Major scare with MacBook today.

OK, as I mentioned in the last post, I got over the problem with the Ubiquity installer crashing during the Ubuntu install.
What I didn't mention was that when I went to reboot, I just got a white screen -- nothing else -- no Apple or Linux logos.
I really though I had lost yet another HDD on this machine which would be the third in less than a year.
Then I found that I could use the Ubuntu LiveCD to get something to show up -- so it wasn't the graphics card which I had also suspected.
Strangely, though, I was able to mount all of the Linux partitions that I tried as well as the OSX partition. Also, I could read, copy any of the files from these partitions and even play music on the OSX partition.
So, this didn't suggest that the hdd was unreadable.
Then I tried the OSX Leopard install DVD which also booted fine. Here I tried the disk utility and it said the OSX disk verified OK.
I was lost and thought I'd have to bring my Mac to the repair shop tomorrow.
However, as the OSX disk utility didn't show either /dev/sda1 (EFI) or /dev/sda3 (Foresight /), I thought I'd try Parted Magic to see how these partitions looked.
Well, they all showed up but every single one had a yellow warning sign against it.
Just by chance I noticed that the Foresight / partition had a boot flag so I took this out and all partitions lost the warning sign.
Tried again to boot and this time absolutely everything was back to normal.
This is quite incredible as I'm totally sure that boot flag had been there for a while without causing any problems at all. So, why did a simple install of Ubuntu II (alpha3) cause this to turn very nasty? I really do not understand this. Nevertheless, I really was on the verge of making another trip to the Apple repair shop in my city and I'm very glad I didn't have to.

I should mention as well that the Ubuntu II install also seems to mess up the GPT/MBT synchronisation so that you get a "no bootable disk" message when you try to boot (at least into Linux -- not sure if this also happens if you try to boot to OSX). However, this is very easy to fix: In the opening rEFIt page, just move to "Start Sync Tool" and say "y" to the sync suggestion offered.

Incidentally, during the various desperate attempts I made to get this thing to boot, I restored the Mac Darwin boatloader to the MBR. Here's how this is done.
Boy that was scary but had a happy ending.

Ubuntu install stops due to Migration-Assistant crash

I tried today to install Ubuntu 8.10 (Alpha3 version) on the Mac. Note that I had already tried an upgrade using the update manager but this wouldn't work as it errored out complaining about some calculation error (I forget the details but it's not an uncommon problem).
Today, however, the install from LiveCD seemed to be going fine until I got to 88% on the install progress bar when it crashed and brought me back to the LiveCD page.
OK, I thought "well, it is an alpha". But as my Ubuntu / partition had been formatted, I now had to re-install Hardy from its LiveCD. Once again, this seemed to go fine until I got to 88% when it too crashed. Back on the LiveCD page, a crash report appeared blaming a Ubiquity crash during the migration-assistant operation.
Tried again, same thing. Then tried Intrepid Ibex, same thing.
On googling, I found that this is not an uncommon problem and the solution is to open a terminal in the LiveCD home page and type

sudo ubiquity --no-migration-assistant

Here are the links (first, second) where I found this tip.
I believe I've hd this problem once or twice before but it seems to have always "gone away" on a second try.
Now if it happens again I'll know what to do. Have to keep it in mind for other Ubuntu-like OSes, too.

Upgraded to Sidux 2008-2

Today I did a network upgrade to Sidux 2008-2 and this, despite being a very large upgrade, went very well. No problems at all.
To do the upgrade, just need to run these commands as root in TTy1 (ctrl-alt-F1):

/etc/init.d/kdm stop
init 3
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
init 5 && exit

After the upgrade, everything worked fine (that I've seen so far) except for wifi. however, this was very easy to get back just by following this guide.
The steps involved are, all run as root:

wget -c http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-trunk-current.tar.gz
tar -zxf madwifi-trunk-current.tar.gz
cd madwifi-*
make
make install
modprobe ath_pci

At this stage, iwconfig (as root) should show ath0 as a working device. Now just unplug the ethernet cable and reboot and wifi should connect. Strangely, however, no IP is taken up during the boot by DHCP. Yet once X starts, wireless is connected.

Resolved my Foresight update problems

Got some very helpful replies to my post to Foresight Forum regarding the problem I had updating Foresight.
Basically this involves:
1) Checking the error message -- what's messing up your update?
2) If it's glib that initiated the problem, run this to update glib without any interference from dependency problems:

sudo conary update glib --replace-files --no-deps

3) Then update as normal

sudo conary updateall

This worked perfectly for me.

Update problems in Foresight.

Well, I was able to completely eliminate my failure-to-update problem in Foresight by re-installing but without re-formatting /home.
This went perfectly, although, as I've said in an earlier post, getting back to where I was takes another 2-2.5 hours.

The main items included in the "recovery" phase are:
1. sudo conary update all
2. sudo conary update group-codecs
3. Install latest Opera (I like to d/l as .tgz, extract and then ./install.sh as root
4. Now the big one; allow at least an hour for this
sudo conary update group-gnome-dist-devel
5. Get nVidia driver (96.43.05) + patch for 2.6.25 kernels as described here.
Note that the command line which has to be manually entered in TTy1 is:
sh /path/to/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.05-pkg1.run \ --apply-patch NVIDIA_kernel-96.43.05-2290218.diff.txt
Note carefully that in the section of this command "\ --apply" there are TWO spaces between \ and -.
6. Install fusion-icon and tasque from conary
7. Install yakuake 2.8.1 as described here.

I'm coming to believe that my frequent update problems in Foresight are entirely due to some of the weird things I like to install.
Up to now we've had update problems because
i) I made /etc/resolv.conf immutable
ii) Yakuake in the way I had installed it previously (very sloppy)

Now this weeks problems may well be due to the sloppy way I installed Giver. Therefore my problems seem to all the fault of my unstructured, impatient hacking.

Updating Foresight.

I'm really starting to have some serious difficulties in updating Foresight. Almost every time I try it I get some message telling me that the update can't proceed as some dependency needed by another app would be deleted.
In the last couple of weeks I have had to re-install Foresight from the most up-to-date install DVD (without touching /home). Thereafter for a few days, I could apply the almost daily updates without a problem.
However, once again, today I had the same problem on both machines.
I posted to the Foresight forum on this but have had no replies up to now.
If not, tomorrow I'll probably have to re-install again. Luckily the Foresight install is very fast (10-15 minutes) but reconfiguring afterwards can take an hour or more.
Still don't know if I'm the only one with this problem.

Foresight still giving update problems.

I tried to update Foresight on both the Mac and the Dell today.
The Mac first time gave a problem (unfortunately, can't remember what the error message was) but the second time, soon after and without having done anything, went through smoothly.
However, on the Dell, we had a problem as I've outlined in this post.
I have a feeling it may be that I need to re-install Foresight on the Dell using the recently-downloaded 2.0.2 CD. But I'll see what replies, if any, I get to my post before deciding on the next move.

Updating Foresight (Mac)

After the problems I had with this yesterday, I tried a newer Foresight install DVD (this time 2.0.1, yesterday I had used 2.0).
However, although the install seemed to go fine, again the attempted update after the install ended with the very same error message.
So, I downloaded the newest Foresight install DVD (2.0.2) and went through everything again.
This time I noticed that an error that had showed up with the previous two installs (something about Grubby failure and non-availability of templates which shows up after the bootloader installation) didn't occur this time.
Now the update proceeded perfectly.
Can't really say I understand why.
I posted to the Foresight forum about this but have yet to receive any reply.

Problems getting Foresight to update (both computers).

Yesterday, I mentioned that it seemed like Yakuake was the problem with not being able to update on either computer.
On the Dell, this certainly was the problem. Once Yakuake was uninstalled, updating proceeded smoothly.
However, didn't go so well on the Mac for reasons I still don't understand.
Although most of the 127 updates (this is even after reinstalling Foresight and formatting both / and /home -- so nothing left from previous install) installed, with about 25 left I got this error:

ERROR: An unexpected condition has occurred in Conary. This is
most likely due to insufficient handling of erroneous input, but
may be some other bug. In either case, please report the error at
http://issues.rpath.com/ and attach to the issue the file
/tmp/conary-error-lshGTz.txt

Then, for more complete information, please run the following script:
conary-debug "/usr/bin/conary updateall"
You can attach the resulting archive to your issue report at
http://issues.rpath.com/ For more information, or if you have
trouble with the conary-debug command, go to:
http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Conary:How_To_File_An_Effective_Bug_Report

To get a debug prompt, rerun the command with --debug-all

Error details follow:

/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/conary/local/journal.py:199
type: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted

The complete related traceback has been saved as /tmp/conary-error-lshGTz.txt

I've tried this a number of times after rebooting, but still get the same error.
Can't think of anything else other than to post to the forum. I'll do this tomorrow.

Foresight update problem

I had posted to the Foresight forum about this but did not get any immediately helpful replies.
In general, this may mean that the problem is specific to my computer.
So, I had a look in Foresight on the Desktop (which I hadn't opened in some time). I got more or less the same error when I tried to update here too. Plus, when I did the lm_sensors things, the resulting error referred to yakuake.
The fact that I had the problem on BOTH of my computers and nobody else seems to have had, AND the error refers to Yakuake which probably very few if any Foresight people have (as it's not truly in the repos), seems to suggest only one thing.
So, does this mean I have to uninstall Yakuake?
Well, painful as it was, this is what I did. Then I did the update and it went smoothly without problems.
So, it was Yakuake!!!
Now however, I'm faced with the task of reinstalling Yakuake.
I looked at where it is in the repo browser and then I found that what was there was a x86-64 version. So, this may well explain why I had such problems with it.
Now, I trying to compile the 2.8.1 version of Yakuake (I selected this as the updated version 2.9.3 is very kde4 oriented - and probably isn't going to work in Gnome).
Tomorrow I should have some news on how this install attempt went.