Thursday 27 March 2008

Getting XUbuntu 8.04 beta to work on an old Dell Latitude CPi's

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It has been a while since our last post. But two days ago we started work on an interesting, though perhaps a bit weird, challenge: to get xubuntu 8.04 Beta to work on an old Dell Latitude CPi. This is the trouble we get into when we boast about how great Linux is and that it is more than ready for the desktop ;-). We choose xubuntu because of it's claim to be light and easy on the hardware.

We have two old Dell Latitude spare laptops. One of them had the keys partly ripped of a few years ago, by a diligent, very creative 2 year old. The other was left abandoned by it's previous owner because of a failed hard drive. They are not completely identical, but they have enough in common to use one of them as a spare for the other. Eventually we ended up with the with the following configuration:
  • Dell Latitude CPi
  • Pentium-II 400Mhz
  • 160MB system memory
  • 4 MB Neomagic 2360 video controller
  • 12,073 MB hard drive
  • CD-ROM installed in modular bay
  • external Trust USB keyboard (USB legacy mode enable in BIOS)
  • PCMCIA Xircom RealPortRBE-100 10/100Mbs ethernet card
  • Single primary partition occupying the whole disk with a FAT32 file system
First we would like to share the things that went wrong, before we figured out how to get xubuntu to work (yes we did after two days of fiddling):
  • Slow boot because of xubuntu insisting on checking for non-existent floppy drives
  • Extremely slow boot after the second installation menu
  • Problems with ext3 formatting caused by the fix for the previous problem
  • Network interface card not getting an IP address
Slow boot because of floppy trouble.
The first problem was easily resolved by setting the floppy "Diskette reconfig" to "At Reboot Only" in the BIOS. This makes a big difference in boot time. As we didn't have a floppy drive installed in one of the spare bays, disabling this option, saves minutes in boot time.
Extremely slow boot after second installation menu.
The installation and live cd boot both fail, well not quite, but after 10 hours of churning on the CD we considered it failed ;-). The installer seems to be getting itself stuck after the second menu (Welcome - installation language), looking at F8 the last message displayed by the system is: "* Starting Ubiquity...". No response from the mouse, the animated cursor has stopped animating and the CD is continuously active with occasional hard drive activity. Originally we thought the trick would be to find the right kernel parameter to solve this problem. But this was not the case. But after some deeper digging and running top in one of the consoles (we had to do this immediately after we clicked on "Forward" at the second install menu, while the system was in the process of responding). Using F1 we managed to get a slow terminal prompt and top showed the system was waiting for I/O more than 85% (%WA) of the time (5th field from the left in 3rd line from the top):



This gave us the idea that actually all we needed to do was to enable a small (twice the size of internal memory) swap partition on the hard drive. After we did that the difference in response time was remarkable .... but now we created a new problem.
ext3 formatting failed.
As we now claimed the drive, the Linux kernel couldn't dynamically load the partition table after we choose "Guided partitioning", manually partitioning the system didn't work either of course. This was caused by
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda1 failing with a "could not stat /dev/sda1". Happily the fix to this wasn't difficult, a reboot and the new partition table was picked up and so was the swap partition.
Network interface card not getting an IP address.
After login it turned out the network wasn't running, after some investigation it turned out to be the network interface was set into "roaming" mode. After taking that out and enabling DHCP we could surf the Internet usingFirefox.

Actual procedure on how to get xubuntu 8.04 beta to work on the Latitude.
First things first, having learned our lesson, we adjusted the BIOS setting such that the "Diskette reconfig" only can be done at boot time. Then after obtaining the download ISO image from one of the xubuntu mirrors and burning a CD we booted the Latitude from the CD, the boot menu looks like this (yes it jumps straight into the F2 menu to select the language):



We decided to install directly to the hard drive, after selecting the language the first option was highlighted, we didn't want that:



We needed to select the second option and choose F6 "Other Options" to switch of quite mode. it is a good idea if the installation doesn't go according to plan to make the system a bit more chatty:



Removing the "quiet" kernel option:



Press enter and the system will start churning. While it is doing this have a look at the boot messages under F1. You will see some message scroll across the screen giving some indication of the kernel's process of working out what hardware it is running on:



To get back to the graphical installation choose F7:



After a while the system will show the, quite stunning, bird (is it a firebird?) wallpaper:



The first of 8 installation windows will now prompt you:



To go to the next screen click "Forward", at this stage, while the following menu (language choice) was displayed the excessive delay and CD activity started (when we tried this first time):



Here we chose the language of the installation and the default language used for running the system. Also here we got stuck so we needed to divert away from the installation process and create a swap partition. As quickly as possible at this menu or even better the menu before using cntl-alt-F1 open a terminal and enable swap.

First use fdisk to delete any old partition that was still present on the drive and create a new
empty partition of about twice the size of internal memory (the installation process will redo this, so the actual location and size isn't that important):

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

When fdisk starts (this can take a while), use the following commands as your guide:



The example above will create a partition of 320MBytes with a type of 82 (Linux Swap). Confirm this using (fdisk again):



At the prompt the new partition must now be enabled for swap, this will dramatically speed up the rest of the installation:

sudo mkswap /dev/sda1

sudo swapon /dev/sda1 (is not necessary as we need to reboot here)

We did try to continue from here and got stuck (see above). Here a reboot is required to go back to the installation menu. The system will now pick up the swap partition and use it. We went through the same menus (1 and 2 of eight and eventually got to the next step "Where are you" without to much delay):



The zoom feature used when the mouse hovers over the picture of the world map is a bit fanatic. The zooming is rather sensitive, amplifying the slightest mouse movement into a fast hunt for the home location! Quite a nice game, but not intended as such, we believe. After we hit the right spot (the drop down menu can also be used ;-). The next menu will come quickly:



As our laptop has an external USB international keyboard we choose the "USA-With EuroSign on 5 setting". This turned out to be the right choice.

Step 5 out of 8 is the process of setting up the disk partitioning. As the kernel now has the correct partition table loaded, using the Guided (full disk) partitioning worked beautifully:



A (quickly disappearing) message that it is reading the hard disk partition table is displayed and then the system responds reasonably quickly with the next menu, where the main login must be created:



Now the system has enough information to continue (on it's own) with the installation:



After clicking on "Install" several messages are displayed:



We thought at this stage it was safe
to leave the office, go to home and to bed. Unfortunately leaving xubuntu unattended after the last step wasn't such a good idea. It spontaneously went into hibernation and didn't finish the installation (this was over night at about 15% in the "Installing System" stage). The next morning we had to go over the same steps again ..... while every so often keep clicking the mouse button to keep the system awake .....

In addition to that at about 61% the status display disappeared completely. After about 30 minutes the system came back with an installation ready status message, reboot and remove the CD and the system booted into xubuntu. But we were sailing blind for a while.

Eventually the system asked for a re-boot and yes when it came back up we were greeted with the login screen!

Before we could surf the Net we had to setup the ethernet interface as the system had installed it by default with "roaming" enabled. We're not quite sure what is meant with that on a wired network, any ideas please feel free to leave a comment. It's fairly easy to rectify this problem, on the left top menu Applications under the drop down menu System, Network the network manager can be found:




When the "Network Settings" application starts up, unlock the access to the ability to make any changes and enable DHCP:



First impressions are very positive (after we recovered from the installation ....). The system is responsive, very similar to Windows XP on the same laptop. In a later post we will share our experience using xubuntu on this laptop.