Tuesday 8 May 2012

Trouble with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Over the last few days I have upgraded my family's computers from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04.   I had been getting a bit over-confident at how good Ubuntu was, and so was not really worried about things going wrong during the upgrade, as I would have been in the past - it had been getting to the state that it 'just worked'.   So I made the mistake of doing the upgrade over a weekend when we were particularly busy, which meant it was a particular pain when things went wrong.   The issues we have had are:

  1. Our PackardBell OneTwo was un-useable - booted to a black screen - didn't have chance to work out why so I just saved some logs to report the bug later, and re-installed 11.10.
  2. My home server (my old Fujitsu Amilio laptop) appeared to upgrade without problems...but every time I tried to access it, it was dead.   I think it was suspending, even though I had set the power settings to never suspend.   Have tried leaving the lid open, with me logged in, with the screen blanked - seemed to be working when I left - need to work out what was going on there....

Monday 7 May 2012

More on Samsung CLP-325w on Ubuntu

I have been pretty pleased with the Samsung CLP-325w - working nicely from my daughter's Ubuntu PC.
Have just had to re-install Ubuntu 11.10 on that (see separate post), so need to get the printer working again.
I had received a question about why I did not use an open source driver, and used the Samsung one last time.   The main reason was that the 'Recommended' driver when I installed the printer only worked in monochrome, not colour.
Just tried again, and used the 'recommended' driver, which was a generic PCL6 one.  Again this printed monochrome, until I realised that under the 'Printing' options it defaults to 'Normal (monochrome)' print quality.  Changing that to 'Normal' got it printing in colour.
Currently using it plugged into the USB port on the computer, because having a bit of trouble with network printing - job for next weekend.

Ubuntu 12.04 on Packard Bell OneTwo

Some of my previous posts have described my experiences of running Ubuntu Linux on my daughter's Packard Bell OneTwo 'all in one' touch screen computer.

Ubuntu 11.10 was working fine, but updated it to 12.04 last night.   No errors during update, and it was late when it finished so switched it off and went to bed.   This afternoon she reported that she had to resort to booting Windows because Ubuntu does not work - she got a black screen that she left waiting for 5 min, before giving up and booting Windows.

From a quick fiddle booting in 'recovery mode' and trying the safe graphics option, I think it is something to do with the graphics hardware not working, but am going to have to investigate more....just lent her my laptop to do her homework for now....

Went through a few options that I found on the internet, but none seemed to be quite my problem.  Also tried running 12.04 from a memory stick in case the upgrade had gone wrong, but it failed to work that way too....So I gave up - saved a selection of files from /var/log/ and re-installed Ubuntu 11.10.