I have been playing around with Xen for the past week and it’s always interesting to see Free Software/Open Source alternatives to products like VMWare or Virtual PC. So far I have been able to install Edgy as an domU inside a Feisty dom0 on a file-based disk image. It’s unnecessarily complicated to setup initially but once you get into it, it’s pretty simple. Unfortunately, I don’t have the hardware needed to run Xen in full virtualization mode. Full virtualization allows the guest OS to run unmodified and requires processor support, which means either IVT (aka Vanderpool) or AMD-V (aka Pacifica) extensions. Right now I’m happy with paravirtualization mode since it’s all I need to be able to perform fault isolation experiments.

I just finished upgrading my laptop from Ubuntu 6.10 to Ubuntu 7.04. Right away I decided to try out the “Desktop Effects” which enables Compiz. It’s pretty stable and I haven’t had it crash yet. While Desktop Effects is enabled, I cannot play movies using the popular players (totem+xine, mplayer, vlc) as the player seems to just crash. I haven’t found the time to investigate this yet.

One other thing I noticed with the recent upgrade is that shutdown seems to hang randomly. I have seen this behavior before on my desktop and it was due to an APM bug in my BIOS and it would happen consistently. This time however, the hangs seem to be random and I suspect that some process is in an uninterruptible sleep and killall5 -9 in sendsigs is unable to kill the process.

Initially, I thought the hang was caused by a bug in my laptop’s ACPI and I decided to investigate. Searching around the web, I found out that my laptop is really a “white box” system from Clevo rebranded as “Neo”. It’s interesting because apparently Clevo has been supplying white box laptops to Alienware and other companies abroad, as I found out on this forum posting on notebookreview.com.

A couple of days ago, I found this piece on Digg showing how to back up Gmail messages on a local computer using fetchmail. While the instructions found there are mostly Cygwin-specific, fetchmail has its roots on Unix and those instructions can easily be adapted to Unix-based OS’s.

I decided to try it out and later found that it’s a waste of space to back up everything on my local computer. A lot of my messages on my Gmail account are from mailing lists and those are already available on the mailing list archives. What I really needed to do was to back up only important messages and discard the rest. For that, I needed procmail.

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By following this thread I was able to get DRI (for hardware accelerated 3D) to work for my ATI Radeon 9250 card.

If you’re too lazy to dig it up, here’s the low-down on things:

• DRI is broken because the kernel drm.ko module refuses to load on start up.
• This is linked to recent updates concerning AIGLX.

Indications of this error:

$ grep WW /var/log/Xorg.0.log
        (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
(WW) The directory "/usr/share/X11/fonts/cyrillic" does not exist.
(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:1:0:1) found
(WW) fglrx(0): board is an unknown third party board, chipset is supported
(WW) fglrx(0): Probed monitor is 320x240 mm, using Displaysize 336x269 mm
(WW) fglrx(0): ***********************************************
(WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed!                  *
(WW) fglrx(0): * (maybe driver kernel module missing or bad) *
(WW) fglrx(0): * 2D acceleraton available (MMIO)             *
(WW) fglrx(0): * no 3D acceleration available                *
(WW) fglrx(0): ********************************************* *

Then when you try to manually load the drm module:

$ sudo modprobe drm
Password:
FATAL: Error inserting drm (/lib/modules/2.6.17-10-generic/kernel/drivers/char/drm/drm.ko): Cannot allocate memory

To fix it you should edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add the following lines if you don’t already have them:

Section "Extensions"
        Option  "Composite"     "Disable"
EndSection

If you have been using the Open Source X.org drivers for ATI (ati) while you switched to fglrx, you must reboot your computer. Simply zapping your X server will not do the job. It seems that the kernel is left in a complete mess when you switch drivers. Additionally before rebooting, make sure that the fglrx module is loaded by the kernel on startup. Do:

$ grep fglrx /etc/modules

You should get fglrx as a result. If nothing is displayed, then do:

$ sudo nano /etc/modules

add fglrx on a line of its own, save the file and reboot.

Note that it’s no longer required to use an older libGL.so.1.2 if you have an RV2xx card. The current driver version that ships with Edgy seems to work with these low-end cards.