Kubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn on the Dell D620 Laptop

TuxMobil - Linux on Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs and Mobile Phones

These notes follow on from my brief review of Kubuntu 6.10 "Edgy Eft" on the Dell D620.

A forum poster reports that a clean install of Feisty works well on the D620. However, I installed Feisty as an in-place upgrade over Edgy, using the Adept Package Manager GUI. When the GUI offered to upgrade, I clicked Yes (after taking a hard-drive backup to a firewire drive with Acronis True Image). It took several hours to download and upgrade.

Installer Crash

At the end of the upgrade process, the installer complained about some packages I'd got installed which were not supported by the Feisty repositories. The installer announced that it would built a list of such packages as candidates for removal, but then crashed whilst doing so. This seems to be a recurring bug, as the same thing happened when I upgraded my Parallels VM image. But the system reboots happily enough, and it seems to have done its job.

Kernel Issues

In use, it soon became clear that the upgrade from Linux kernel 2.6.17-11 to 2.6.20-15 was a bit unhelpful. Specifically, three packages that I depend on (BestCrypt 1.6-10, Cisco VPN Client 4.8.00.0490-k9, and Parallels 2.2.2112) ceased to work and could not be persuaded to rebuild. The suspend/resume/power off functions on the laptop were also broken. All this was fixed by editing /boot/grub/menu.lst and changing the line that says "default 0" to say "default 2", i.e. to select the third menu option down by default, so that the system boots the older 2.6.17 kernel unless otherwise instructed.

With the system running under the old kernel once again, the system seems happy enough.

Kernel Update: 2.16.20-16

I don't like to run a really old kernel in case it has some vulnerabilities in it. So recently it seemed like it was about time to upgrade. The latest kernel installed by Kubuntu Feisty's update manager is 2.16.20-16 (as of October 2007). Happily the following versions of code work with that: BestCrypt 1.6-14, Cisco vpnclient-linux-x86_64-4.8.01.0640-k9.tar.gz, Parallels Workstation 2.2 build 2204. Note that the Cisco VPN client for Linux is now the same tarball regardless of whether you run 32-bit or 64-bit Linux.

USB Serial Ports on Feisty

I plugged two USB serial ports into the laptop running Feisty under kernel 2.6.17-11. Both devices were autodetected both FT232BM devices, and /dev/ttyUSB2 and dev/ttyUSB3 were created automatically. But Feisty then disconnected the ports, apparently due to a clash with some Braille screen-reading software that is installed by default. You can see what's going on by using the command tail -f to watch /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog when you plug the devices in - extract below:-

usbfs: interface 0 claimed by ftdi_sio while 'brltty' sets config #1 ttyUSB2: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now disconnected from ttyUSB2

The solution was to use the Adept Manager to remove the package "brltty". I also removed "libbrlapi1" but that probably wasn't necessary. You do need to reboot though, as there's some daemon running which will fill your log file with error messages about the missing Braille software if you don't.

Going off at a slight tangent: if you want USB serial ports to work on FreeBSD 6.x, you'll need to rebuild the kernel with two new lines:

device uftdi device ucom

This will create /dev/ttyU* and /dev/cuaU*, however you can't use these as serial consoles because they won't get set up until the system goes multi-user - which is a shame because it means you can't have a serial console on something like a Mac Mini running FreeBSD.

CrossOver Linux

If you receive a lot of Microsoft Office documents, then you might like to know that the WINE-based CrossOver Linux (from codeweavers.com) runs rather nicely on this distro. I am using Crossover 6.0.1 to run MS Word 2003, MS Excel 2003 and Internet Explorer 6.0 on those rare occasions when documents don't render correctly in OpenOffice or Firefox. It saves having to reboot into Windows or fire up the full Parallels VM environment.

If you just want to be able to check a few web page layouts in IE 5.x and IE 6, then you might want to install "ies4linux", which will install those for you (provided that you've installed WINE from the Adept Package Manager).