GB.

Did some tests with with fdisk and:

TakeMS:

Disk /dev/sde1: 985 MB, 985591296 bytes
122 heads, 62 sectors/track, 254 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 7564 * 512 = 3872768 bytes
Disk identifier: 0×00000000

San Disk Ultra II:
Disk /dev/sde1: 3960 MB, 3960995840 bytes
122 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1022 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 7564 * 512 = 3872768 bytes

See the difference?

So my short review: for photo it might be ok. For sd card video cameras, forget it.

Amalia today – Fado taken to a new level

I’m not a big fan of Fado, despite being PT… :, but there are great musics and singers of this Portuguese musical genre.

Anyway, sometimes something appears that rocks your world:

Fernando Ribeiro of  Moonspell (yeahh!), the lead singer of the most famous death metal, gothic metal portuguese band and two elements of the The Gift band (Electronic,Pop), the vocal singer Sónia Tavares and Nuno Gonçalves joined and produced an amazing tribute to Amalia the most world wide known Fado Singer.

It blows you away:

And if you never heard of Moonspell:

And Gift:

Cool?

[K]ubuntu USB errors->Slow boot

I’ve installed Kubuntu 8.10 64 bit on my new computer. This new computer has a Asus P6T motherboard.

What started to happen was that boot became quite slow due to some USB errors… For example:

usb 5-1: device descriptor read/all, error -71 and usb 5-1: device descriptor read/all, error -110

This slowed down booting for 30s to one minute as the console was outputing these errors… After a while, boot progressed, and the KDE logon screen appeared. No issue was found accessing any connecting USB device.

First I thought of my WD Elements 400GB external drive was the reason for the issue. But fully disconnecting it didn’t do the trick. I also thought it might be an issue with the motherboard, the new Asus P6T, but it looks like it was more a Linux kernel module issue.

At least this for me worked:

rmmod uhci_hcd

rmmod  ehci_hcd

rmmod usbcore

and then change the module loading order:

modprobe usbcore

modprobe ehci_hcd

modprobe uhci_hcd

Rebooted, and problem solved.

Kubuntu and Firefox looks: It looks bad

As I’m fully installing my new computer from scratch with Kubuntu 8.10 64bit, some things aren’t quite right.

One of the most annoying is that Firefox on Kunbuntu doesn’t look very good…

The radio buttons for example look belong to a different complete theme than Firefox. Not good.

The solution?

sudo apt-get install gtk2-engines-qtcurve gtk-chtheme

Then goto System Settings, select Apearance and then GTK Styles and Fonts. On GTK styles choose to use another style. On the dropdown box you should have now QT4, QTCurve and Raleigh.

Choose QTCurve.

Restart Firefox, and pronto/listo/voilá!

ASUS P6T (i920) and lm_sensors

To make more or less the temperature sensors to work on this motherboard combo Asus P6T and an I7 920 processor, I’ve followed this instructions.

http://guide.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1056681

It kind of works… It’s better than nothing.

[K]Ubuntu: Grub and XP NTLDR missing

My scenario: I have three internal hardisks: 1TB WD (sda) and on 640GB (sdb) WD disks.  sdb is my boot disk, so I have an Windows XP 32bit, and Kubuntu 8.10 ( ) 64 bit. I also have an old 160GB ide disk (sdc). I’m running in AHCI mode.

After installing Kubuntu, Grub created entries for Kubuntu and Windows XP.

After reboot I can boot into Kubuntu but booting into Windows XP, it stoped with the dreaded NTLDR is missing…

Kubuntu install created this for booting windows:

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sdb1
title           Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root            (hd1,0)
savedefault
map            (hd0) (hd1)
map            (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader     +1
Which doesn’t work. At boot it gives the above error: NTLDR is missing.

The solution? In my case all it took was to change to this:

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sdb1
title           Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root            (hd1,0)
savedefault
chainloader     +1

Now it boots without any problem

Digikam and Kubuntu 8.10

Instructions for instaling the latest version of Digikam on Kubuntu 8.10 are located here http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Digikam+Compilation+on+Kubuntu+Intrepid

On Kubuntu 8.10 64bits, so far good. I had to lauch it twice so at the second time all the Kipi plugins where detected.