Trouble with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Over the last few days I have upgraded my family's computers from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04.   I had been getting a bit over-confident at how good Ubuntu was, and so was not really worried about things going wrong during the upgrade, as I would have been in the past - it had been getting to the state that it 'just worked'.   So I made the mistake of doing the upgrade over a weekend when we were particularly busy, which meant it was a particular pain when things went wrong.   The issues we have had are:

1. Our PackardBell OneTwo was un-useable - booted to a black screen - didn't have chance to work out why so I just saved some logs to report the bug later, and re-installed 11.10.
2. My home server (my old Fujitsu Amilio laptop) appeared to upgrade without problems...but every time I tried to access it, it was dead.   I think it was suspending, even though I had set the power settings to never suspend.   Have tried leaving the lid open, with me logged in, with the screen blanked - seemed to be working when I left - need to work out what was going on there....

Ubuntu Linux on a Packard Bell OneTwo - Update

The Packard Bell OneTwo touch screen computer has not been used for quite a while, so I decided to start using it rather than my daughter's PC, because it uses a lot less power and is quieter.

The main issues from when I tried it before were:

• Screen flicker every now and then
• Touch screen calibration issues.

We installed Ubuntu 11.10 on it as a clean install.  Went pretty well.  The issues were:

1. Used a normal screen shape rather than wide screen.   Solved this by going to the settings / display menu and changing to a 16:10 aspect ratio screen resolution.
2. Touch Screen Calibration:  This took a while to solve because when you pressed the screen the mouse pointer appeared at a different position.  Eventually I traced it to the display settings that I had altered - Although there is only one monitor on the computer, the software detects two displays (there must be tv-out hardware in the box, but no connector outside).  I had un-clicked the 'mirror displays' option and this had resulted in the two screens being shown side by side.  I didn't think anything of it as there is no monitor connected to the second, but it confused the touch screen calibration - switching the un-used display to 'off' solved it and the touch screen calibration is fine now.
3. Multi-Touch:  The touch screen works just like a mouse.  I think it should be able to cope with multiple touches so you can do 'pinch' gestures etc. to re-size windows.  This is not working.   I tried using the mtview utility as described in the Ubuntu wiki, and it seems like multi touch is working - you can draw with two fingers at the same time, but the window manager does not seem to be using them.

Therefore, Ubuntu 11.10 worked much better 'out of the box' than the previous version I had tried - the main missing thing is multi-touch support for the touch screen.  This is an important one to fix for me because our son is VERY short sighted, and looks very closely at the screen, often pressing his forehead against it.  Once he has done that, the touch screen does not work because it only detects one press at a time!   I am going to have to learn how x windows input devices work to debug this I think.....

Ubuntu Linux on a Packard Bell OneTwo

This post is a record of me getting Ubuntu Linux (Release 10.10 - Maverick) running on our new Packard Bell OneTwo all-in-one touch screen PC.   I will update it as I make progress fixing the bits that have caused problems.

Installation
Installation was pretty easy - I booted of an Ubuntu 10.10 USB memory stick, and selected manual disk partitioning.
I kept the Windows 7 partition (/dev/sda1) unchanged, and did not touch the other two windows partitions (/dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3).   I deleted the blank 'Data' partition (/dev/sda4) and created a new swap partition (/dev/sda5) and ext4 root partition (/dev/sda6).
Installation went without problem and the machine now dual boots Ubuntu and Windows 7.

Note that I did have a funny happening yesterday when the machine completely refused to boot after I had been using windows.  I fixed this by booting off the USB memory stick and re-installing grub as described in a previous post - This has not happened again.

Audio
Worked out of the box.

Video
Ubuntu did not detect the correct screen size initially - it used a normal aspect ratio rather than wide screen, so only the centre of the screen was used, and the touch screen calibration was way out - this is because it thinks it has two displays (I don't know where the second is - there is no VGA or s-video connector on the back).
This was fixed by going to the System->Preferences->Monitor menu and un-checking the "Same image in all monitors" option.
You can then drag the main screen (labelled "Laptop") away from the second (labelled "Unknown") and set the laptop resolution to 1600x900 resolution.

This makes the screen the correct size, but every now and then it flickers twice within less than a second - it seems that the screen backlight dims momentarily before coming back to full brightness.  This seems to be associated with disk activity - I don't know what causes this - it does not do it in Windows - Any suggestions for fixing it would be appreciated!.

Touch Screen
I was impressed that the touch screen worked 'out of the box' once I had fixed the monitor resolution issue.
Update 01/01/2011 - I decided to do a clean install of Ubuntu 10.10, just in case I had mangled it installing different testing packages going through bugs on launchpad.   Having done the install and updating all packages using update manager, the touch screen is working perfectly - pressing the screen is the same as moving the mouse to the location and left click - Success!!!! (I hope!)  - Ok, I'll give it a couple of days to make sure it doesn't beak before I say success.

Unfortunately there are problems with it.   It seems that once you have done a 'drag' using the touch screen, x-windows thinks the mouse button is still pressed - moving the real mouse changes the shape of the drag region, and worse still, the real mouse button stops working.   Sometimes the keyboard stops working too (both mouse and keyboard are wireless, using a USB receiver)


Investigations so far:

sudo apt-get install input-utils

provides a program called 'lsinput'.  Doing

sudo lsinput

lists the touch screen as:

/dev/input/event6

   bustype : BUS_USB

   vendor  : 0x408

   product : 0x3001

   version : 272

   name    : "PixArt Imaging Inc. Optical Touc"

   phys    : "usb-0000:00:1a.2-1/input0"

   uniq    : ""

   bits ev : EV_SYN EV_KEY EV_ABS EV_MSC

Installing multi-touch utilities by doing:

sudo apt-get install utouch libutouch-grail-dev utouch-grail-tools

sudo apt-get install mtdev-tools

bzr branch lp:~utouch-team/utouch/mtview

cd mtview

make

Provides amongst other things a utility called mtview.  Running that lets you draw pretty patterns on the screen using multi touch - it certainly seems capable of detecting and tracking two fingers at once.

Given this I think the touch screen is basically working, and it is the interface to x-windows that is the problem.

I'll have to work out how x-windows drivers work to fix this though....

I will update this section as I investigate further.

Web Cam
Not tested.

Trouble with Ubuntu and Windows 7 dual boot

I just had a surprising problem with our new Packard Bell OneTwo.   While it had apparently worked fine after installing Ubuntu on a spare partition in the hard drive, I booted it under its original Windows 7 operating system this morning to test benjamin's program with windows.
It worked fine, but after it had been switched off it absolutely refused to boot - no error messages or anything.
Went into the bios settings to take off quite boot and quick boot, but still no errors.
It booted off the Ubuntu live CD ok, and I could mount the linux root partition.

My best guess was that the boot loader was mangled, so I re-installed grub by doing:

sudo mount /dev/sda6 /mnt      [sda6 is my root partition]

grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

 This worked ok with no errors, and re-booting the machine gave the familiar grub boot menu.   Ubuntu booted ok...we'll see if it works after I use Windows next time - I suspect it was Windows that killed the boot loader!

Packard Bell OneTwo with Linux

Our son, Benjamin is autistic and has severe learning disabilities. Persuading him to do anything other than his current 'favourite' activity is really difficult. We took him to a light room today and I was impressed that he showed signs of interacting with a white square which lit up where you touched it. Laura and I started to think about making him one. It looks quite difficult because as well as the hardware to mount all of the lights we will need a touch sensitive panel and produce some software to drive it. For this reason I started to think about going for a purely software solution instead - just use a simple computer and a touch sensitive monitor.

I have contacted a couple of suppliers to see what they can do, but the first quote for a whole panel PC (which would be neat - no wires!) was very expensive £1620 for a 32" one.

An alternative would be to go for something smaller - HP and Acer make 23" all-in-one touch screen PCs for <£800k, which is still quite a lot, but getting better.

PC World and Currys are selling a 20" touch sensitive monitor for £180 which is more like the price I was thinking of, but I will need to add a computer, which will mean wires. I do have a little netbook which I don't use anymore, which could do the job though, so I may try this and just invest in a bigger one if he seems interested.

When I went to PC World today they did not have any of the monitors, but they did have a Packard Bell OneTwo all in one PC with touch sensitive screen.  This was £599 so I decided to give it a go, because at least it meant no wires.

I downloaded Ubuntu 10.10 onto a USB memory stick and installed it in the spare 'Data' partition on the drive (I actually deleted the data partition and re-created a 10GB swap partition and the rest as a ext4 filesystem to use for the ubuntu filesystem.   The install went ok, and grub appears to give me the option of booting windows (I haven't tried yet).

The most noticeable thing was that the screen resolution was not very good, and it was not using the widescreen aspect ratio.   I fixed this by going to the monitor settings in the ubuntu system menu and un-clicking the 'mirror' option - it seemed to think it has two monitors, one of which is low resolution.  Once I had de-selected that option I could select the resolution of the main monitor (called 'laptop' in this case).   Now that is done it looks better, and the touch screen appears to be working.

For more information on my experiences using Linux on the Packard Bell OneTwo, see my other blog entries, in particular http://nerdytoad.blogspot.com/2010/12/ubuntu-linux-on-packard-bell-onetwo.html.

My daughter Laura and I are working on the applications for Benjamin to use - I am doing the code and she is on graphics at the moment.

The application is at an early stage, but the outline can be downloaded using

svn co https://ntmisc.googlecode.com/svn/benApp

There will be more about this application as we work on it and try to get Benjamin interested in it.