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ubuntu karmic koala

I've upgraded ever since Gutsy: to Hardy, Intrepid and Jaunty. But this time, I did a fresh install of Karmic Koala, given the new Grub, ext4 and so on. Here are some things (bugs I mean - with potential fixes) I've experienced running Ubuntu Karmic Koala as my main OS (for about 2 days now):

1. I installed it, rebooted and got some inconsistency error on my HDD ("Unexpected Inconsistency: Run Fsck Manually"), for both the / and /home partitions. After I did "fsck /dev/sda1" and "fsck /dev/sda5", I managed to boot into Ubuntu Karmic Koala. I have 3 hard disks of which 2 are kind of old, but this was my somewhat new hard disk and I really didn't expect it to fail. After a bit of googleing, it turns out it's not something wrong with my hard disk, but some bug in Karmic:

The error that the OP posted is a clock error. Basically what I think is happening is that the hardware clock is behind the local time, and it's not loading the local time before it does the filesystem check. The filesystem is labeled with its last write time, which of course is the local time, so it looks like the filesystem was mounted in the future to the operating system.


More details about this, here.

2. I have an DSL internet connection which although seems to be running on each reboot, it does not work. No ping, no nothing, although it says it works. I've seen this happening to other people too (on the Ubuntu forums). I managed to create a temporarily fix, by running this command on startup: "poff -a ppp0 && poff -a ppp1 && sleep 5 && pon dsl-provider" but hope it will be fixed soon as my internet connection doesn't exactly work as expected.

Update: it seems the issue is with the DNS servers. The resolv.conf files is empty on each reboot. I found another solution for this: removed the network manager (sudo apt-get remove network-manager) - so it doesn't delete my resolv.conf file contents anymore, and manually entered the OpenDNS servers in /etc/resolv.conf (gksu gedit /etc/resolv.conf):
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220


3. This is more of a tip: Don't "apt-get upgrade" or "dist-upgrade" as root, because GDM will fail to be installed and will break your system. Instead (even if you log in as root), do "sudo apt-get upgrade" and "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade"! - Bug details here.

4. Another annoying bug: double clicking .deb files does not install them; I get this error: "unable to read filedescriptor flags for <package status and progress file descriptor>: Bad file descriptor". But doing "sudo dpkg -i *.deb" in a terminal works. No fix for this so far, but you can install .deb files from the terminal which I guess it's ok for now, but this would better be fixed soon as not everyone is used to work with the terminal. More details about this bug, here.

5. I couldn't set my resolution to 1280x1024, also Nvidia Settings failed to modify my xorg.conf. To make Nvidia Settings be able to modify xorg.conf, I had open Nvidia Settings, then delete xorg.conf, then click "Save to xorg.conf" and manually enter the path to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and it creates a new file. Than I had to tweak xorg.conf manually to allow me to set my resolution to 1280x1024. I hate X :):

If there is nothing really customized about your xorg.conf, one possible workaround would be to delete it after you log into X and then execute nvidia-settings. Nvidia-settings will then create a new xorg.conf instead of trying to (unsuccessfully) merge with your current xorg.conf. You will have to specify /etc/X11/xorg.conf after you press Save to X Configuration File. nvidia-setting also need to be run as root.

sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo nvidia-settings


More info about the Nvidia-Settings bug, here.

6. And the most annoying bug of them all. Firefox scroll lags and for instance, when browsing comments on Reddit or in Google Reader, everything floats ("trails" or whatever... it's very hard explaining this behaviour). The same for pages with YouTube videos... they just trail behind and it's the most annoying thing ever (I know I've said that before, but I just felt I had to tell you that twice). This was occurring before... in Gutsy and Hardy and then at some point I managed to fix it and it remained fixed until Jaunty. Now, after a clean install, the lagging scrolling in Firefox returned and I can't remember how I managed to fix it. I basically tried everything and it occurs both with Compiz on and off, on pages with or without flash, and so on and so forth. If you have any idea how to fix this, please leave a comment.

Update I fixed this by installing Firefox 3.6.

[image via hispalive]