fragility

It’s been nearly 3 years since i bought my first and current laptop. An Airis Diamond 630, Pentium IV 2.80 Ghz, 512 MB Ram (about to have an upgrade to 1GB), 40GB HDD, ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 64MB, Combo drive, 15″, and some nice 3,5 Kg of weight.

Now, why have i bought such a lousy laptop, you ask me ? Price. It was all about price. And the fact that at the time, i was mostly a gamer, more than the GNU/Linux webdeveloper geek i’ve turned into. Airis (a spanish maker) is cheaper than most of it’s competitors and they had some nice promotions (i got an Epson CX3200 for 50???, where it was being sold for more than 150??? at the time).

Centrino based laptops were really new at the time, and the truth is i haven’t researched on the subject a bit. I knew almost nothing about it, and the little i knew was that they were probably not as good in terms of performance as desktop processor based laptops.

I had just entered University at the time, and i was in need of a new computer, so a laptop was the best choice. As i said before, i was a gamer at the time, so i wasn’t really worrying about weight, size or anything else. I wanted something where i could play my games and that was it. However, i changed a lot since then and i haven’t played usual games (other than some emulated games or Frozen Bubble) in almost 2 years. Ok, maybe some Enemy Territory, just to kill time.

A while after i bought it, i was introduced to Linux, and in a couple of months it became my main operating system. At the time there was no Ubuntu, and i was somehow lost in the world of Slackware.

In the meanwhile, some problems started appearing. The battery had a warranty of only 6 months. At the 7th month, it died. Once in a while, i started to have some weird freezes. I soon found out that they were not software related (as i was dual booting into Gentoo and Windows at the time), and less than a year after i had bought it, it had a little trip to the doctor. When it came back, i was told that it was some loose screw that was causing the problem. I found it weird, but since some of the freezing happened when i accidentally bumped it with my hand or knees, i tought it might be possible.

The problem was gone for a long time. Once in a while, it started happeing again, but it was so rare, that i didn’t bother about it. I could have sent it to the store again, yes, but since it happened so rarely i got lazy and never done anything about it.

After the warranty was over, it started getting worse. It started happeing more often, usually after i had transported it for a while. And now it would do something different. After the freezes, it would refuse to boot. When Grub started to boot the OS, it would refuse to do it, feeding me error messages which are rather random, but usually refer to CRC error checks, and Kernel panics, stating it can’t mount the root filesystem. After some tries, it boots. And sometimes freezes again.

It happens every once and then, and the only thing that has gotten worse is the frequency on how much it happens. It’s a pain in the ass, but i have to live with it, and i’m not sending it to repair as long as it works again after a few tries.

Over the time, i talked about this problem to lots of people, and even after i said everything i already wrote here, they would still say things like “have you formatted your hard drive already ?”, and the closest chance i ever got (based on searching Google for the error messages i get on boot and talking to a friend of mine who works at the tech support of one of the largest Portuguese computer store chains) was that it might be the BIOS battery dying out,but i already tried opening up the machine, and given it’s awfully bad construction, i doubt i will ever be able to replace it and use the machine again (unless i send it to repair…which i’d like to avoid).
The other huge problem i have with this laptop (other than it’s weight, and bad materials that are starting to crack), it’s related to hald/dbus.

After i started using Ubuntu (almost a year ago, 10 months or so), i started having other kind of freezes. These would happen if i wasn’t working on the laptop, and only after it was on for a considerable period of time (1 day or more).

The logs report an error related to a timeout on /dev/hdc (the combo drive). After some googling, i found out it’s a problem related to dbus/hald (stopping the services stops the freezing), but it’s in reality a kernel bug (Andrew Morton confirmed this himself on a bug report i read at the time on Red Hat’s bugzilla, which disappeared in the meanwhile).

Dapper came, and the problem remains. I read lots of bug reports somehow related to this, i tried lots of stuff (unloading modules, turning off DMA on the drive, etc), but the only way to stop this is not using hald and dbus, and not just stopping the service but killing every daemon some other application might spawn (actually, i just noticed that despite the existence of a script to do that, the daemon is still spawning somehow…damn, i need some holy water).

So my only hope is that the problem is solved in one of the next kernel or hald/dbus versions. Either that, or wait until i get a new laptop (which i intend to sometime in the next year, but this time i won’t make the same mistakes). And the truth is that without hal and dbus, i’m missing out a lot of interesting features.

The Logout/shutdown dialog in Ubuntu depends on it, so it won’t work. The Hibernate feature won’t work as well (i guess it wouldn’t work anyway but…). And many other programs complain that they need dbus in order to do this or that.

So altough i’m using Ubuntu, i sometimes still feel like i’m using Slackware. Well…not that much…but a little bit.

And now it’s bed time. I guess i just caught a flew so i’m having a really bad day with lots of pain on my body, chills and a dripping nose. Oh, and on top of all that, a huge hangover…

One thing i tought i wouldn’t do for a long time after i installed Ubuntu Breezy Badger last November or so, was a fresh install. After i realized i loved Ubuntu and that i wouldn’t keep it (yay no more distro hopping), i tought reinstalling would be a word to forget for a long time. Well that isn’t the case.

When dapper was almost out, i decided to go “unstable”, and i upgraded to Dapper Drake. This was in last April, right when they decided that Dapper’s release would be postponed by 6 weeks. It behaved fairly well for an unstable branch, but it left it’s marks. Somewhere along the way, something went wrong, very wrong.

One day, i found myself having some files replaced by strange symlinks, and i still found them today. /usr/bin/java was symlinked to some man page ! And like this one, i had many other important files symlinked to something that had nothing to do with it, like /etc/apache/httpd.conf symlinked to some binary file. I found so many already that i can’t remember them all. And there’s probably something else that went wrong, because once in a while i found some weird behaviors here and there.

One problem i had during Dapper unstable was with my Epson CX3200 not printing anything. “This will be solved by dapper’s release”, i tought. No way. There was a bug report about it, i confirmed it…and it only received confirmed status until very recently. I know, there are a lot of bug reports, and developers have limited time and resources, but this one was fairly simple, and the developer looked like he was paying some attention to it when it was first reported.

Well they are working out to get it solved now (i can’t try it because i don’t have the printer with me at the moment, and i’ll only have contact with it in September), and one of the conclusions they have reached is this:

So it appears to me there is a bug in the install script for gs-esp which does not install pstoraster.conv if the package is already configured even when the file is missing therefore only affecting upgraded systems and not newly installed systems.

If this happened, lots of other things might have happened that might have screwed my installation.

Now the big question is: fom what i can tell from the bug report, this happened to systems that were upgraded while dapper was unstable. Do systems that have been upgraded when dapper was already stable suffer from the same problem ?

For the sake of Ubuntu, let’s just hope not.