Toshiba NB205 Dual Boot BSOD

After using XP on my Toshiba NB205 netbook for a while, I decided to finally spent some time getting Ubuntu Netbook Remix to work correctly on it. Things went bad. Very very bad… The first thing I did was use gparted to shrink my XP partition, and then created a new partition and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix from a USB drive.

First off, the following will not work correctly without a lot of fighting in Ubuntu on the NB205 right now,

• Wireless (easy fix)
• Bluetooth (not so easy fix)
• Sound (speakers will not work without throwing away ALSA and using OSS sound system)
• Hibernation (couldn’t find a fix)
• Hard Drive Shock Protection (no fix exists right now)
• Battery life goes down over an hour, I believe because of the CPU scaling not being enabled

I’m used to tweaking Linux to work, so fine. The bad things happened when I attempted to pick Windows XP from the Grub boot menu and was greeted with a blue screen of death and reboot. To stop the reboot when you get a BSOD in XP, you can hit F8 when booting and there is an advanced option to disable that. After that I managed to figure out the error,

STOP: 0x00000024 (0x00190203, 0x85BD2490, 0xC0000102, 0x00000000)

Lovely error, isn’t it? Spending some time Googling revealed this,

This issue can occur if a problem occurred within the Ntfs.sys file. The Ntfs.sys file is the driver file that enables your computer to read and write to NTFS partitions. Damage in the NTFS file system, damaged portions of your hard disk, or damaged SCSI or IDE drivers can also cause this issue.

It looks like Gparted inside the Ubuntu installer, for whatever reason, messes up the NTFS partition. The fix seems to be easy, you just run CHKDSK.  Only problem being, this netbook doesn’t have a CD drive, a floppy drive, and I also don’t have the recovery disks because Toshiba does not send them.

First idea, look for Linux tools. This didn’t go anywhere, Linux can hardly mount NTFS, no less fix it.

Second idea, use a BartPE disk on a USB drive. I got this to boot, but I can’t get the drivers to see the hard drive on the netbook. I even dumped all the drivers from the recovery partition onto the BartPE build, but it still will not see the hard drive.

Third idea, NTFS4DOS. This just sits there at a blinking icon like this guy said.

Fouth idea, use the recovery partition option in GRUB and just give up on Linux for the day. This gave me the following errors,

“Windows cannot find C:\Bin\ErrorDialog.exe”
“Windows cannot find C:\BootPriority.exe”

Fifth idea, there is a file on the recovery partition (which crashes just like XP) called base.iso. I pulled this out and extracted the files. Using a combination of PE2USB and 7-zip I tried to get this to boot off a USB drive, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get it to boot properly.

Finally, I managed to get it to boot into the recovery partition. I was so excited that it actually booted into it after 6 hours of trying to get my laptop to boot that I did a full system restore and didn’t tempt fate by experimenting further. What I did was, remove the “savedefault” option from the grub entry on the recovery partition. Why did this work? I haven’t the faintest idea. The menu.lst file mentioned,

# WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not use ‘savedefault’ or your
# array will desync and will not let you boot your system.
But I wasn’t even using the saved option to begin with. Maybe I did something else before and this wasn’t actually the solution, because I can hardly believe such a GRUB option would cause the troubles getting into the recovery partition. Whatever the cause of this entire mess between XP and Ubuntu on the NB200/NB205, I’m not alone. The following posts show other people with the same problem and no solutions,

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1272853

http://ubuntu-ky.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7800396

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/windows-xp-wont-boot-with-grub-after-installing-ubuntu-8.04-738769/

At the moment, I’m just glad XP is back to running… and would NOT recommend trying to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix on a Toshiba NB200/NB205 without backing up the hard drive, especially the recovery partition, and be ready to run into a lot of issues.

# WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not use 'savedefault' or your
# array will desync and will not let you boot your system.

Ubuntu User Security (or lack of)

The other day was the first time I actually set up a user account for someone other than myself on my Ubuntu laptop. Something rather odd that I noticed, by default, the new /home/user directory has the file permissions set so anyone can read or execute the files. If I’m not mistaken, last time I made a user on Slackware or Gentoo it was set so only the owner could access and read the files located in his /home director… This discovery was followed by a “chmod -R go-rwx /home/user” on all my accounts, something that’s a good thing to do every now and then anyway if you’re security paranoid and in a multiuser enviornment. In the future, to make users created with adduser have more secure permissions,  run “sudo dpkg-reconfigure adduser”.

And select no on the prompt asking if you want systm-wide readable home directories.

A Programmer’s Quest for Primes: Part 1 – Brute Force

While trying to come up with something to program, I looked to prime numbers in my discrete math class and decided to make a simpler prime number calculator. The deeper I delve into the world of prime numbers the more interested I become. The building blocks of all numbers with plentiful applications in cryptography have captured my spare time recently. This is part 1 of my quest for calculating prime numbers. I have no real goal in this quest, other than to expand my knowledge of mathematics and sharpen my skills of programming; it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.

First off some math. What is a prime number?

Prime Number: A positive integer p greater than 1 is called prime if the only positive factors of p are 1 and p. A positive integer that is not prime is called composite.

For example, 42 is not prime, it can be written as the product of the factors 2 and 28. 28 isn’t prime either, it can be written as 2*14. 14 can be written as 2*7. What can 7 be written as? or 2? Nothing, these are primes. Now a useful theorem.

Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic: every positive integer greater than 1 can be written uniquely as a prime or as a product of two or more primes.

That means 42 can be written as 2*2*2*7, all of which are prime numbers. 105 can be written as 3*5*7, all prime.

Now, how can you tell of a number is prime? Well, if the number is composite, that means it can be divided by some prime number. You can keep a list of prime numbers and then try and divide that number by them all. If it doesn’t divide by any prime numbers, it’s prime itself. For example, we find a list of prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11. Now suppose we want to see if the number 13 is prime. We’d do the following,

13 % 2 == 0? If so prime.

13 % 3 == 0? If so prime.

13 % 5 == 0? If so prime.

13 % 7 == 0? If so prime.

13 % 11 == 0? If so prime.

None of these numbers can divide 13, so 13 is prime. When we get into prime numbers like 576,194,557 though, this process will be doing millions of checks on the prime numbers found before, which will be horribly slow.

A quick way to make a huge speed difference is use another handy theorem.

Theorem: If n is a positive composite integer, then n has a prime divisor less than or equal to sqrt(n).

So rather than checking if 576,194,557 is divisible by each prime found before it, we can just check if it’s divisible by any of the primes less than or equal to 24,004.

Before getting down to the programming, one more quick way to make it more efficient is to count by 2’s, since we know all prime numbers are odd. In fact, prime numbers always end in either 1, 3, 7, or 9. Increasing the number you’re checking for primeness by 2 every time can eliminate checking anything that ends with 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8.

Therefore,  a simple brute force method for finding primes: create an array (in the heap, because the stack will overflow), and store all the primes you find in it. Increase your candidate number by 2, try to divide it by all the primes in the list, and break out of the loop if you find a number that divides it or if you reach a prime larger than sqrt(candidate). The latter means it’s composite and the former means it’s prime. Keep doing this until you find as many primes as you like. My source code for such a program written in ANSI C can be found here, http://pherricoxide.jumbofx.com/code/simpleprimecalc.c. It’s well commented and should compile with any ANSI C compiler. This is the first of hopefully several prime calculators I’m going to write.

Using this program on a 1.4ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM, the first 100 million primes are found in about 137 minutes.

The problem is, as the numbers get bigger, this program runs slower and slower. The graph below shows time plotted on the horizontal axis and number of primes found plotted on the vertical. You rapidly find primes in the beginning, but after a while it will inevitably take you long minutes just to find a few primes. Using this method, we hardly have to worry about running out of RAM, because by the time we get 2GB of data (around 200 million primes), the process will be going so slowly it will hardly be worth continuing the search, at least using this brute force method.

Stay tuned for faster prime calculations with better code, better algorithms, and someday perhaps even some cluster computing, as I continue my quest for primes. Until then, here are some prime numbers to spot check your own prime calculating programs with.

1 millionth prime: 15,485,863 (found in 7 seconds)

5 millionth prime: 86,028,121 (found in 112 seconds)

10 millionth prime: 179424673 (found in 5 minutes)

20 millionth prime: 373,587,883 (found in 12 minutes)

30 millionth prime: 573,259,391

40 millionth prime: 776,531,401

50 millionth prime: 982,451,653 (found in 50 minutes)

60 millionth prime: 1,190,494,759

70 millionth prime: 1,400,305,337

80 millionth prime: 1,611,623,773

90 millionth prime: 1,824,261,409

100 millionth prime: 2,038,074,743 (found in 137 minutes)

Spim/Xspim on Ubuntu 8.10

Spim is a MIPs assembly simulator. If you don’t know what it is, then I doubt you have a use for it.

I thought I’d share this, because I’ve found it incredibly difficult to get xspim working on the new version of Ubuntu. It’s no longer in the package repository because of a very stupid reason. The Ubuntu developers claimed that the software was no longer being maintained because there hasn’t been a new version in 2 years. The spim people say that there just hasn’t been any bugs and the software is complete, but they don’t provide or maintain any packages other than the RPM for Fedora based distros. Perhaps someone will get around to putting it back in the repository, but until then here’s a work around.

It won’t install from source correctly (on 64-bit at least), and it won’t run under wine due to missing DLLs. However, I did finally get it to install.

First off get the dependencies out of the way. Most, but not all, of these already come installed by default, but I’m just listing them all for completeness.

$ sudo apt-get install flex libxaw7-dev libxt-dev libc6 libsm6 libx11-6 libxaw7 libxext6 libxmu6 libxpm4 libxt6

Then, download the older version of the package from here if amd64,
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/amd64/spim/download
Or here if 32-bit,
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/i386/spim/download

Then install the package you downloaded,
$ sudo dpkg -i spim_7.3-1_amd64.deb
or
$ sudo dpkg -i spim_7.3-1_i386.deb

After that you should be able to type “xspim file.s” and open your assembly files. The GUI looks a little primitive, but works as well if not better as the one in Windows. If you’re really hardcore you can run “spim file.s” and use the command line based version of the simulator.

Sharing Firefox Profiles on Dual Boot Systems

A quick fix for sharing your Firefox profiles/bookmarks in a dual boot system is shown here. I’m dual booting XP and Ubuntu 8.10 but the operating systems shouldn’t matter much. Simply create a partition that all your operating systems can read, FAT32 format in my case, and makes sure all the operating systems mount it. This is always a good idea when dual booting to keep your files available for all your operating systems. To auto mount that partition in Ubuntu you’ll have to edit /etc/fstab to add something like the following line,

what_to_mount    where_to_mount    vfat    auto,users,rw,exec,uid=username,gid=groupname,umask=017    0    0

For example,

/dev/sda8    /mnt/storage    vfat    auto,users,rw,exec,uid=pherricoxide,gid=admin,umask=017    0    0

Then, copy one of your Firefox profiles to that partition. The profiles are located in ~/.mozilla/firefox/. If you’re using Windows, this would be in c:\\documents and settings\user\application data. If in Linux, this would be in /home/user/. It should be the only directory if you never set you multiple profiles, something with a lot of random looking numbers and letters.

Once that’s done open up a terminal or command prompt and run firefox -profilemanager. In my case, this wasn’t in the XP path, so I had to cd to program files/mozilla firefox/ before running it. After it comes up, click create new profile. Hit next, and then change directory. Change to the directory on your FAT32 partition of the profile that you copied over, and then just hit next. Just stick with the default profile name. That’s it, now Firefox is using the profile in that directory. Do that with all your operating systems and you should be set.

Note: I’m not sure how well sharing a profile would work with multiple versions of Firefox. It’s likely best to update all your versions before you get started.

Note 2: This messes up some of the more complex plugins, and Firefox will often complain that it’s installed new plugins when you switch to the other OS.

Battle of Wesnoth Review and Tips

With only one final left to study for, I’ve had enough free time to get addicted to a new game. The game is Battle of Wesnoth, a totally free Open Source game that has versions for both Windows and Linux.  I had actually tried it once before, but I lost interest before I learned how to play well. That is a risk with this game, the easy level is sometimes too easy and the normal/hard levels are frustratingly difficult, at least to someone new.

First off a description of what this game is. It’s a turn based strategy game that’s simple to learn how to play, but difficult to master. It’s based in a fantasy realm where you’ll encounter elves, humans, orcs, and various other factions wandering the lands of Wesnoth.  There are over a dozen campaigns to work your way through and also a multiplayer mode and tons of user content if you finish all that. The graphics aren’t extremely impressive, but aren’t so old and clunky that it’s a big turn off. It does mean you can play this game on practically any computer without worrying if your 3D shadowing and refresh thingamagjig is good enough.

Campaigns consist of multiple scenarios, which have an objective often as simple as eliminating a boss on the other side of a small map. The map is divided into hexagon squares which your troops can inhabit. Also scattered around the map are villages, which you can claim by placing a soldier;  these villages increase your gold income.  From your Keep you are able to recruit your army, consisting of ranged attackers, melee attackers, scouts, healers, and mixes of the previous. Once you recruit your army, moving and attacking is as simple as clicking on the unit, and then clicking where you want him to go or what you want him to attack.

The strategy of the game is in small details which are sometimes hard for beginner players to notice.

First off, each turn changes the time of day. During night some factions fight better, while others fight better in the day. If you’re fighting Orcs for instance, they benefit from the cover of darkness. This means that timing your attacks to hit at dawn and hopefully weaken or destroy the enemy by nightfall is often crucial when you are outnumbered and outpowered. If you can’t defeat the enemy by nightfall, it may be better to sit idle and let your units heal or retreat rather than continue to let your units fight to their death. Even if you’re adjacent to an enemy, if you’re going to loose more HP than you can deal damage, it’s often better to just sit and get the +2 heal from being idle at the end of the turn instead of loosing most of your HP in an attack and then being quickly killed when the enemy attacks back.

A second major factor is the terrain which your units are placed on. Some terrain provides your units with defensive bonus, enabling them to dodge more attacks. An elf archer in the forest can easily fend off and defeat a far more powerful foe that is fighting from inside a river, making the formation of lines of units along river banks with some healer behind them extremely effective. Another important factor is keeping key units alive throughout the campaign. Each time a unit attacks it gains a small amount of experience. When a unit kills an enemy unit, it gains a large amount of experience. Eventually units can level up and gain more health, special skills, and more powerful attacks. In order to level units it’s often necessary to attack an enemy with several units, and then finish them off with someone who usually wouldn’t do well in a fight, like a healer. A small force of high level units can make a huge difference in battles. When the enemy is strong, they can often kill your low level units in a single turn. I’ve found a small force of elite units really come in handy to kill bosses and other powerful foes.

Another tip, don’t underestimate high level healers, and try to keep them traveling in pairs because they can’t heal themselves.

Overall it’s a highly addictive game once you get into it and start coming up with strategies. My first impression wasn’t quite so glamorous because I hadn’t learned anything except how to play. Playing is easy, and even boring, but winning by outmaneuvering your enemy is hard, and quite enjoyable. If you get bored, try playing at a different difficulty level or a different campaign before you give up.

Linux Ignorance in Public School

I think I just lost all faith in the public school system. Oh wait, being told that I didn’t know anything about computer security and that I caused a “mutiny” when I was going to Compuhigh (an online High Schoolprogram) did that, but this certainly didn’t help.

In recent news, a middle school teacher in Texas confiscated Linux CDs from a student. Apparently this has happened several times before, with teachers at various schools confiscating Ubuntu CDs and even suspending students for exchanging pirated software. This particular teacher decided to email the developers at Helios Linux and tell them what she thinks.

“…observed one of my students with a group of other children gathered around his laptop. Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a confrence with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods. I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back… I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them…” – http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/linux-stop-holding-our-kids-back.html

I don’t even know where to begin. She confiscated a student’s property when he wasn’t doing anything illegal. If she actually tried Linux in college she would know that it was free software, or if she actually did some research like she said. She thinks Microsoft would give out free copies of Windows to disadvantaged people? How about be a little open minded, especially for someone in the educational field? Mr. Starks of Helios planned a meeting with the school district’s superintendent, who agreed after seeing this email forwarded to him. Hopefully they’ll have an interesting talk about this teacher. Lets hope she’s just the PE teacher.

EDIT: The following is a fictional story, but after the above it wouldn’t surprise me if it could happen.

Topeka, KS – High school sophomore Brett Tyson was suspended today after teachers learned he may be using PHP. A teacher overheard him say that he was using PHP, and as part of our Zero-Tolerance policy against drug use, he was immediately suspended. No questions asked,” said Principal Clyde Thurlow.   “We’re not quite sure what PHP is, but we suspect it may be a derivative of PCP, or maybe a new designer drug like GHB.” – http://whatsthecrack.net/Student-Suspended-Over-Suspected-Use-of-PHP

Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid 64-bit Problems

After using Ubuntu some more I’ve run into a few new problems with no solution. If anyone has any advice, leave a comment. If I happen to find a solution I’ll edit the post and add it to the end.

First off I’m using a Canon iP1800 printer, and there appears to be no 64-bit drivers for it. I found some 32-bit drivers for it and attempted to install them using getlibs, but nothing seemed to happen. If I try and just run the deb files I end up with an “incorrect architecture error”. No solution found yet, Googling just reveals lots of people with the same problem and the only solution seeming to be switching to 32-bit Ubuntu or using a generic Inkjet printer driver which doesn’t perform well at all on this printer.

Second, there is no 64-bit Sun Java plugin for Firefox. If you try and install it on 64-bit with apt-get you get the following error,

Package sun-java6-plugin is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package sun-java6-plugin has no installation candidate

I would just stick with IcedTea but Java3D doesn’t seem to like OpenJava. I installed the IcedTea plugin for getting Java to work with Firefox and installed the Java3D libraries following the instructions on this link, http://www.icram.de/?q=node/85, but all I get is a grey box when trying to load any sort of Java3D application. Eclipse still works with Java3D applications using Sun Java’s JVM though.

Neither of these problems are deal breakers, but they’re certainly annoying, and further evidence that Linux (especially 64-bit) isn’t quite ready for the desktop world. Linux works great, works with hours of Googling and editing of configuration files, or doesn’t work at all (unless you feel like writing your own drivers). Unfortunately, I’ve always had hardware that fits into the last category (weird wireless cards, video cards, printers). The blame is quite likely on the hardware companies and not the operating system itself, but the average desktop user doesn’t care who should be blamed for the problems, they just want them fixed. And for that matter, so do I… switching to Windows every time I want to print something is a real hassle, and buying new hardware to make your operating system work is more of a Mac thing.

Ubuntu 8.10 Tweaks

As you saw in my last post, I installed the newest version of Ubuntu. A number of things annoyed me, a number of other things needed improvement, and a number of things I just felt like toggling, so here is a list of what I’ve done so far. I’m not going into details on how to do it, there are plenty of tutorials on the Internet, so there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. Just use the wonderful thing known as Google if you need directions for any of these tweaks.

Must have programs installed:

• X-chat
• Adobe Flash
• Sun Java
• Eclipse IDE (make sure to configure to use Sun’s Java)
• Jedit
• MP3 Codecs
• Microsoft Windows Fonts (msttcorefonts package)
  
• Advanced Compiz Configuration Manager

Things to stop running because I won’t use in Preferences -> Sessions

• Bluetooth Manager
• Evolution Alarm Notifier
• Check for new hardware drivers
• Update Notifier (I do manual updates when I feel like it)
• Visual Assistance
• Tracker
• Gnome Login Sound
• Pulse Audio (see last post, using ALSA only)

Things to stop running because I won’t use in Administration -> Services:

• Bluetooth Manager

Keyboard shortcuts to add:

• Alt+T Terminal
• Alt+L Lock Screen

Enable a real root account:

• sudo passwd root
• usermod -U root (use if you get an error saying the account has expired)

Must change things in compiz because the alt+tab was annoying me:

• Disable application switcher and enable static application switcher
• Static Switcher Application -> Appearance -> Selected Window Highlight -> None

Disable Ubuntu splash screen:

• I hate splash screens tha hide what’s going on in the background with a little loading bar, and Ubuntu 8.10 hides EVERYTHING. Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and remove the “quiet splash” line from your Ubuntu entries. Text based FTW!

Disable IPV6 in about:config of Firefox.

Disable the drive icons on the desktop

And finally, make a sane shortcut scheme for all the pretty Compiz functions. Well.. somewhat sane.

For switching desktops on the 3D cube,

• ctrl+alt+left move to left desktop
• ctrl+alt+right move to right desktop
• ctrl+alt+down unfold desktop cube
• ctrl+alt+up move to desktop #1 (main desktop)
• ctrl+alt+shift+left move to left desktop dragging current application
• ctrl+alt+shift+right move to right desktop dragging current application

For switching applications,

• Windows key + right: switch to right application
• Windows key + left: switch to left application
• Ctrl + Windows key + right: switch to right application (across desktops)
• Ctrl + Windows key + left: switch to left application (across desktops)

• Windows key + up: application picker (local desktop)
• Ctrl + Windows key + up: application picker (across desktops)
• Alt+tab: ring switcher next (local desktop)
• Ctrl+alt+tan: rint switcher next (across desktops)

Ubuntu 8.10 Installation on Dell Vostro 1400

After having the falling out with Gentoo, and Linux in general, I’ve been using good old XP for the last 4 months or so. Sure, Linux has plenty of advantages, but it just hasn’t been worth the work to set up again. When I first started playing with Linux I wanted to learn all about the operating system, programming, etc. Now, I know about the operating system, programming, etc, and just want it to work without endless Google searches on how to work through all the bugs or spending 3 days compiling my Gentoo system. When Ubuntu 8.10 came out I decided to give Linux another chance on my laptop.

I pop the CD in, go through the install procedure, get to the prompt that says I need to restart, and then get a black screen with a little blinking white line. Hello Linux? Knock knock? Anyone there? I wait a few minutes and then press the power button, at which point it actually decides to try and shut down. It gets to the “stopping ALSA” part and then goes back to sitting there doing nothing. After a few more minutes I give up and kill the power, restart, and install some of the new device drivers and updates. The Nvidia driver seems to make things even worse, after I reboot from the updates instead of getting a blinking curser, I get a blank screen followed by pretty speckled grey, green, and red colors. That can’t be good… The good news, after the driver updates, at least the wireless works fine using the Broadcom B43 wireless driver.

A quick Google search reveals a dozen bug reports, and even more forum posts with no solutions but lots of complaints. Eventually I run across this post, https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/49799 which seems to mention some random hack on how to fix it by adding ifconfig eth0 down into the stop section of /etc/init.d/alsa-utils. It seems to work, but I’m still wondering why… Adding a command to kill my network when I disable ALSA seems like a work around I’d rather not use for long. This is a new release of Ubuntu, so I won’t complain too much about a couple installation bugs, but while Googling I found there were plenty of bug reports with this complain while 8.10 was in Beta. Hopefully Linux isn’t going with the Windows approach of releasing software before it’s ready to be released…

Moving on from that annoying little venture, I decided to update the 60 packages saying they were in need of being updated. After the new kernel was updated, I reboot, and hear a crackling/popping/fuzz coming from my speakers instead of the welcoming sound. Wonderful, now sound is broke. For those who don’t know, ALSA hates me and all my computers, and has since the days of Slackware 11 on my server. For once it wasn’t ALSA causing my troubles, but Pulse Audio. After doing a killall pulseaudio and setting all my sound settings to ALSA instead of auto detect, sound works fine. I think I’ll just uninstall pulseaudio when I get a chance, some instructions for that I found here, http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=973637

After fixing the shutdown problems and sound, things seem to be working fairly well. Compiz is awesome! In a useless sort of way. I’m not usually one for random special effects, but I’ve also never had a video card that could really run them all. This time I gave up my usual liking of fast boot times and low CPU usage and enabled every little useless compiz feature to play with. My desktop is now more of a… 3D watery sticky wobbly gliding cubetop! I think it’s giving me a headache…