Ubuntu: Downgrading X.org

First things first, if you use multiple monitors and you're thinking about upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), I would recommend holding off. A good number of users, myself included, have experienced a very annoying bug where the mouse spontaneously loses it's ability to click. The only way to regain mouse support is to kill X with ctrl-alt-backspace (ugh). I've been able to faithfully reproduce the bug by doing the following:

* Enable Xinerama in xorg.conf
* Open firefox fullscreen on both monitors
* Rapidly move the mouse between monitors

It's worth noting that this bug has nothing to do with what window manager you're using. I've experienced it under Gnome, AwesomeWM, and Xmonad. The bad news is that even though a lot of people are complaining about it, the bug has not been fixed. As of right now, the only reliable method to regain workstation stability seems to be downgrading X.org back to the Hardy packages. To assist anyone who might be Google'ing this issue, here are the instructions for doing so.

Log into a text console as root and shut down X with '/etc/init.d/gdm stop'.

Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy main
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-updates main
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main

Run apt-get update.

Purge all the packages you can by doing the following:

cd /var/lib/dpkg/info/
dpkg --purge `ls *xorg*.list | sed s/.list// `

Some of these will fail to purge due to dependency issues. That's OK. Continue with the instructions.

Reinstall the packages from the Hardy repo:

apt-get --reinstall install x11-common/hardy xorg/hardy xserver-xorg/hardy xserver-xorg-core/hardy xserver-xorg-input-kbd/hardy xserver-xorg-input-mouse/hardy

Note that if you're using a stock Ubuntu video driver such as the Matrox driver you will need to include it in the list as well (xserver-xorg-video-mga/hardy). I use the third-party Nvidia driver, so it wasn't necessary to include it in the list.

After this, you can start X with "/etc/init.d/gdm start" and hopefully login to a working desktop. The final step is to go into synaptic and lock the reinstalled packages to avoid the upgrade manager from nagging.

Thanks to Nelson for providing these instructions, which I've modified slightly for presentation here.

Ubuntu Audio Sharing

For a good while, audio sharing issues plauged my Ubuntu workstation. Whenever I'd hit a website that used Flash 9, none of my other audio applications would be able to access the audio device until my Gnome session was restarted. Googl'ing around for Ubuntu and Flash, I stumbled onto this package, which I'm happy to say solved the issue.

Ubuntu libflashsupport.

Obviously, you can install it quite easily with apt.

sudo apt-get install libflashsupport

Hope this helps somebody.

Ubuntu + Bootlogd = ?

Apparently the last three releases of Ubuntu have been plagued by issues with bootlogd. In fact, it's been such an issue that boot logging is now disabled by default. I like to see what's going on under the hood during bootup, so I Google'd around and compiled the following tips to get it working again.

1) This thread contained a custom tarball of an older version of bootlogd. Grab the tarball from here. Then run the following commands (assuming it's saved in /tmp).

# unpack the source
tar xzvf bootlogd_2.86.02.tar.gz
# build the package
cd bootlogd-2.86.02
debuild -us -uc -b
cd ..
# install the package
sudo dpkg -i bootlogd_2.86.02_*.deb

2) After that, make sure it's setup at the appropriate priority in the init system.

update-rc.d -f bootlogd remove
update-rc.d bootlogd defaults 08

3) Finally, make sure it's enabled.

echo "BOOTLOGD_ENABLE=Yes" > /etc/default/bootlogd

The custom version of bootlogd writes it's log to /var/log/bootmsg instead of /var/log/boot. One final gotcha: initially, I tried running bootlogd as root from inside of X, and I got the following message:

bootlogd: cannot find console device 136:1 in /dev

This is because it's not being run from the console and does not mean that it's broken. Do a ctrl-alt-F1, login as root, and you can test running it from there.