Have a Dell Laptop and want Kubuntu with Recovery Partition...

Well, I recently purchased a Dell Mini 10v, and wanted to have Kubuntu 9.10 on it. I purchased it with Ubuntu, but it came with Ubuntu 8.04, and it was the lpia version. Neither of these appealed to me, however, the Dell recovery partition did. So, I set out trying to find a way to get Kubuntu on there with a recovery partition.

Thanks to Mario Limonciello (superm1), who works for Dell, I was able to get a process that more or less works, and gives me a recovery option for Kubuntu 9.10.

Here's basically what you need to do.

1) Download the DVD iso for Kubuntu Karmic 9.10 to your system.

2) Visit https://launchpad.net/dell-recovery/+download and grab the latest dell-recovery deb (at least version 0.27) for Karmic and install it from any Karmic system (gdebi can be used here). This will not work from a live CD/DVD as the process requires a lot of temportary space to work with, so you must be in a working Karmic install (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, etc).

3) Now, run the dell-recovery-media program as follows:

dell-recovery-media --builder

The --builder option is a recent addition by Mario, which allows building Dell recovery media from any Ubuntu ISO, so it will work with Kubuntu, with a few tweaks.



4) Click the Forward button and you are given an opportunity to choose the ISO to build the Dell image from.



Click on Choose Image and select the Kubuntu DVD iso you downloaded earlier.



The screen will update and show some details about the image (which should show Kubuntu Karmic 9.10).

5) Click the Forward button, and hit Fetch/Update GIT Tree.



This may take a few minutes to complete.



Once the fetch is completed, hit the Close button in the GIT Tree Status window. From the GIT Tags drop down, select Origin/Master.



6) Click the Forward button to go to the FISH screen. This allows you to add additional packages to the install process. We are going to skip this for now (I may expand on this in a future post).



7) Click the Forward button and choose to create a USB Flash Drive



8) Click the Forward button and enter a version number (I chose K00 for Kubuntu ), then click Apply.



Enter your password when prompted to Authenticate. The program will now start building the new ISO to copy to the USB Stick.



9) This will then launch the usb-creator application. At this point, you should be able to simply click Make Startup Disk (See some of my previous blog entries about usb-creator-kde for more info about this).

10) After the startup disk completes installing, you can close it and the Dell Recovery window which pops up after.



11) The last step you need to perform is to remove the del-recovery deb from the newly created USB Startup Disk, as it is gtk based, and has some additional deps that are not found on the default install media and will thus fail during the install process. Assuming the mount point for the media stick is /media/disk, you would preform the following command to remove this file:

rm /media/disk/debs/main/dell-recovery_*_all.deb

12) It is now safe to unmount the USB Stick or reboot if you wish to install from it now.

13) After you install the new dell image, you should re-install the dell-revocery application. Unfortunately, one of the deps is currently missing from the package. To get around this, you will need to install policykit-1-gnome as follows:

sudo apt-get install policykit-1-gnome

Then use gdebi to install dell-recovery, which you downloaded (refer to step 2 for the link).

14) Now, you can use dell-recovery-media to rebuild the ISO from the recovery partition and make as many USB disks or ISO's as you want. As well, you can now access the restore option in grub (hold space bar during boot to expose the boot options).

I hope this is useful to you. I will be working with Mario to see how hard it would be to create a Qt/KDE front-end for the dell-recovery package, so that we can avoid having to remove anything.

Arora 0.10 in Kubuntu 9.10

For anyone looking to try out a lightweight browser under KDE (or even Gnome for that matter), they should definately give Arora a test run.

For the upcoming Karmic Koala release, we have worked very closely with the upstream Arora developers to ensure we have a nicely integrated browser, which can serve as an alternative to the default system browser.

For example, in this release, we see AdBlock support as well as wallet (password/form autofill) support. This was missing in the 0.9 and earlier series, and was definately a feature I missed when testing out this, otherwise, fantastic browser.

Now that it has the wallet and AdBlock features, I can heartily recommend that everyone give it a serious try. If you find the default system browser doesn't work on some of your favorite sites or you find Firefox to be a bit bloated, then you will surely love Arora.

Check out www.kubuntu.org for details on downloading the new Karmic Koala beta or if you already have the beta running, simply install Arora in Add/Remove software.

To find out more about Arora, please see www.arora-browser.org.

Switching from Acer to Dell...

I have been a long time supporter of Acer, and have 4 Acer systems. However, due to recent issues in dealing with their technical support (helpless desk) I have given up on Acer and instead switched to Dell.

Dell has embraced Linux, and especially with partners like Canonical pushing for more preinstalled Ubuntu systems from Dell, I can only imagine Dell doing bigger and grander things with Linux and Ubuntu.

Given that, I have decided to switch to Dell and throw my support behind them. I have also just today ordered two brand new netbooks from Dell, and will be selling my old Acers.

It's important I believe to start and support vendors who are truly cogniscent of Linux and are willing to work with developers to ensure their systems work well with Linux. Dell is going down the correct path, so here's my thumbs up Dell and Great Job.

And good-bye Acer, it was fun while it lasted.

Recover a Non-booting Linux System

Ok, inevitably, it will come to pass that if you are testing out Alpha Releases, you will experience at least one time in your life where the system will not boot.

Recently, while working on Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10), I did an update an rebooted into a non functional system. Apparently just before freeze for Alpha 6, there were some uploads which caused the build systems to not completely build all the necessary packages. Hence I had a partial update.

Anyway, things seem to be resolved now, so on to recovery. I am documenting this mostly so I remember how to do it again (copy/paste is your friend) and maybe it will be useful to others.

First, you need a live CD/DVD/USB running your favorite Linux. In my case, it's Kubuntu. I used my usb-creator-kde to make a live USB from a known working and recent release.

After booting into your live environment, you need to open a terminal and switch to mount your partitions under /mnt.

To determine the partitions, you can use fdisk as follows:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd88dfd16

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 61 489951 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 62 38913 312078690 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 62 1306 10000431 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 1307 7385 48829536 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 7386 38913 253248628+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 2057 MB, 2057306112 bytes
64 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1012 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 3968 * 512 = 2031616 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0000a283

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 1012 2007777 b W95 FAT32

sdb is my USB drive and sda is my HDD. sda1 is /boot, sda6 is / and sda7 is home. Yours will likely be different.

After you figure out your partitions, you will mount them as follows:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/sda6 /mnt
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/home

Verify everything looks correct before proceeding (i.e. you got the partitions correct and mounted in the correct places).

Next, you need to take care of /proc and /dev as follows:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -t proc none /mnt/proc
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev

Ok, now you have setup your chroot environment, and may change into it:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo chroot /mnt

At this point, you should be able to update your system, add/remove packages using apt-get, or edit any files you need to fix the system.

In my case, a simple apt-get update && apt-get upgrade will fix things.

After making your changes you need to exit the chroot and unmount the partitions in the reverse order.

Now you should be able to safely exit the live system and reboot.

Hope this helps.