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Dell + Ubuntu, Again

November 23, 2006

It took me a few days to get it right. Didn’t have any problem installing Ubuntu5.10 on my old DIY desktop pc. But the same couldn’t be said about installing the newer release on my brand new Dell. There were unpleasant surprises and frustrating moments:

Getting the Ubuntu6.06 LiveCD to run was easy – it probably didn’t load any exotic video driver even when it was not actually running in Safe Graphic mode. Installing it on my harddisk was entirely a different matter.

As mentioned in my last post, the first surprise was that the Ubuntu6.06 LiveCD just installed its Grub bootloader on the MBR – no warning and no option to choose from. Grub is a fine bootloader but there are two major problems: first, if the computer is a Dell with a special MBR to cater for its two hidden partitions, Grub will simply mess up your specially partitioned harddisk. Second, Grub will invariably see your harddisk arrangement differently than your OS does (whether it’s Ubuntu or Suse) if you are using SATA or USB external harddrive. For my Dell, my internal SATA drive was sde during installation but became sda once Ubuntu was booted up (unless you are aware of this, you won’t be able to boot up Ubuntu using the Grub menu. One simple but sure-work way is to press ‘e’ and manually changes the root. In my Dell, I have a card reader which alone takes up sdb, sdc, sdd and sde. So my external drive can be anything from sda to sdg depending on (1) which harddisk I boot up from and (2) whether the OS will first see my card reader or the USB harddisk). One thing for certain is that whichever partition Grub thinks your root actually resides on will be wrong. It is necessary to manually edit the grub menu before Ubuntu will boot up.

Having sorted out Dell’s special MBR and getting the correct drive designation (btw, try using UUID¹ in fstab once you have your Ubuntu up and running. It eliminates the confusion created by an ever changing drive designation) for my Ubuntu root, I managed to boot up Ubuntu but only to the command line mode. The fglrx driver that comes with the newer version of Ubuntu 6.06 and 6.10 doesn’t support Composite with DRI and thus preventing the xserver from functioning properly. The following method worked for me to get my X600 ATI card working in direct rendering.

Boot up Ubuntu6.06 LiveCD using the Safe Graphic Mode. (If you do not use the Safe Graphic mode, you have to resort to the rescue console to do the configuration in text mode. It is the same. Indeed, if you are trying Ubuntu6.10, you have to do the configuration in rescue mode because Safe Graphic Mode is unavailable in Ubuntu6.10). Complete the normal installation process (note down the root partition id (for example sde6 or sdb3 if you have a complex partition structure) as you will need it to log onto Rescue Mode later.

Reboot to the newly installed OS if you are in Safe Graphic Mode or Reboot using the LiveCD, choose Rescue.

Use vim to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list, uncomment (ie remove the #) the restricted repository to enable it.

Use vim to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to add an ‘Extensions’ section:

Section “Extensions”
Option “Composite” “Disable”
EndSection

If you are not already in a terminal console, open one and execute the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-$(uname -r)
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo depmod -a
sudo aticonfig —force —initial
sudo aticonfig —overlay-type=Xv
sudo shutdown -r now

Done. Reboot.

fn{1] to find out the UUID of your harddisk partitions, use

udevinfo -e

Comment out the /dev/sdaX part in fstab and replace it with UUID=XXXXXXX where XXXXXXX is the UUID you have found above using udevinfo -e.

Posted to General at November 23, 2006 06:46 PM :    Furl It!    del.icio.us

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