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resolving video problems with K-L-Ubuntu and XFX Radeon 6850

By finndo On October 22, 2011 · 2 Comments

I’ve been having all kinds of video issues since I purchased my new hardware, the strangest is with the video card… Worst part is that I don’t have time to deal with this right now, I have a baby on the way (as in less than 15 days, and [...]

Part of my new hardware purchase was an XFX Radeon 6850 cooler, quieter, lower power usage, and 20% performance increase, an upgrade from my XFX Radeon 4890 monster. I first installed windows 7 with my new hardware and had lots of problems. After I gave up on that, I moved to Linux (I used windows 7 first, because Ubuntu 11.10 was due out in 7 days and I did not feel like spending a week setting up my computer, just to upgrade it) and decided that I have always liked XFCE and LXDE as my default window manager in other linux distros and so I would give them a shot now. I downloaded the Beta 2 release of both versions of Ubuntu and tested them via the live CD. I decided on LXDE as my WM of choice and went with it. 13 or so days later I went to download LUbuntu.

Well, to start it was not available at 5am on the release day (eastern time, GMT -5), nor was it available at 11am. so I stopped checking and just decided to wait until later. about 7pm I decided to check again, and Ubuntu 11.10 was available, and after hunting repositories, and it took 5 or 6, I finally found LUbuntu 11.10 non-beta on one of them. I of course chose the torrent file, and while it was still a bit slow (I’ve seen downloads on my computer hit 1.84Mb/s and this even via torrent was crawling along at 287Kb/s) it was going along well enough. I also started Kubuntu at the same time as you never know, and I used KUbuntu for years before I switched from Windows.

The installation went fine, other than the fact that my network adapter was not working (I expected this from the live CD and was prepared with a driver from the chipset vendor. After installation I put the NIC driver on the system, still no internet… I did a lot of searching and spent several hours trying to get the internal adapter working, no dice (even found other users who had the same motherboard and were not having issues after downloading the driver…) finally I got tired of it, I have not had a completely working computer in almost 2 weeks, and work (personal work) was starting to back up to enormous quantities and you could no longer see the top of my desk! So, I grabbed an old 1GB NiC out of the closet in my box ‘o parts, and slapped it in the computer, rebooted, disabled the on-board NiC and boom everything worked. (just a note, I did have the exact same issues in Windows, except the MB CD has Win7 drivers, and they worked). I downloaded the new AMD Radeon drivers and they installed fine, had my two monitors running, even got VMWare workstation working with only 2-3 days worth of research and troubleshooting.

Now I was happily installing my applications and setting everything up, that is when I noticed the lack of GUI system settings applications. Sure there are plenty out there, but most wanted me to install Gnome2 or nearly all of KDE to get them working. All I wanted was:

To be able to see in real time the CPU usage of all 6 cores at the same time, with or without a graph.
To customize my power settings so the monitor stopped cutting off every 15 minutes (I set the default time out to 180, in case I am watching a movie, as not all players stop the screen saver).
To be able to change alternatives without installing half of Gnome2.
To have the settings I changed in AMDCCLE actually save! and to be able to use them!
There were some other things, but I can’t think of them now, I’ll add them if/when I remember.

I know most of what I want can be done from the command line, and I was doing some of it from there, but some of the things I wanted to make changes to, without using a GUI app, I did not know where all the setting are located, as they are not always in the same directory. (try editing Grub settings if you don’t believe me, they are located in 4 different places!) and I always miss something… So I decided to install KDE over top of LUbuntu, that way I could use LXDE when I wanted to, but I already knew where the settings and plasmoids were that I needed to do the other things I wanted. Not to mention at this point I was going on 3 weeks without a working computer. (as of when I was writing this, it has been 25 days since my new hardware was ordered and I had 2 day shipping on that!). Installation went well, although it missed a few things from just running : sudo apt-get install kde-desktop but I was able to resolve those with a sudo apt-get -f install and all seemed good.

Then about 3 days later something happened. I was working on setting up an application, I cannot remember what, and I was watching a pre-recorded TV show at the same time. suddenly my screen froze, mouse worked, but no response from the Keyboard. Since then I have not had a working display, and that was 6 days ago. Nothing has worked, I’ve even reinstalled KUbuntu from the KUbunutu install disk. I still cannot get my video working, I get video from one screen, a little less than half the time, the rest of the time the desktop fails to load, or I get a blinking blue or flashing white display. I’ve done a LOT trying to get it working, in fact I have not spent less than 6 hours a day trying to get it working, for 6 days! I’ve tried reinstalling LUbuntu, KUbuntu (the installer keeps crashing during partitioning, so I’ve given up on that one), and when I started writing this I was installing Ubuntu, even though I am not a fan of Unity. I’ve even gone so far as to unplug one of my monitors, thinking having two was causing the issues (during every attempt to reinstall the AMD drivers in the last 3 days I have been getting a message “configuration has more monitor than detected” and this was after using the auto configure to setup the configuration…). I’ve followed the sticky display issues during upgrade post on the Ubuntu Forums, not much there of use after spending 4 days googling the issue already. Nothing seems to fix it, not even copying my old, “working” xorg.conf file. part of the problem is that Ubuntu no longer requires an xorg.conf file, part of the problem is that the AMDCCCLE only saves in the home folder of the user who ran it (if you run it with root privileges, which are needed to make changes, it saves it in Root’s home folder!), but Ubuntu uses the file (if it exists) from /etc/X11! no wonder nothing was working… (any settings changes did not take affect when I made them from the GUI, and if I closed the AMDCCLE and relaunched it, they were reset to the defaults; however using the command line worked fine… the first time.).

Right now, with a clean installation (several posters on the Ubuntu forums have reported this resolved their issues, and nothing else), I am giving it a go, I only have 1 monitor connected right now, and still have to get most of my applications working again, but at least I have a desktop running, internet access, video drivers installed, and it has not crashed yet. I have not completely ruled out a crappy (but quite expensive) motherboard. A bit upset, I spent more on the upgrades for my computer, than I spent on my computer (which I built from parts, like always, in my life I’ve only ever bought 1 pre-assembled computer, and that was because my wife wanted it. and it lasted 5 years without upgrades and cost more than twice what I spent building this one, before my new upgrades anyway), and when I bought it everything was top of the line (except the video card and it was not too far down the list) and it almost all worked right away, but i never had any problems like I do now.

So, back to trying to get things running again. I’ll comment on the current status later if all is well, else I’ll post more headaches.

KUbuntu 10.04 32-bit and Appcelerator Titanium Desktop [working]

By finndo On May 14, 2010 · 1 Comment

So, I’ve started with a clean OS install in a virtual box VM (see screen shot) and here is where I’ve gone from there (currently not working, waiting on some advice from the Titanium Developers forums)…

Before we get started I want to make sure you know that there are a [...]

Titanium Kubuntu 10.04 Virtual Machine Settings

Before we get started I want to make sure you know that there are a lot of steps below and that not all of them are necessary, again this is just how I did it.

*********update 5-17-2010**********

(on doing this again on a new from scratch system I have learned that in the Java section, steps 10-31 may not be necessary at all. while this is a good thing to have setup on your system for future upgrades, it is not necessary UNLESS you have the open source java installed prior to installing java (or anytime after installing java. this is actually out of order in these steps, you would have to do steps 1-7 in the following section (installing gcj-4.4-base) BEFORE doing the Java section, else steps 10-31 will not work.)

First let’s finish setting up the Ubuntu installation and get out guest additions installed. (although I use KDE, all of this should work from gnome, or ice, or xfce, or whatever GUI window manager you have chosen.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dpkg dpkg-devel
sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade
sudo apt-get install yakuake
reboot
sudo apt-get autoremove
select “devices” from the VM window
select “install Guest Additions”
when the “devices recently plugged in” window appears, click on the VBox guest additions, and select browse with Dolphin. this will mount the CD in /media for you
cd /media/VB[press the tab here for auto-completion, as the name changes for every version of VirtualBox]
sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
wait for it to finish, then reboot your system (simplest way, not only method)

Now you should be able to resize your screen by just resizing the VBox window, and your mouse should move between host and guest without exclusivity, you also should get better performance if your host is outdated or low end.

Let’s install java SE JDK!

cd ~/Downloads
mkdir android
mkdir android/environment
mkdir android/environment/system
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/widget/jdk6.jsp (this is where you need to go to get the current Java SE JDK, I tried to find a direct url useable by wget, but they have it scripted so you need to use the web browser, save this file in /opt/java)
cd /opt/java
sudo chmod +x jdk*
sudo ./jdk-6u20-linux-i586.bin (may need to change the name depending on the the version you downloaded, this will install/extract java into the /opt/java directory)
sudo rm jdk-6u20-linux-i586.bin (since this is a vm, it is a good idea to clean up after yourself! the final virtual hdd is gonna be pretty big anyway)
sudo ln -s /opt/java/jdk1.5.0_09 /usr/lib/jvm/java-sun
sudo vi /etc/jvm (this file did not exist for me, do not know why you need to do this or if you can skip this step)
“O“
“/usr/lib/jvm/java-sun” (make sure to include the quotes, again I do not know why, but the Ubuntu Forum post I found said to do it this way)
sudo cp /usr/lib/jvm/.java-gcj-jinfo /usr/lib/jvm/.java-sun-jinfo (this file does not exist on my system, if you have it do steps 14 – 17, if not skip them, as he did not give the details of the expected file contents)
sudo vi /usr/lib/jvm/.java-sun.jinfo
[esc] :%s/java-gcj/java-sun/g (make sure to get the colon as the first character if you are copy and pasting!! this line replaces all the gcj’s with sun, gcj is the GNU open source version of java, what we are doing here is replacing the references to it with references to the newly installed sun java so your system will use sun java instead of the GNU java)
[esc] :wq!
sudo apt-get install galternatives
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-sun/ /etc/alternatives/java-sun
galternatives (this will run the GUI version of alternatives so you can make edits on the files without using vi)
select each of the following one by one and repeat steps 22 – 24 for each one. jar, jarsigner, java, javac, javadoc, javah, native2ascii, rmic, rmid, rmiregistry, serialver
click ‘add’
set path to /etc/alternatives/java-sun/bin/[name of what you are changing, ie jar, java, javah, javap...]
set the priority to the “gcj priority”+1 (note it will not allow you to input numbers greater than 1000 in the GUI, those must be done manually, so just set them to 1000 at this time. it is recommended not to set them to manual, so see step 34 after completing all of these additions for how to make these the defaults.)
sudo update-alternatives –force –install /etc/alternatives/javap javap /usr/lib/jvm/java-sun/bin/javap 1066 (javap did not exist for me so I had to enter this at the command line, it returned multiple errors; however when I reran galternatives, the new setting was there.)
cd /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives
sudo vi java (repeat this process, steps 27 – 29, for all the changes above that you were not able to set the priority over 1000 on)
[esc] :%s/1044/944/ (replace the “1044″ with the number that your system has, this may be different for each file. for simplicity, set the “944″ to the number your system has – 100)
[esc] :wq! (note, this is not necessarily the fastest nor most efficient way of using vi, nor is it the way I usually do it; however I use this method when I write this information out, because it will work regardless of the contents in your file that are/were not in mine AND because without actually seeing the file I cannot tell you “go to line # 5′ or ‘change the third word of the eighth line to “blah”‘. this method should prevent you from inadvertently changing something you should not, I hope…)
java -version (this should display the version you just downloaded and installed, if not… go over the steps again and make sure you followed them all, else… well back to searching the inet for a solution, for you!
javac -version (just in case check this one too!)

Right now that that is done, let’s move on to installing the dependencies for your development environment (again, may not be the only method, nor even the recommended one, but this is what I have done!)

cd ~/Downloads/android/environment/system (this will keep your home folder from filling with source code and build files)
sudo apt-get install debhelper gcj-4.4-base gcj-jdk m4 debiandoc-sgml python-docutils cdbs (these are the dependencies for step 3 and need to be installed first)
sudo apt-get -b source gcc-defaults gcc++ python-defaults ruby-defaults
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade (check for any updates to the files you have just installed, always a good thing!)
sudo apt-get autoremove (this removed 85.2MB for me)
at this point I did a complete shutdown and created a snapshot in VirtualBox. current Virtual HDD file was 4.72GB before I took the snapshot. (in case I messed something up in the next part, as we have accomplished a good bit of work at this stage)

Now that all of your prerequisites have been installed, let’s install our development environment! (finally)

go to http://developer.android.com/sdk/adding-components.html and download the android SDK to /opt
using dolphin (or your favorite GUI folder browser) find this file and right click on it, select extract here
cd android-sdk-linux_x86/tools
sudo ./android
goto settings first and check the box for “force https://”
select available packages click the down arrow to the left of the web address shown.
check the boxes for: SDK 1.6 API 4 R2 / SDK 2.1 API 7 R1 / Google API 1.6 / Google API 2.1 (this will let you code for Android 1.6 (more of these currently than any other OS version) and 2.1 devices (the newest available) and the google API’s will let you access the preinstalled google apps that come with android and their resources (google maps and voice command and such) I also recommend the samples and documentation files if you are new to coding for Android.
click “install selected”
click “accept all”
click “install” (at this point it will begin installing, you can wait, or continue on to my next step while it does this, personally I let it run, and went to get something to eat!! make sure you check the details before closing, my 1.6 environment did not install with the error: finished with wrong size, expected 63422901 bytes received 4828132 bytes, this also caused the google APIs for 1.6 to fail and I had to re-attempt to install 1.6, everything worked the second time)
cd ~
vi .bashrc
press the following “jjjO” (this will move you down 3 lines, insert a new line and allow you to start editing, then just copy and past the following 2 lines)
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-sun
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME:/opt/android-sdk/
[esc] “wq!“
cd ~/Downloads/android/environment/system
sudo wget http://www.appcelerator.com/download-linux32 (this should get you the “Titanium Developer.tgz” file)
use dolphin again to right click and “extract here”
now you should have a “Titanium Developer-1.2.1″ directory
cd /opt/titanium/runtime/linux/1.0.0 (need to fix some incompatibilities that I found on the Titanium Developers forum)
sudo mkdir backup
sudo mv libgobject-2.0.* backup/
sudo mv libglib-2.0.* backup/
sudo mv libgio-2.0.* backup/
sudo mv libgthread-2.0.* backup/
cd ~/Downloads/android/environment/system/Titanium\ Developer-1.2.1/
./Titanium\ Developer (I have tried both with and without sudo, but it throws an error instead of running. I have posted a question on the Titanium Developers forum and linked it to here, so hopefully someone can help me out.)

Now that 32-bit is working, I’ll give the x64 version another shot this weekend. Hope I did not upset too many people over at the forums with my first post! but neither google nor bing came up with that forum post while I was searching…

Tagged with: Appcellerator • apt-get • autoremove • dselect-upgrade • Gnome • icewm • Java • Java SE SDK • Kubuntu • SDE • SDK • Sun • titanium desktop • Ubuntu 10.04 • xfce

resolving video problems with K-L-Ubuntu and XFX Radeon 6850

KUbuntu 10.04 32-bit and Appcelerator Titanium Desktop [working]

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