Problems With 64bit Ubuntu Edgy

I've got two work machines -- an Acer Ferrari 3400 (AMD Opteron) laptop and a Dell Dimension 8200 (Pentium 4) -- each with a triple boot setup, capable of booting into Windows Xp, Solaris or Ubuntu Linux.

Up until yesterday morning, I had Ubuntu Dapper Drake and an old build (#34) of Solaris Nevada. Time to upgrade to the latest and greatest.

I downloaded .iso images for the Ubuntu Edgy 64 bit CDROM and the Solaris Nevada build #51 x86 DVD and burned media.

I first booted the Ubuntu Live CD, and then double clicked on the "Install to disk" icon on the desktop. The installation is wonderfully painless. On my 32bit Dell, Edgy works smoothly. Not on my Ferrari though.

After it had spent 20-30 minutes installing the software on the CDROM to the hard disk, it came up with the dialog that gives you two options:

• Continue working from the Live CD.
• Reboot Now.

When it rebooted it had the following error:

/dev/hda2: The filesystem size (according to the superblock) is 9769528 blocks
The physical size of the device is 9766512 blocks
Either the superblock or the partition table is likely to be corrupt!

/dev/hda2: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN fsck MANUALLY.
       (i.e., without -a or -p options)
fsck died with exit status 4

It then throws me into a maintenance shell to run fsck manually. That doesn't help. /dev/hda2 I believe is my Solaris partition. Ubuntu doesn't seem to grok it.

I've been unable to fix this. (I'm not even sure it's a real problem). If somebody knows the appropriate commands to run, please let me know. Maybe there is a way of making it just ignore this file system, although it would be really nice to see the files in this partition from a Nautilus window on my desktop, like I can for my Windows partition.

I do have one other problem though. It appear that it hasn't been able to properly configure the network. At least that's what I assume it means with the little "Network Connection:" icon in the top gnome-panel that has a red "No Entry" symbol against it. When I click it, I get a popup with:

Please contact your system administrator to resolve the
following problem:

    SIOCGIFFLAGS error: No such device

                                            [Close]

The Solaris Nevada installation was mostly uneventful. If you are doing an upgrade install instead of a full install, I noticed that it no longer installs the Solaris GRUB loader, so I had to run that manually via a single user shell from the boot DVD before hand (thanks Detlef!), otherwise the recently installed Ubuntu GRUB loader (which knows nothing about Solaris) would have been active.

After the upgrade was complete, I then had to merge in the new Ubuntu boot lines (from a previously saved copy of the Ubuntu /boot/grub/menu.lst) into the Solaris /boot/grub/menu.lst so that Ubuntu would be recognized as a valid boot option.

Which nicely brings me to my next point. While I'm venting I have two more complaints.

1. The Ubuntu GRUB loader doesn't recognize Solaris partitions. I thought we (Sun) had a strategic business alliance with the Ubuntu folks. Can't somebody slip the usual brown bag full of used fivers behind the stalls in the men's restroom and get this fixed?

2. The need to have special 64bit libraries. With Orca, there is a very nice text-to-speech engine that we use called DECtalk. There is only a set of 32bit libraries for Linux. They don't work on 64bit Ubuntu. We can't persuade the company that owns DECtalk ( Fonix), to generate a set of 64bit Linux libraries. There isn't enough demand for them.

   Maybe there is a way of faking 32bit libraries under Linux so that they'll work on a 64bit system. If there is, I wish I knew how to do it. The fact that Ubuntu has separate media for the 32bit and 64bit versions of their operating system suggests that this isn't possible.

   Needless to say, you only need one set of DECtalk libraries on Solaris "x86" (32 bit or 64 bit). They just work.

I'm going to the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Mountain View next week. I'll take along my Ferrari. Perhaps some Ubuntu engineer will take pity on me and fixup whatever is wrong with my installed Ubuntu distro.

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( Nov 01 2006, 06:06:15 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [12]