Ubuntu 9.04 Kernel Panic Problem

Great, I finally got my Ubuntu 9.04 up and running.

Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop

I am an Ubuntu user and I make sure that I always have the latest version installed on my computer.

However luck was not by my side during the latest release of Ubuntu – 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

After having installed Ubuntu while starting the new system the computer froze with Caps Lock and Scroll Lock LEDs blinking. I was really disappointed… I felt like crippled since i perform most of my productive tasks on Ubuntu…

I made a lot of researches in order to solve the problem, tried removing and reinstalling it, tried installing the nVidia drivers still nothing worked. Then and angel smiled at me…

I came across this forum which gave me my life saving answer…

So here is the explanation about the Kernel panic:

The default kernel installed on Ubuntu 9.04 is the 2.6.28-11 version which for some unknown reason was not compatible with my hardware configuration… (well that’s an assumption since it was working fine on other computers according to the other Ubuntu users)

I then read the forum post and chose the Optimal way (Part C with reference to the forum post) to repair the kernel panic problem.

The solution was to install the latest version of Kernel released for 9.04 but it seems it is not yet available on the repositories (Version 2.6.29-3)

Since my gnome desktop was not reliable i had to log on using recovery mode and chose the netroot option.

I then downloaded the three packages for i386 system:
$ wget -c http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.29.3/linux-headers-2.6.29-02062903-generic_2.6.29-02062903_i386.deb

$ wget -c http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.29.3/linux-headers-2.6.29-02062903_2.6.29-02062903_all.deb

$ wget -c http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.29.3/linux-image-2.6.29-02062903-generic_2.6.29-02062903_i386.deb

I then installed the downloaded packages using dpkg:
$ sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.29-02062903-generic_2.6.29-02062903_i386.deb linux-headers-2.6.29-02062903_2.6.29-02062903_all.deb linux-image-2.6.29-02062903-generic_2.6.29-02062903_i386.deb

After installation I restarted the computer on the new Kernel and it now works really great…

I am currently publishing this post from my Ubuntu 9.04…

My new OS installation with Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows Vista SP1

Last week I formatted my hard disk and installed Vista along with the new Ubuntu 8.10

Here are the screenshots of my Ubuntu and Vista… I have always liked the blue background which comes from MAC OSX.

Well I first installed the Vista since if i would have installed the latter after installing Ubuntu i would have lost my GRUB boot loader. The installation of Vista was quite fast and simple… However after restarting my PC on Vista i looked at the memory consumption and damn… Just a plain Vista takes 512MB to run… I had not installed anything yet… LOL…

Now on to the Ubuntu installation…

Well that took quite some time maybe because of the CD. The installation procedures of Ubuntu are not as simple as Vista… Well after the installation i did some fine tuning of my ubuntu since i do not really like the default theme… What’s really cool in ubuntu is when u enable the desktop effects… that needs the nVidia Driver to be enabled.

I logged back on to the Vista and installed the basic softwares needed… With the antivirus and all.. Note that in ubuntu i do not have to install any antivirus

Well Vista is really nice to use… it’s beautiful… but while using for some time it crashes with physical memory dump… maybe it’s because of my PC Specs?

I got a 2 GB of RAM, Pentium 4 2.8 HT Processor, 512 MB Graphic Card…

With Ubuntu i got really no great problem till now Ubuntu is a lot simple than Vista but it’s great to work with… Well just got a small problem to change the icons that i download from Gnome-look.org, When i apply the downloaded icon themes, the folder icons change to the default Gnome Icon…. The other Icons change but the Folders do not… If anyone could help please

I use Vista mostly for chatting on MSN and “playing games” though i do not get the time anymore…. I installed Vista on a 20 GB partition and u can say i did not install anything in that partition apart from some drivers and Skype which goes to drive C:/ by default… only 6GB left out of 20GB lol…

I have installed Ubuntu on another 20GB partition and got ample of space left (around 14GB which is enough for me to work on Ubuntu)

Got a separate partition to store my huge files… Still i think i need to buy a 250GB hard disk… lol…

Since i am more in favour of using freewares and open-source, i have installed IZArc instead of WinZip or WinRAR. And Installed CDBurnerXP instead of Nero Both are good to use…

I have decided to base all my works on Ubuntu… It’s really worth giving it a try…

Now waiting to try a MAC OS… hihihi

Mounting .iso images manually in Ubuntu (using the terminal)

I have been trying to mount .iso images on my Ubuntu these last days, i looked over the internet and found many solutions, including some ready made scripts and even some applications which help mount iso images, an example is Gmount-iso. I really did not like the way it mounts since when i mount it i have to create a folder on the Desktop and mount it there itself. I looked for some scripts and i tried using them but i was still not able to mount them.

Finally while searching for another solution i ended up on this site which had both ways of mounting the iso image. One way was to use the Nautilus Script which i was really not satisfied and the second way was mounting it manually through the gnome terminal using the Kernel Loop Module.

First let’s see what the Kernel loop module does as it stated in the site:

Using the module loop it is possible to mount a filesystem file. squashfs is a “loop” with (de)compression (Compressed Loopback Device) and it is possible to mount a compressed filesystem like a block device and seamlessly decompress its data while accessing it.

So, firstly we need to load the loop module. Open the terminal and type in:
sudo modprobe loop

Root access is needed so you will be prompted for your root password.

A folder is then created in the /media/ directory (This folder is the mount point of the .iso image) using:

sudo mkdir /media/anyname

“anyname” can be replaced by any name of your choice.

Now we need to mount the .iso image file.

To make my task easy, i open Nautilus (the ubuntu file browser) and navigate to where the .iso file is found. I then Right-Click -> Copy then return to the terminal and type in:

sudo mount

and after a space i just press Ctrl+Shit+V or Simply Right-click on the terminal background and paste. The path and the filename will already be pasted thus:
sudo mount path_and_filename.iso

and further we type in the mount point of the .iso image in this case: /media/anyname/ followed by -t iso9660 loop where “iso9660″ specifies the type of image file being mounted. There on the whole the code will look like this:
sudo mount path_and_filename.iso /media/anyname/ -t iso9660 -o loop

The iso image is now mounted and accessible from the desktop in the form of a CD/DVD icon

Well after using our mounted .iso file we need to unmount it in order not to leave tasks incomplete (just a small discipline):
sudo umount /media/anyname

Then we simply delete the mount point that we created:
sudo rmdir /media/anyname

I found this a bit more practical even if we got a lot to type but it allows me to create a mount point of my choice without any problem and really flexible…

Well i really want to create an application which will help me implement this using a gnome gui… or maybe there is already one (definitely not Gmount-iso since it does not let me create any folder int the /media/ directory-premission denied)

Any suggestion and help are welcome. This small implementation will help out a lot and save a lot of time and do some clean jobs.

Ubuntu Live Stats

I was just browsing the All about Linux blog, I came across a very interesting post which talked about a site which gives live updates about Ubuntu including Forum posts, Bugs, News, Security and others. So i had a look at the site and it was really a page where we got the updates Live… As soon as a new post was entered or there was a News, it just got updated in the lists without the need to refresh the page… That was too cool… Well these live updates are because the page was created in AJAX… I really do not know well about AJAX yet since i never got the chance to study it, but i would really like to know about AJAX and learn it… The site which i was talking about is the Ubuntu Live Stats where all those interested to get the latest news about Linux can have a look…

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