Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on a Sony Vaio SZ4-XWN October 14, 2007
Posted by Wille in Technology.trackback
Ok, I’ll be the first one to admit that my dismissal of Ubuntu as, shall we say “not too good” was a bit premature. I eventually found the cause and fix to my network problem. It is not a fix for what I consider a big flaw in Linux’s handling of DNS-servers, but it is a workaround that should be sufficient for most people, including those that spend considerable time on the go, like me.
So, to not let anyone else suffer from the same problems as me, I thought I’d write up the short of how I got my machine to work cleanly..
What works perfectly
Ubuntu is able to detect most of the goodies immediately: bluetooth, network card, wireless card, sound and graphics work perfectly out of the box. The only thing you are required to do to get full use of the NVidia 7400Go graphics card is to install the proprietary NVidia driver.
To do this, you have to go to “System -> Administration -> Software Sources” and check all the packages as available. After the Source manager has updated when you close it, you should be free to go into “System -> Administration -> Restricted Drivers” and just check the NVidia card. This should get your card going.
Networking issues
I had some network issues that almost put me off trying Linux, these included not being able to update or install packages, not being able to download e-mails and so on. These are two-fold:
IPV6 might cause you some trouble. If your router does not support IPV6 (or still supports IPV4, which is 99% of all routers), you will have no use for IPV6, so the best and easiest thing is to disable it by doing the following:
Do a “sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/aliases”
from a terminal window.
Add the following line, and comment out the line that is commented out below:
alias net-pf-10 ipv6 off
alias net-pf-10 off
alias ipv6 off
#alias net-pf-10 ipv6
This should get your browser going, and if you are lucky, everything else. If you ever run into problems in another network location, try reverting back to the original settings with IPV6 enabled.
The second part of my problems was as easy to fix, but a bit hard to spot: Apparently some broadband routers (a bunch of D-Link routers among others) don’t play very nicely with Linux, they will announce themselves as DNS servers, rather than do DNS forwarding, which makes Linux think the actual router is a DNS server. This is reflected by having an address of something like “192.168.1.1″ as a nameserver in /etc/resolv.conf and every hostname resolving to an IP of “1.0.0.0″ when using apt-get from a terminal window.
There is no fix for this problem, but luckily there is a brilliant free service out there that can help you anyway: OpenDNS. The fix is simply to use their servers as the default DNS servers if you are using DHCP. This should be good enough for anyone who doesn’t have a need to define their own DNS servers anyway. You can find simple step-by-step advice on how to do this on Ubuntu here that makes the change permanent (very simple). Point of note: the addition to your /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf file goes at the very end of the file.
External screen and docking station
I have a tasty 24″ Benq external screen with a 1920×1200 resolution that is hooked up to a Sony docking station through DVI. To get this working, simply hook up your machine the docking station, turn it on, and once logged in do the following (assuming you installed the nvidia proprietary drivers):
sudo nvidia-settings
This should open up a graphical interface much like the Windows screen settings dialog. I simply chose to disable the laptops screen, and make the external screen the primary one (I have not tried having them on at the same time, because I have plenty of space on the external one, neither have I tried hotdocking the machine!)
After a logout and login, the external screen jumps in to play, and the external goes blank, just as expected. Shutting down and restarting the machine out of the dock makes the integrated screen work as expected again, and ditto putting it back in the dock and starting it again.
There are a few gotchas here though:
- Do NOT use the default Ubuntu screen config tools, this will most likely cause crashes. Use nvidia-settings.
- Resolution behaviour can sometimes be a bit erratic (about once every ten reboots), so you might have to go in and fix the resolution in nvidia-settings.
- Panel behaviour can be a bit erratic (once every ten boots): upper or lower toolbar can go missing. A restart fixes this.
Summary
Most of the hardware works fine out of the box. IPV6 and your router may or may not make you stumble, but the above advice should fix your problems. Docking station and external screens work fine, so long as you use the NVidia proprietary driver and its related tools.
I have not tried the bluetooth connection, but the Bluetooth Manager is running when it is on, so I presume it works fine. I have not tried the webcam, the fingerprint reader or the dial-up modem, because I do not envision needing to use them.
I have not tested the HSDPA 3G card (Merlin XU870) that comes with the laptop, but I have found documentation that indicates it should work, and describes how to get it working.
The overall verdict is that Ubuntu is really easy to install even with the gotchas, as long as you know what the problems are. However, if you are not aware of these gotchas (in which case you probably haven’t read this..), you are in for a very frustrating time: I was struggling for about 8 hours, at which point I wrote a pretty vitriolic post about my pains getting the networking running. Hopefully though, I won’t have any more problems, and the switch is definitely worth it when comparing to the painful experience of using Windows Vista every day..
Thank you for posting the fix. It will no doubt help some people some day. That’s what the “community” is all about. We don’t depend on the good graces (or not) of the Master Control Corporation. We take care of our selves. I was a little hard on you in your previous post. You could have left it at that, but you applied some more effort and found the answer and shared it with us. Thank you.
you sure helped me- thanks!
Thank you for posting the fix. You are my hero.
Call me a Luddite, but it really burns me the way IPV6 is being pushed on us at a time when many routers don’t support it, and there is little or no consumer demand for it. As far as I can tell, the whole rollout of IPV6 has been ill-conceived and poorly implemented. Until the infrastructure is able to handle it properly, the ordinary man-in-the-street should not be forced to deal with the teething pains, whether the OS is Vista or Linux.
I already use OpenDNS and have since January 2007. I still get bad waits for DNS resolution with gutsy that I never had with feisty. They have made a lot of improvements in gutsy so I’ll stay with it but it is clearly inferior to its predecessor in that regard.
I did an upgrade so that might have something to do with it. I had a fresh install of feisty but tried close to 4 dozen apps over the last 6 months (install, try, remove). I’ll try a fresh install and see if that helps.
I found your IPv6 fix via an article in the Register grumping about Ubuntu 7.10.
I had been having trouble setting up ProFTPd on my Debian box. It kept giving cryptic messages about hostnames not being found and esoteric IPv6 errors in the logs. I wanted to disable IPv6 and fall back to IPv4 to see if that would fix it but couldn’t find how.
Your little fix resolved all my issues; ProFTPd is working beautifully and my Samba connections to my Debian box are much faster now.
Thanks
This particular problem with IPv6 is not a new bug. It is really a regression. It first showed up in old Hoary, then went away for a few release and seems to have come back up now. This is really more of an issue with the network stack in general than with Ubuntu specifically. I have seen it crop up on fedora,slackware and Debian.
The IPv6 implementation of Ubuntu or Linux must be broken if you have problem with IPv6 enabled. I use FreeBSD 6.2/7.x and Mac OS X 10.4 with IPv6 enabled without any problem. If the router supports IPv6 then you will get IPv6 address and then you can communicate via IPv6. If your router does not support IPv6 then your system will get only link-local IPv6 address, but it will not be used for global IPv6 communication.
The DNS problem derives from the way the DNS server software on those Routers manages requests it does not get an answer for in time. I experienced this problem earlier with an Actiontec Router. I tracked it all the way down to their DNS server software. As it seems it hands out 1.0.0.0 for all addresses it can’t resolve in time. Seems to be it’s way to say try again later. This does not appear to be the right way to say this, I mean this does not appear to be what the DNS protocol standards define. Seems to be a way to save code lines as the software used on the Actiontec Router was specifically designed to be low footprint. I filed a bug report back then with Actiontec, but no reaction of course. I am not sure if I reported the bug to the DNS softwares bug tracker, but I might have.
Anyhow, the difference between Windows and Linux in general seems to be, that Windows discards such answers from the DNS as false, while Linux tries to use them.
I’m sure you’ve already read about the latest issue with Ubuntu and laptop hard drives, just in case you haven’t, here it is:-
https://launchpad.net/bug59695.html
[...] (thanks Matt for the tip) [...]
That explains it!
I had the same problem in OpenSuse 10.3. Apparently, this isn’t just limited to Ubuntu. My internet connection wouldn’t work for all that I tried until I disabled ipv6 and used OpenDNS instead of my router. Spent about 3 hours sweating over my computer trying to get it to work…including compiling the wifi drivers from source…DOH!
If this problem spreads to other distros, why it didn’t show up on Ubuntu 7.04?
Thank. You. Finally! Cheers, mate.
…and by the way, when I tried opensuse because of the dns issue, I, too, had the same issue. thanks again for the openbdns hint.
Me again. It went a bit funny after the first wave of happiness:
I don’t understand the stuff I did, but I know this: After I followed the instructions at OpenDNS, I had something like »no such device« on
$ sudo ifdown eth0 && sudo ifup eth0
Still, everything worked fine until after a reboot. Then the network manager applet freaked and my wireless connection didn’t work any more. I would see the two dots indicating nm trying to connect, but the whooshy thing going round in between the two dots froze before I could even say »huh?«. Also, network-settings took its time before showing. I could see the frame of the window instantly, but the content would only show after maybe five minutes.
1. I removed 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
2. $ sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf.auto /etc/resolv.conf
3. $ sudo gedit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf
4. removed prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222,208.67.220.220;
4. reboot
You can’t imagine how surprised I was, when after that I could not only connect through Firefox etc., but I could also still connect through synaptic. Again, I don’t have the faintest idea what I did there, but I won’t touch it as long as it works.