Sunday, May 30, 2010

Lucid Lynx cifs support needs smbfs package

After a recent upgrade to Lucid Lynx I attempted to mount a network drive using mount -t cifs ... It failed each time with the following in dmesg:

CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22

Ultimately, the solution was to install the smbfs package.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

No XDMCP in Lucid Greeter

I recently upgraded a Compaq Evo 510s from Hardy to Lucid. The Evo is essentially a thin-client via XDMCP. However, after upgrading I found that the gdm greeter in Lucid no longer offers an option to remotely connect to another X-server.

This appears to be a bone of contention for many users, me included. Several options exist to work-around this problem. Ultimately, I chose to install kdm, whose greeter does include an option to use XDMCP to connect to a remote X-server.

X unstable running Lucid on a Compaq Evo 510s

I recently upgraded a Compaq Evo 510s from Hardy to Lucid. The first problem I encountered was instability running X-windows. The display would go black with a few white stripes.

It seems I wasn't alone - other Lucid users with Intel's integrated graphics chip were reporting similar problems. Several solutions have been proposed. I went with the simplest - switching to the VESA video driver. This solves the problem at the expense of losing hardware accelerated graphics. However, as the Evo is essentially a thin-client this wasn't a problem.

Installing Lucid Lynx 10.04 on a Compaq Evo 510s

I have a policy of only installing Ubuntu's LTS releases, so with the release of Lucid Lynx it was time to migrate from Hardy. I started with an aging Compaq Evo 510s. I used the upgrade path via the update-manager.

Things went smoothly aside from a couple of warnings regarding the flashplugin-nonfree package. I dismissed these, however, at the completion of the upgrade the warning became an error and the upgrade process exited before clean-up and completion.

Upon rebooting the Evo appeared to have Lucid installed but it was very unstable (a separate issue). Fortunately, the Evo is little more than a (XDMCP) thin-client. So, I burned a Lucid ISO and performed a fresh installation. This time the installation completed successfully.