Results tagged “annoying bugs” from CLICK

Ilene's iBook G4 is dying. So I've set her up with the $0 Laptop, which the kid already uses to play her educational games (GCompris and Childsplay).

After using Linux for nearly a year and a half, and overcoming many dozen obstacles, bugs and the like, I was very unhappy to find one problem specific to Ubuntu and another that might be a hardware issue ... or a Linux-wide, soul-crushing situation.

First off, Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy will not mount a USB memory stick. It shows up in the selection of drives, but it refuses to mount. I've got to get into the console and see whether or not I can mount it there. I saw a few bug reports that discuss the problem, here and here, and maybe here.

I also see reports of it here: Ubuntu forum post. Possible solution to try. And here is a more promising set of things to try.

Again (and I've had to say this many too many times), in Slackware I can see not being able to mount a drive without reading the FAQ and adding myself to the plugdev group, or whatever other group(s) are necessary. But in Ubuntu, users need to be able to plug in USB devices and have them work immediately.

The USB drive mounts fine in Debian Lenny, and I'd just have everybody switch over to Debian, except that user-switching is broken in Lenny (and I've grown fond of it); and while suspend/resume doesn't work in Lenny, I can do without it ... but neither Ubuntu Hardy nor Debian Lenny will allow me to print to my USB-connected printer, an HP 1020 Laserjet.

CUPS sees the printer and appears to configure it, but when I send a doc to the printer, nothing happens.

I don't think the two USB problems (flash drive and printer) are related because I can mount the flash drive in Lenny. But I'm about to try Puppy 3.00 AND 2.13 to see if I can print from there.

And ... while Suspend/Resume does seem to work most of the time, I just got a report from Ilene that she closed the laptop lid and killed Ubuntu.

I already know that closing the lid in Debian Lenny will hose the box, too, but I figured that Ubuntu 8.04 had this down a little better.

Curiously, or perhaps not so much, I can close the lid with abandon in Puppy 3.00 and have the laptop come back every single damn time.

Bottom line: Using Linux/BSD/what-have-you myself is one thing, but having the rest of my family rely on a FOSS operating system is another matter entirely. Stuff needs to work.

Is ACPI a mess in every operating system, or just in Linux? How does Windows handle it? I ask because I don't have a clue. I imagine that each hardware maker kicks out drivers for every specific machine to go with every specific version of Windows. But when it comes to Linux, the distro handles what it handles, and barring that, you're in configuration hell.

And while Puppy is great, it's not exactly set up as a multiuser system. OK, you can kind of do it, with separate pup_saves and directories created on a separate partition for each user. (I don't recommend saving files in the pup_save because it's nice to be able to get to them from other OSes, something that doesn't work with things stuck in the pup_save.)

The USB flash drive problem -- it's all Ubuntu. The ACPI problems -- Ubuntu is better at it than anything else I've seen. It's just a matter of telling Ilene and the kid not to close the lid. I don't like it, and I'd like to code around it, but can I?

Again, if Debian Lenny, right here, right now, worked with my USB-connected printer, I'd be giving Ubuntu the big heave-ho, but I suspect the problem is deeper than just Debian or Ubuntu. I don't want to go as far as setting up a USB-to-Ethernet print server like this one (especially because the closely related HP Laserjet 1022 is listed as NOT WORKING with this device), but the Gateway has been great with networked printers at the office, and I'd just like to solve this problem one way or the other. At least then I'd have the printer networked and could use it with more than one machine at a time. I'm starting to like the idea already.

Still, can getting the Gateway to actually print to a USB printer be so hard? CUPS has no problem seeing the printer, but no data is being transferred, I think.

Back to the drawing board, but in the interim, I did get a Firewire-equipped backup drive for the ailing iBook G4. I do have a backup of the user files on an iPod (yep, I use an iPod as a backup drive; I'm just not much for listening to iPods, so at least the thing is useful), but that backup is a bit old. I'll try to do a second user-file backup to another iPod before using SuperDuper to do a full, bootable backup on the Firewire drive.

If I can get that full backup done and then successfully boot and run the iBook from the Firewire drive, I'll know that the iBook's main hard drive is the problem.

I could change the hard drive in the $0 Laptop (the Gateway Solo 1450) in about 5 minutes. It would take maybe an extra minute to change out the drive in the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt). But pulling the hard drive from the iBook is going to take a major operation that involves cracking the case, removing all kinds of parts and then putting the whole mess back together again.

Apple may be renown for design, but that didn't include easy access to the hard drive. It's easier to put in a SODIMM memory module, although you do have to remove the keyboard and take out the wireless module first. Again, harder than in any of my PC-compatible laptops, but not as difficult as this hard-drive replacement.

I will curse Steve Jobs at regular intervals.

And even though the proprietary nature of Apple's Macintosh line and OS X in no way makes me happy, the iBook has worked perfectly -- in heavy use -- for five years now, and if a new hard drive can bring it back, I'll be very happy, indeed.

It's a tradeoff: all the good stuff that comes with your average Linux distribution vs. having every damn thing work without needing to do much.

I did have to do a bit of detective work to get the USB-connected HP 1020 printer configured on the Mac, only because HP, in its infinite wisdom, didn't offer an exact OS X driver for this printer because they wanted to upsell Mac users on the HP 1022, which went for a few extra bucks for no good reason. ... but I digress, and I've gotten very much used to the perfect power management on the iBook.

Laptops are hard, in any OS, since there's more going on, and if we want to drag more people over from proprietary OSes, Linux had to do a whole lot better.