Archive for the 'Ubuntu' Category

Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy upgrade issue

Published on October 29, 2006 in Linux OS related and Ubuntu. 0 Comments

There is an issue that appears to be more common than others when it comes to upgrading Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 up to Ubuntu Edgy 6.10. This error arises when the Upgrade Manager tries to calculate the packages and dependencies. The error displays this:

The error title is: “Could not calculate the upgrade”

The message is: “An unresolvable problem occured while calculating the upgrade. Please report this bug against the ‘update manager’ package and include the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade/ in the bugreport.”

In my case the last few lines of the /var/log/dist-upgrade/apt.log file showed the following issue:

Starting

Starting 2

Investigating libgl1-mesa-dri

Package libgl1-mesa-dri has broken dep on libgl1-mesa

  Considering libgl1-mesa 8 as a solution to libgl1-mesa-dri 0

  Removing libgl1-mesa-dri rather than change libgl1-mesa

Investigating xorg

Package xorg has broken dep on libgl1-mesa-dri

  Considering libgl1-mesa-dri 0 as a solution to xorg 0

  Holding Back xorg rather than change libgl1-mesa-dri

Investigating ubuntu-desktop

Package ubuntu-desktop has broken dep on xorg

  Considering xorg 0 as a solution to ubuntu-desktop 10000

    Reinst Failed because of libgl1-mesa-dri

Done

The problem is being cased by a dependency issue with libgl1-mesa-dri. I found that libgl1-mesa-dri indicates that the package ubuntu-deskop is dependant on it, yet ubuntu-desktop does not indicate it has this dependency. The other package that is dependant on this one is x-window-system-core.

The solution that I and many other people have found works for this is the following:

1) Run “sudo dpkg -r –force-depends libgl1-mesa libgl1-dev libgl1-dri libglu1-mesa libglu1-mesa-dev mesa-common-dev mesa-utils” from the command prompt

2) Then run “sudo apt-get install -f” from the command prompt.

Also, if you have an entry in your /etc/apt/sources.list file with “compiz” in it then comment out that entry (or entries) by putting # in front of them. One way to do this is by running “sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list” from the command prompt.

You may need to manually uninstall libgl1-dri in the Synaptic Package Manager. At least check that it is not installed before proceeding.

You should now be able to install the upgrade. The fastest way to do this is by downloading the Alternative Install ISO file, burning it to a CD-R and then running the command: gksu “sh /cdrom/cdromupgrade”

Of course if you have a really fast internet connection, and it is well past the release date of Edgy (October 26th) then you may wish to just upgrade online with the command: gksu “update-manager -c”

The upgrade procedure is outlined here: http://help.ubuntu.com/community/EdgyUpgrades 

Some information on the above fix is available at Launchpad.net Bug # 58424

Please let me know how you get on if the above information helps your upgrade issue.

Remote desktop XP to Ubuntu Linux

Published on August 16, 2006 in OS Tips & Tricks, Ubuntu and Windows XP. 6 Comments

It took me some time to figure this one out. I found many sites / blogs / wikis / forums giving very elaborate instructions on how to do this, but they all seemed much to complicated. What I wanted to do seemed like a simple “want” to me. How do I access my Ubuntu linux box remotely (over the LAN) from a windows xp machine? My linux machine runs Ubuntu. If you are trying to RD into another distro you will have to modify these instructions accordingly. So here is what I did:

  1. Activate XDMCP on Ubuntu - SYSTEM >> Preferences >> Remote Desktop - “Allow other users to view your desktop” - “Allow other users to control your desktop”
  2. Install Cygwin/X onto the Windows XP machine. - Download and run setup.exe from http://www.cygwin.com/ - Install the standard packages on Cycwin/X along with :

    - X11 –> X-Startup-scripts - X11 –> xorg-x11-base (this will set a lot of x11 dependencies to install also — you want to install these)

  3. Run Cycgwin
  4. In the Cgywim terminal enter the following command: $ XWin.exe :1.0 -unixkill -scrollbars -screen 0 1280 1024 -emulate3buttons -once -query (NAME / IP) & Put the name of the linux computer or its IP address
  5. You should then see the Ubuntu login page. Voila.

It’s possible I installed one or two other things on the Ubuntu system. I don’t recall just now as I tried so many other ways to get this functionality working I now forget exactly what was done for what. If you try the above and it does not work, let me know and I’ll figure out what else has to go onto the Ubuntu system. I know I installed freeNX although I am not sure if this was for the Cygwin connection or not. If you want to use SSH to Ubuntu via Cygwin there are some instructions here. I tried various SSH related ways of going about this. SSH from Windows directly and SSH via the Cygwin terminal. I kept getting the error that the port was not open. I tried port 177 (which XDCMP users) and 5901 and others, all to no avail. I am not sure how to make these ports available from Ubuntu. But the Xwin route works great.

A little extra info on this tip can be found here, along with links for further research 

Ubuntu: smb not a valid location error

Published on July 3, 2006 in Ubuntu. 12 Comments

I recently upgraded Ubuntu 5.10 to 6.06 (from Breezy release to Dapper release). The upgrade went well, once I ironed out a few issues. I have found, however, that I was unable to browse the windows xp computer on my network. When trying to browse the network I would get this error:

smb:/// is not a valid location

The odd thing is that I was able to print to shared printers on the WinXP machine. I was also able to browse the Samba shares on the Ubuntu machine from the WinXP machine. I was not able to browse the network from Ubuntu though.

I searched high and low on the internet for some answers and very little useful help was forthcoming. I eventually found one key tip that fixed this issue simply and without any further mucking around editing configuration files (which was all to no avail).

The trick the worked was to install the package called libgnomevfs2-extra

I installed that and voila, problemo solved. If you get the “smb:/// is not a valid location” error then try this out and let me know if it fixes it for you.

You can install this package using the built in Package Manager or using the apt-get command at the command prompt.

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