I am not ready to live without ACPI (or recompile the kernel) yet so I've decided to stick with Vista for the foreseeable future and default GRUB to boot into it. I have tinkered with GRUB before and I thought this would be easy. Wrong! Most info floating around is about the older version of GRUB but Ubuntu 9.10 comes with GRUB 1.97 beta (for documentation, looks for GRUB 2) So, I couldn't just edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, which correspond to entries on the GRUB menu, because it doesn't exist anymore! It was "superceded" by /boot/grub/grub.cfg, which users are not supposed to edit manually.
I ended up changing /etc/default/grub by setting GRUB_DEFAULT=saved and executed update-grub. Then I picked Vista from GRUB once and it remembered my choice.
Now that I'm back to Vista, reluctantly. The next thing is to get sound output through HDMI. [Update: I've tried it. That link mentioned choosing SPFIF but I could actually choose HDMI as my default Sound Output Device and it works.]
[Update 2: I've found some fixes that could replace the acpi=off workaround but I've yet to try them.]
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Tech of the day: First day with Toshiba Satellite P505
My goal is to dual boot this desktop-replacement notebook with Windows 7 and Arch Linux. It actually comes with Windows Vista Home Premium (M$/Toshiba offers free upgrade to Win 7 but for some reason Toshiba's registration system is down so I'll try again later) According to instruction I googled, Vista provides a "Shrink" feature in its Disk Management but some reported it didn't work for them. I tried it and it shrunked my Vista partition from 360Gb to 180Gb, which leaves ~180Gb for Linux. I was so glad it worked out (but my euphoria was premature) Next I used Toshiba's recovery disc creator to create the recovery disc immediately (it is very possible that a simple mistake could render everything unusable) Finally, I put my Arch Linux (64 bit) installation CD in and rebooted. The first thing went wrong was that the installation requires network (I opted for the CD that does NOT include everything) Second, Arch's installer used cfdisk and it complained about "bad primary partition 2 partition ends in the final partial cylinder" And nobody has offered any good solution except for wiping the HDD!
So there we went. I rebooted with my newly created recovery DVD. I chose the option "Erase the hard disk" which led to 2 choices "delete all data and partitions from the hard disk" or "delete all partitions and overwrite all sectors on the hard disk" The latter is supposed to take a long time so I picked the former. Well, it takes a long time too (2 hr 15 mins) And it doesn't seem to be absolutely necessary from reinstalling Vista! Anyway, I picked the option that allowed me to pick the size of my partition (and I chose not to create an extra partition for System Recovery, i.e., will rely on my DVDs from now on) After it slowly created the partitions, I was prompted to insert the 3 DVDs one after another, for it to slowly copy all the files back. That took another hour. Finally it rebooted with Vista! And as usual, Vista needs to slowly set itself up. Just when I thought it's done, another Toshiba program took over for "configuring system" then reboot. This cycle has repeated so many times that it seems never ending. I think what it actually did was re-installing all those Toshiba's drivers (noticed the screen went from lo-res to hi-res) Anyway, another hour of my life was wasted on this. I knew it's done when Vista asked me to create a new user account.
Now it's ready for another attempt to install Arch, using the "core" CD which does not rely on FTP to complete the install. And this time the installer (or cfdisk) didn't complain about the partitions and the installation went all the way 'til completion. Happy ending? Well, far from it. For one thing, networking required setup. I was smart enough to start with wired networking. Even that didn't work out of the box and after lots of googling (the Wiki suggests to use hwdetect, which wasn't installed and without access to the net I have no way to install it! The Wiki also suggested dhclient instead of dhcpcd. Again, no internet no installation!)
So it's time to try a different distro. Before that, I preferred to clean out Arch first by blowing away the 2 partitions (root and swap) on my HDD, and took out GRUB from the MBR. The latter was actually trickier that I thought on Vista: I had to reboot with my Toshiba Recovery DVD and choose Recovery Console from one of the Recovery Options. Once in the console, execute: bootrec.exe /FixMbr
Next, I reluctantly went with the popular and familiar, Ubuntu. (I think Canonical drops support on releases way too soon so users need to keep updating in order not to left behind. On the other hand, users who update too soon could run into their own problems, see below) Ubuntu 9.10 was right out of Canonical's "door!" Again, installation went well, as it has always been. And again, trouble started when I tried to get network working! To troubleshoot, I enlisted the help of Arch's Wiki (yeah, the same steps work for both Arch and Ubuntu) and found that my Ethernet adapter uses the module atl1c. Looked for this in dmesg and I saw a bunch of errors related to ACPI (also caused Wireless adapter to fail) So, the workaround is to disable ACPI (here is how) Or try compiling the newer kernel. After 12 hours of tinkering with it, enough is enough and I called it a night.
So there we went. I rebooted with my newly created recovery DVD. I chose the option "Erase the hard disk" which led to 2 choices "delete all data and partitions from the hard disk" or "delete all partitions and overwrite all sectors on the hard disk" The latter is supposed to take a long time so I picked the former. Well, it takes a long time too (2 hr 15 mins) And it doesn't seem to be absolutely necessary from reinstalling Vista! Anyway, I picked the option that allowed me to pick the size of my partition (and I chose not to create an extra partition for System Recovery, i.e., will rely on my DVDs from now on) After it slowly created the partitions, I was prompted to insert the 3 DVDs one after another, for it to slowly copy all the files back. That took another hour. Finally it rebooted with Vista! And as usual, Vista needs to slowly set itself up. Just when I thought it's done, another Toshiba program took over for "configuring system" then reboot. This cycle has repeated so many times that it seems never ending. I think what it actually did was re-installing all those Toshiba's drivers (noticed the screen went from lo-res to hi-res) Anyway, another hour of my life was wasted on this. I knew it's done when Vista asked me to create a new user account.
Now it's ready for another attempt to install Arch, using the "core" CD which does not rely on FTP to complete the install. And this time the installer (or cfdisk) didn't complain about the partitions and the installation went all the way 'til completion. Happy ending? Well, far from it. For one thing, networking required setup. I was smart enough to start with wired networking. Even that didn't work out of the box and after lots of googling (the Wiki suggests to use hwdetect, which wasn't installed and without access to the net I have no way to install it! The Wiki also suggested dhclient instead of dhcpcd. Again, no internet no installation!)
So it's time to try a different distro. Before that, I preferred to clean out Arch first by blowing away the 2 partitions (root and swap) on my HDD, and took out GRUB from the MBR. The latter was actually trickier that I thought on Vista: I had to reboot with my Toshiba Recovery DVD and choose Recovery Console from one of the Recovery Options. Once in the console, execute: bootrec.exe /FixMbr
Next, I reluctantly went with the popular and familiar, Ubuntu. (I think Canonical drops support on releases way too soon so users need to keep updating in order not to left behind. On the other hand, users who update too soon could run into their own problems, see below) Ubuntu 9.10 was right out of Canonical's "door!" Again, installation went well, as it has always been. And again, trouble started when I tried to get network working! To troubleshoot, I enlisted the help of Arch's Wiki (yeah, the same steps work for both Arch and Ubuntu) and found that my Ethernet adapter uses the module atl1c. Looked for this in dmesg and I saw a bunch of errors related to ACPI (also caused Wireless adapter to fail) So, the workaround is to disable ACPI (here is how) Or try compiling the newer kernel. After 12 hours of tinkering with it, enough is enough and I called it a night.
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