A visitor to the site mentioned that he has the same laptop as I have yet is running Linux Mint rather than Ubuntu. He said that all the help that I was offering for getting Ubuntu to run well on the Studio 17 worked for him in Linux Mint except the headphone fix didn’t work. So, I dug in to see if I could find a solution.

I installed Linux Mint on my Dell Studio 1735 two nights ago and got the headphone jacks working successfully. Here’s step-by-step what I did:

1. Installed the latest Linux Mint. As of this writing, the latest version is Linux Mint 6 Felicia.
2. Booted and logged into the Linux Mint desktop.
3. Ran mintUpdate by double-clicking the open padlock in the tray and clicked “Install Updates”.
4. I then ran Synaptic (Menu > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager), clicked “Mark All Upgrades”, and clicked “Apply”.
5. To make sure that any possible changes that could have fixed the headphone jacks had a chance to work, I rebooted. Amazingly, they already worked.

So, to make sure that you get the needed updates, run mintUpdate (Menu > Administration > mintUpdate) and install all the updates followed by running Synaptic (Menu > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager) and install all upgrades. This update process should install the 2.6.27-11-generic kernel. At this point, you should reboot your system so that you can load this new kernel. When the boot option screen (Grub loader) is brought up, make sure that you select the new 2.6.27-11-generic boot option (it should be default).

In step five, I say “amazingly” because when I first started to write this post, I had to do a lot of workaround to make the headphones work. However, I started again from a fresh install to verify the exact sequence of steps and found that things just worked this time. So, it may be that an update came out between my first try and second try that fixed this issue. If so, go Linux Mint team.

Please report your results with Linx Mint on your Dell Studio laptop.

As always, if you have a problem that you can’t find a solution to, ask in a comment or contact me.

image from New Life Service Co.

I got an emergency call from a friend yesterday. His computer was totally eaten up by viruses and couldn’t function anymore. He’s a writer and doesn’t do backups, so he was naturally very afraid that he would lose the book drafts that he’s been working on.

I brought him and his ailing computer over to my place to give it some TLC and get it back in fighting condition. This system, Raine, is special to me as it was the second computer I built. That was way back in 2002, and when I cracked the case, horror itself greeted me. I could see that I had a long night ahead of me.

Triage

I really wish that I had taken pictures as the inside of Raine was disgusting. The picture on the post is actually a combination of before and after images from New Life Service Co who specializes in cleaning homes and salvageable items after fire, water, or storm damage. The image gets the point across about what I was facing though.

There are some natural enemies to electronics: cigarette/incense smoke, coffee, and soda. These things typically don’t instantly kill a computer, but they act as a cancer that slowly grows and over time can break a crucial system of the computer, causing the entire machine to fail. In essence, these things work together to kill the respiratory system of a computer, the fans that cool off the machine, this can cause massive heat buildup which eventually causes a component, such as a processor or graphics card, to overheat. At first, this overheating will cause the system to turn itself off, reboot, or freeze. It does this as either the component glitches out or the system proactively tries to protect itself from the heat buildup.

Basically, the sludge that is carried in smoke and the sludge that is created from dried coffee and soda creates the problem. The entirety of the inside, and good portions of the outside, were coated in a layer of this congealed slime it had combined over the years with dust to create a viscous tar. This tar was clogged between heatsink fins, had coated all the fan blades, had filled all the cracks where air flows through, and had even coated many of the fans’ shafts and magnets (causing the side intake fan to completely fail).

Raine had been in an environment with large amounts of cigarette smoke. My friend also indicated that coffee and soda could also have been involved. So, inside the case was a tragedy.

Now I know that the viruses and failed Windows install were the primary issues here, but it is like going to to the hospital because of a broken bone and they quickly discover a massive tumor. The broken bone is definitely a problem, but that tumor is a much bigger concern. So, before I was going to do anything to revive Windows, I needed to get that machine clean.

Getting Clean by Getting Dirty

Whenever I clean electronics, I usually do the same thing:

• Turn off, unplug, and remove any batteries from the electronics first. If it is a computer, turn the physical switch at the back of the power supply off (the ‘O’ down is off; the ‘|’ down is on) and remove the CMOS battery.
• Blow, vacuum, or wipe off as much loose dirt and dust as possible first.
• Break down the device into non-electrical components (casing, covers, screws, etc), electrical components (circuit boards, chips, cables, etc), and combination parts that can’t easily separated and then put back together (non-electrical parts that could be easily cleaned yet are mated via some kind of dark magic of manufacturing to one or more electrical components).
• Spray off the non-electrical components with water and clean with soap or other detergent as necessary. Where I do this depends on the size. Very large items get the yard and hose, medium sized items get the shower, and small items get the sink.I find the shower with the hand-held shower head to be the most useful for most situations. The hot water helps break up gummy substances, the mess goes down the drain, I don’t have to get muddy in the yard, and the drain strainer keeps small parts from disappearing down the drain.I know some people will also use their dishwasher to clean such parts. I’ve never tried it myself as I fear that the temperatures that some dishwaters can get up to is hot enough to melt certain plastics. So, I play it safe and don’t use the dishwasher method. If you do try it, share your experiences.
• I will then shake as much water off of each component as I can, dry it off with a combination of towels and paper towels, and then let them fully dry out for an hour or more before connecting anything back to it.
• The upholstery attachment for vacuum cleaners makes a very good hand-held device to wipe the loose crud off of electrical components. The bristles have enough stiffness to push dirt off but are soft enough to not damage any of the components. I lightly brush all of the electrical components off with this and set them aside for the next step.
• I will then get out a bottle of rubbing alcohol and pour some of the fluid into a small dish. Next I get some cotton swabs.I dip one end of the swab into the alcohol and let it soak up a small amount (don’t get the swab dripping wet, just damp). I then pick up one of the electrical components and gently clean any dirty areas. A gentle twisting action of the swab can help clean tough spots. I only do small areas at a time and then flip the swab over and dry off the dampened area with the dry end of the swab. Set each component aside for a few minutes to let any remaining alcohol evaporate before you try to reconnect it to anything.

This process is useful for all kinds of electronics and not just computers.

Typically, you can disassemble an entire computer with nothing more than a medium-sized Phillip’s head screwdriver. I recommend placing all the removed screws into a container. The first few times you disassemble an electronic device, you will want to use multiple containers, one each for each type of screw, and label them so you know exactly what screw goes to what part. A trick that I use whenever I know that I’ll have difficulty remembering what part or screw goes where is to quickly snap a picture with my camera.

Finishing the Job

After about six hours of hard work, I had cleaned off the entire case, the hard drive, portions of the motherboard, the heatsink, all the fans, the DVD burner, and all the cables. I had spare parts around, so I actually gave Raine a slightly upgraded processor, doubled the memory, added an additional drive (this came in handy when reinstalling Windows), upgraded the video card, and replaced the power supply with a nice, relatively new Thermaltake PSU. Unfortunately I didn’t have a spare 80mm case fan lying around (I know, I have spare CPUs, memory chips, graphics cards, etc but not a spare case fan? Shame). However, I usually scavenge good parts from broken components, so I did have an 80mm PSU fan from a failed PSU. The connector wasn’t the correct one, but I was able to snip up an old molex connector and splice it onto the fan. It isn’t the prettiest thing, but that fan really blew a lot of air at a reasonable amount of noise, so it worked out well.

I powered up the system, and everything worked. Actually, I did many, many reboots. I pulled up the motherboard manual on the Biostar website and made sure that all the jumper settings and cable installations were optimal. I had to completely reconfigure the BIOS since I had removed the CMOS battery. Anyways, I now had a newly refurbished Raine ready to get a shiny new OS.

I booted up the computer using a Linux Mint disk that I had handy. The idea was to boot into a Live OS environment, copy over the crucial files to another system to protect them from loss and then proceed with installing Windows again. Fortunately, this went extremely smoothly. Within about fifteen minutes, we had cherry picked specific folders to save to a safe location and had copied them there.

I had configured the new drive to be the primary drive as I wanted my friend to be able to pull off all the data he needed from the old drive before formatting it. I shut down Linux Mint and unplugged the power cable to the old drive. This wasn’t really necessary, but I wanted to make sure that the Windows installation wouldn’t in any way mess up the old data that we wanted to protect as much as possible. I then installed Windows onto the new drive, got Windows up and running, and installed all the necessary drivers.

I then powered down the system again, plugged the drive back in, and booted Windows once more. Now Raine is running smoothly, virus-free, and should have a longer lease on life.

So, even though I work at 8am, I was up past 2am working on the machine. I guess you can say that I’m a sucker for a computer in distress.

Tips

1. Every couple of months you should clean out your machine. Turn it off, unplug it, let it sit for a few minutes, take off the side panels, and then use a can of air duster (one that is meant for electronics) to spray out all the dust and other nasties. This will go a long way to keeping your machine running well for years to come.
2. Always make backups of important documents. You can get flash drives that can easily hold all of our documents for $10-20 these days. Every week, copy new and modified documents to this drive and put it in a safe place.
3. If your OS crashes, you can use one of the Live Distros of Linux to boot up your machine and copy important data to your flash drive. Ubuntu and Linux Mint are really good choices for this task. Finding information on a Windows drive when you are used to a user or My Documents folder can be confusing, so I will probably do a post on how to do this at some time.
4. The best way to keep your system virus free isn’t an anti-virus scanner. A scanner cannot offer you 100% protection, nothing does honestly, and can’t always fix problems when they do happy. The best way to protect your system and keep it running smoothly is to follow these simple guidelines:
   • Don’t ever install or run any programs that came to you in an email. Even if it appears to be from a friend. If a friend sends you a program to install/run, ask them to send you a link to where you can download yourself. Also, if it appears to be an image or document attachment, but your client warns you about executing it, don’t say “Yes” or “Okay.” Say no. That is a program pretending to be an image or document.
   • Don’t install every free program you find on the internet. Not all of these programs are bad. Just having too many programs installed can cause problems and slow down your computer. Your computer is only capable of doing so much, and loading 100 freeware apps that sit in your system tray is going to kill any system.Some of these programs were available for download simply because they wanted to be able to secretely install other programs without you knowing, so pick which programs you install carefully. Do a qiuck Google search for the name of the program and “spyware” or “virus” and see what other people are saying about it.
   • Go through and uninstall old programs that you no longer need.
5. If you are just a casual computer user or don’t have a specific need to run Windows, try running Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or one of the many other Linux distros some day. These desktop operating systems come with a ton of free software to do everything from making images to creating documents to browsing the web. It’s definitely not for everyone, but the odds of getting a virus or other nasty bit of software installed on your computer is extremely low with a Linux-based desktop as compared to a Windows-based one. Best of all, these operating systems are free and many can be run without installing them so you can easily try them.

Lumière is a system I built a couple of months ago to be a pure Linux-only machine. I haven’t done much with her, but it’s time to change that. As I’ve posted before, I really wanted to run different distros through their paces in order to weigh their pros and cons. However, I also wanted to have a system that I could actually use, so I decided to do a multiboot system with shared /home partitions.

Last night, I decided to start off easy and add Linux Mint (Felicia) on top of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex). Now I say that this is easy since Linux Mint is actually a modified version of Ubuntu (which also happens to be a modified version of Debian). Since Linux Mint and Ubuntu share a similar structure, all the user and group IDs would be the same. This means that setting up a shared /home partition would be much simpler.

I also wanted to use Linux Mint since it has been highly recommended to me many times.

I didn’t know how to do this on my own since I’m still so new with running Linux for a desktop, so I used this very helpful guide: Dual boot with two Linux, using the same home directory. This guide uses Debian Etch and Mandriva rather than Ubuntu and Linux Mint, but all the instructions seemed to match any combination of distros that I’d like to use.

In fact, doing the installation was even easier than the instructions as I didn’t have to mess with any syncing of user and group IDs. My process went as follows:

1. I booted from my Linux Mint disk and ran the installation program once the live desktop loaded.
2. I did everything as normal until I reached the “Prepare disk space” step of the installer. Since this step is for setting up the partitions and I wanted to share the /home partition, I need to do some work.
   • I selected the Manual option and clicked Forward.
   • I have two drives: /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. /dev/sdb is the drive I want since that’s where Ubuntu is installed while /dev/sda is merely for storage. I selected the unpartitioned space on /dev/sdb, created a new partition, selected a mount point of /, and selected an ext3 format. I then edited the /dev/sdb5 partition, which is my /home partition, and set it to a mount point of /home. I also have a swap partition, /dev/sdb4, so I edited it and set it to my swap.
   • After making these changes, I clicked Forward.
3. On the “Who are you?” step, I supplied the same username and password as I had used for Ubuntu. I don’t believe that this is necessary as just the IDs have to match, but I did this nonetheless.
4. I continued the rest of the installer as normal until I reached the “Ready to install” step. I clicked “Advanced…” and selected to have the boot loader installed on /dev/sdb7, my newly created / partition, rather than on the /boot partition.
5. I then completed running the installer.
6. Going back to the instructions in the guide, I rebooted the system into Ubuntu.
7. I opened the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and modified it by adding the following at the very bottom:
   title Linux Mint
root (hd1,6)
chainloader +1

   I emboldened some of the text to point out the truly important part to get right. I remember cringing when I first saw this a few years back, and it still doesn’t look friendly.

   Basically, Grub uses different drive and partition identifiers than Linux uses. The first number represents the drive while the second number represents the partition.

   Linux starts naming my drives sda, sdb, sdc, etc, Grub starts naming my drives hd0, hd1, hd2, etc. Notice that the letter is now a number and rather than starting at 1, it starts at 0. Similarly, the partitions also start at 0 rather than 1. So in my system, /dev/sdb7 is actually hd1,6 to Grub. You can find a lengthier description at Grub Terminology.

8. After I saved this change, I rebooted, hit ESC to bring up Ubuntu’s boot menu (you have to do this quickly as it just gives you 3 seconds by default), and selected my new Linux Mint option.

That should be the end of the story, but I ran into a problem. When I got to Linux Mint’s Grub menu and selected a boot option, I received the following error:

GRUB Error 22: No such partition

I was very disheartened when I saw this since problems with boot partition/Grub configuration haunted me during my earliest attempts to run Linux. I decided to power through this problem since I needed to learn how to handle these situations at some point.

I went back to the menu selection screen for Linux Mint, edited the default option (pressed ‘e’ while that option was highlighted), and looked at the information. I knew that I had the correct partition, and I double-checked to ensure that I did the count starting at 0 rather than count starting at 1. Everything checked out. I don’t have any reasoning to explain what I did, but I had a hunch and took a stab at it. I had the following configuration:

I then changed it to the following:

Amazing! It’s booting up. That’s when I hit the next major snag. Linux Mint itself failed to load and complained about a missing partition. “What in the world?” I thought. I rebooted and edited the boot option again. That’s when I saw it. The partition was also referenced in the kernel option. So, I made one more change:

Note: I removed splash from the end of the kernel option in order to make the data fit nicely on the page.

I booted from this newly-modified set of options, and after a couple of minutes, I was greeted with a friendly login screen. When I logged in, I was very surprised. In the midst of fixing all those boot errors, I forgot what the point of all this was. When the desktop loaded, I was looking at nearly the exact same desktop as I had on Ubuntu. The shared /home partition worked beautifully.

So, what was the problem that I had and why did my fix work? Ubuntu and its Grub loader saw my OS drive as the second drive in the system, so that drive was treated as /dev/sdb (or hd1). However, Linux Mint and its Grub loader saw the same drive as the first drive and named it /dev/sda (or hd0). My hunch was that they somehow saw the drives differently and changed hd1,6 to hd0,6 and /dev/sdb7 to /dev/sda7. I still don’t know why this is, but I’m going to keep digging. When I have an answer, I’ll post it here.

As for Linux Mint, I’m going to test it out over the next couple of days. Expect to see some posts about it soon.

I’ve poked around with some distros over the last few days. They’ve all been Live Distros running in VMWare. Some of the Distros ran very well like this (Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, and Ubuntu), but others failed miserably in one way or another (Linux Mint, Sabayon). Unfortunately, CentOS cannot be installed from a Live CD, so I was unable to test out its installer in VMWare.

Starting Over

I realized that running all these Distros in a Live environment and in VMWare may be unfair. So I’m going to start from scratch, and do all the processes by directly running each Live Distro on the machine directly. This time, I’ve created a list of tasks to do in each Distro. I’ll make notes as I try to do each step for each Distro.

Test Basics

I will run each Distro through as much of the list as I can (some Distros may not be able to do certain tests). For each item, I will record how easy it is for me to complete (five-point scale), how well errors or potential problems are reported (five-point scale), and make general notes about the process.

Live Distro Test

The idea for this test is to get a good idea of how much functionality each Distro can provide without having to be installed. I’ll be looking for the best out of box experience. Unless the Distro provides a clear way to allow the task to work, I won’t make any changes to the installation. Since this is a live run of the Distro, making a bunch of changes each time just to do a task would be very unproductive.

• Boot to GUI desktop. This will test how easily the Distro deals with a dynamic mix of hardware and how well it auto-configures itself.
• Test keyboard buttons. I’ll press the non-standard, Microsoft-specific and media keys) on my keyboard and see how many of them are recognized by the Distro.
• Run Firefox and load Google.  This will test for automatic discovery and connection to the network. The internet connection will be handled by the router, so connection to the network should be sufficient.
• While Firefox is still open, I’ll test to see if my additional mouse buttons are recognized and mapped to the back and forward functions of the browser.
• Mount the existing NTFS drives.
  • Copy files back and forth.
  • Test loading media from an NTFS drive.
• Play an audio CD. This will test the ability to auto-load an audio disk. It will also test whether or not the sound card was correctly identified and appropriate drivers were loaded for it.
• Play a DVD movie. Similar to the audio CD test, this test will test whether the Distro can automatically load a movie when popped in, how well the audio works, and how smoothly it renders the video. I expect at least a couple Distros to fail this test due to the DVD decoders being proprietary.
• I’d like to find out how well the automatic mounting of USB drives works, so I’ll connect a USB flash drive and a USB hard drive. I’ll then move and copy files around to get a good feel for the performance.
• Play audio files. I’ll test the playback ability for mp3 and wma. I might also test Vorbis and FLAC. This will be yet another test of the sound playback and will test codec decoder ability.
• Play video files. I’ll assemble a collection of video files with different encoding schemes and test them out. This will test the sound playback, smoothness of video rendering, and decoder ability.
• Load Firefox and visit some sites.
  • First I’ll visit homestarrunner.com and watch the intro video. This will be a good test to check for Flash support.
  • Next I’ll go to the Red vs. Blue site and check out their latest video. These videos are much more intense than the Home Star Runner ones and will be a better test of the performance of the Flash video.
  • For the final stop on the Flash tour, I’ll load up Newgrounds.com and play a game. This will be another good Flash performance check.
  • I’ll then log into my Gmail account, and check my messages, send a message, and do some basic browsing around. This should work smoothly, but I’d like to check just to make sure.
  • Gametrailers.com has content in Flash, QuickTime, and Windows Media formats, so I’ll stop there next and check out a game trailer in the different formats. I don’t expect any of the Distros to render QuickTime or Windows Media videos, but I’d love to know if any of them can.
  • A final test is to go to Apple’s Movie Trailers site and try to watch a movie preview in high quality. Once again, I don’t expect any Distro to do this without any tweaking, but I’d love to know if any can.
• SSH into another box. I don’t expect any Distro to have a problem with this, but I’d love to know if any do.
• Load up OpenOffice Writer, add some text, and try to send the file as an email attachment. I’d love to know the different approaches each Distro has to sending an email without a configured Email client.
• Run the Unigine demo as a benchmark for 3D rendering.

Installation Test

After testing out how well the Live Distro works, it’s time to get to business and install to the disk. This process will be done through each Distro’s live installer (except CentOS which will be installed from the DVD due to not having a live installer). This test doesn’t have any steps and each installation will be done with most of the options left as default.

Using the Installed Distro

Unlike my process for the Live Distro, if the task fails, I’ll try my best to make changes that will result in successfully running the task.

• Update all packages.
• Run through all the Live Distro steps again. This will check for any enhancements that came from package upgrades or potential differences between the live and installed versions.
• Connect my USB printer. I’d like to see if any Distro will automatically configure the printer.
  • Install the printer, if necessary.
  • Print out a document with images.
• Connect my camera via USB.
• Install and test Ventrilo.
• Install Wine.
  • Install and test Steam.
  • Install and test Team Fortress 2.
  • Install and test Crimson Editor.
• Get the fancy Compiz/Beryl desktop stuff working. I’m not sure if I will actually use such a desktop, but I would like to see what it takes to get each Distro to do it.

Distros to be Tested

I’ve made a couple of additions to my list. The list of Distros I want to test are as follows:

• CentOS 5.2
• Fedora 9
• Linux Mint
• Mandriva
• openSUSE
• Sabayon
• Ubuntu

Final Thoughts

In the end, I’d like to get a good feeling for what some of the major Linux Distros are capable of and how easy they are to work with. From the results of my tests, I plan to select my favorite and start using it as my primary desktop for a while.

I’ll post my reviews as I progress through the tests.