[SOLVED] Mega problems on new laptop

[DoYouKubuntu]

I wasn't sure where to post this; mods please feel free to move to a more suitable place.

Here's my situation: I just got a new laptop, an HP dv7. It's amazing--beautiful, BIG screen, gorgeous display, full size keyboard with a numeric keypad on the right, just wonderful. Except for one thing: MANY things are not working.

When I first received it I formatted its drive (to get rid of windows) and installed Kubuntu 11.04 from a CD I'd burned. The installation was easy as can be. I manually partitioned its hard drive, choosing ext4 and creating /, /home, /data and swap partitions.

After the initial install I started adding things via Synaptic. But when I attempted to run many of these programs, such as SysInfo, they didn't run. I'd see them starting, but then they just exited. I was also having problems seeing/accessing the other computers on my network (all of which are Linux only, and most are running Kubuntu 10.10, one is running 9.10). So many things weren't working that I decided to step down a release, so I formatted / and installed Kubuntu 10.10 instead.

Again, the installation went as smoothly as can be...but I'm having the exact same problems with 10.10 as I did with 11.04, and I'm at a complete loss.

I should have mentioned it has a 640GB hard drive; I split it up as follows:

/ 50GB
/home 200GB
/data 340GB
swap 50GB

I use SeaMonkey as my browser and e-mail/news client. Within its preferences I have /data/mail as the directory where each account's mail is stored, each in its own subdirectory. I've never even SEEN this problem before, but when I fire up SeaMonkey I immediately get an error modal saying:

Unable to write the email to the mailbox. Make sure the file system allows you write privileges, and you have enough disk space to copy the mailbox.

Also, when I attempt to post to Usenet I get an error saying that saving a copy to my sent folder failed.

The files that are in /data/mail were copied from my old laptop, preserving their attributes; I definitely have read/write permissions. On my old laptop SeaMonkey works just fine. I looked online for the error message above but none of its explanations make sense for my situation.

There's 338GB of free space where the mailboxes reside. Is THAT the problem? Is it possible that Kubuntu isn't recognizing that big a partition? I thought those days were LONG gone.

I'm having major networking issues. The only way I'm able to access the other computers on my network is by using KRFB/KRDC. I can't mount their drives via fstab or command line despite doing everything exactly as usual. I can't see them in Dolphin via its 'network' link under Places; under 'network' if I choose 'Network' or 'Network Services" NOTHING happens, and if I choose 'Samba Shares' SOMETIMES some of the other computers show up and sometimes I get this error message:

Unable to find any workgroups in your local network. This may be caused by an enabled firewall.

On the rare occasions when some of the computers do show up under 'Samba Shares,' they may or may not actually be accessible.

Yet KRDC sees all the computers immediately.

Another huge problem: The computer freezes. Just, bam!, frozen solid. Everything stops--the clock, all open apps, everything except the mouse pointer which continues working both via my USB trackball and the laptop's touchpad. But nothing is selectable. In other words, the pointer moves but I can't actually DO anything. Sometimes, after 3, 4, 5 minutes it unfreezes, other times I have no choice but to do a hard reset. (If I wanted to reboot due to system freezes, I'd use windows!)

The brightness keys do nothing. With my previous laptop, also an HP, all of its function buttons worked, but with this one, although the onscreen display comes on and shows that the brightness is being adjusted up or down, NOTHING actually happens.

I'm beyond unhappy and frustrated right now. I've got this amazing laptop but instead of being able to get some work done I'm stuck trying to figure out all these flaky problems.

Oh, another thing. I tried installing GNOME via Synaptic (I'm not a GNOME fan, but figured I'd try it and see if any of these problems disappeared), but it fails with messages that "depends on [whatever] but it's not going to be installed"--even when I HAVE checked the specific things for installation. So I can't even get GNOME installed to give it a try.

Sorry for the ridiculous length of this post but I wanted to cover all the issues I'm having. Any help and/or advice will be greatly appreciated!

[oshunluvr]

Re: Mega problems on new laptop

The length of the post is less of an issue than the mixed bag of issues, but we're here so let's get started!

No, Kubuntu doesn't have issues with large partitions. I have one at 2TB. The permission problem you're having likely is because you're using a mounted partition with the wrong ownership or permissions. I would start by unmounting /data, giving yourself full access to the mountpoint, add "users" to the fstab mount options, re-mount it and try again. Also, just because you copied the files over from a previous install doesn't mean you have the same UID/GID so verify that too.

BTW: 50gb swap is waaay overkill unless you're making movies for Pixar!

The "network" issues you're having are less related to networking and more to file-sharing. Networking allows file sharing, but file-sharing isn't "included" in networking - you have to set it up. Unless you're also using windows machines, forget Samba and read up on NFS. However, I'm not going further on this here - please post a separate topic in Networking for help.

Same goes for Multimedia (brightness) keys, KWIN (your desktop) lockups, and dependency issues - these topics are too diverse to address in a single thread.

My suggestion: Rather than tackling all these issue at once and potentially ramping up your frustration even further, prioritize them and address them one at a time. It seems to me the Desktop lockup is the most important, followed by email, file sharing, multimedia keys, then gnome - but thats just my suggestion.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: Mega problems on new laptop

The length of the post is less of an issue than the mixed bag of issues, but we're here so let's get started!

I tend to explain things in great detail so I don't have to keep coming back later and clarifying things!

No, Kubuntu doesn't have issues with large partitions. I have one at 2TB.

Like I said, I THOUGHT those days were long gone.

The permission problem you're having likely is because you're using a mounted partition with the wrong ownership or permissions. I would start by unmounting /data, giving yourself full access to the mountpoint, add "users" to the fstab mount options, re-mount it and try again.

Thanks, but I'd already checked all of that. I definitely have full access.

Also, just because you copied the files over from a previous install doesn't mean you have the same UID/GID so verify that too.

But I've been doing this for years...actually decades. My SeaMonkey mail has followed me from the first iteration of Netscape Communicator, and I've never had any issues. After encountering the problems I described I chmoded, chowned and chgrped the mail directory, recursively, to make sure permission problems were not the issue, but without success. I can write directly to the /data partition without issue; it's ONLY SeaMonkey that's giving me problems.

BTW: 50gb swap is waaay overkill unless you're making movies for Pixar!

Yeah, I know! But I actually work with very large image files, and with all that space I figured what the hell!

The "network" issues you're having are less related to networking and more to file-sharing. Networking allows file sharing, but file-sharing isn't "included" in networking - you have to set it up. Unless you're also using windows machines, forget Samba and read up on NFS. However, I'm not going further on this here - please post a separate topic in Networking for help.

But I did everything I normally do on a clean install to enable/allow file sharing and 'seeing' other computers...but it's not working.

Same goes for Multimedia (brightness) keys, KWIN (your desktop) lockups, and dependency issues - these topics are too diverse to address in a single thread.

You're probably right about that. I'll try to break them down and put them in their threads.

My suggestion: Rather than tackling all these issue at once and potentially ramping up your frustration even further, prioritize them and address them one at a time. It seems to me the Desktop lockup is the most important, followed by email, file sharing, multimedia keys, then gnome - but thats just my suggestion.

Good suggestions. Also, I know my entire reply sounds like I'm disagreeing with you, but that's really not how it's meant. I'm merely stating that I've done all the things I normally do on a clean install--which I've done so many times over the years I can do them in my sleep--and I'm baffled as to why they're not working as I've gotten used to. Like the function keys on my new laptop--NO WAY did I see that coming! The laptop this is replacing is 4-1/2 years old but all of its function keys worked as expected, so I assumed it would be the same on the new laptop. I was wrong!

[charles052]

Re: Mega problems on new laptop

My wife has a HP DV7 which is running 10.4. I've had very little problems out of it at all. Runs smooth as smooth can be. It has a AMD Turion dual core and 4 gigs of RAM. Pretty powerful for being 2 years old or older.

I always like to stick with AMD for some reason. Only had one Intel computer back in the Pentium 4 days. I can't say they're any better or worse, but that's what I stick with.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: Mega problems on new laptop

My wife has a HP DV7 which is running 10.4. I've had very little problems out of it at all. Runs smooth as smooth can be. It has a AMD Turion dual core and 4 gigs of RAM. Pretty powerful for being 2 years old or older.

I always like to stick with AMD for some reason. Only had one Intel computer back in the Pentium 4 days. I can't say they're any better or worse, but that's what I stick with.

Mine's Intel, and it has 6GB of RAM, and I now realize I should have specified that it's a dv7t. Regardless, most of my issues are now resolved. Here's what happened...

Things went from bad to worse, and I decided to wipe the drive and start over. But before doing anything I asked myself, "what's different?" as far as anything that might be responsible for the problems I was having. The only thing I could think of was that I had chosen ext4 as the file system; up until now I've always gone with ext3. So when I reinstalled I changed the file system to ext3 and formatted all of the partitions. Then I did a clean install of 11.04. Voila! Almost every issue I had is now resolved. The ONLY thing left is the brightness control...er, lack thereof. I'm now happily mounting all of my networked drives via fstab, happily sending/receiving e-mail with no issues in SeaMonkey, happily not having any lockups, and so on. In other words, I'm a happy camper! Now if I could just figure out why I can't control the brightness, I'd be thrilled.

[oshunluvr]

Re: [SOLVED] Mega problems on new laptop

That's totally odd, but great

Try xbacklight -get in a terminal (you may have to install it) and see if there's any output. This should tell us if your backlight control is detected by the kernel.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: [SOLVED] Mega problems on new laptop

That's totally odd, but great

I know, it doesn't even make any sense, but I don't care! I'm just THRILLED beyond description that my amazing, FAST new laptop is living up to its expectations.

Try xbacklight -get in a terminal (you may have to install it) and see if there's any output. This should tell us if your backlight control is detected by the kernel.

Okay, just installed and ran it...here's the output:

0.000000

[oshunluvr]

Re: [SOLVED] Mega problems on new laptop

It's saying 0% brightness or OFF. Obviously, it's not connecting to your backlight.

What is your video card and are you using the latest driver for it?

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: [SOLVED] Mega problems on new laptop

It's saying 0% brightness or OFF. Obviously, it's not connecting to your backlight.

Since wiping the drive and starting over, the brightness buttons no longer cause the onscreen display to come on. I hadn't realized that when I posted earlier. I was watching to see if the brightness was going up or down, and didn't even notice that the onscreen display is no longer there. So now I'm actually worse off than I was before--but ONLY with this one remaining issue. Again, I'm thrilled that everything else is resolved.

What is your video card

Here are the full specs on my new laptop:

HP Pavilion dv7t customizable Notebook PC

  * • dark umber
  * • Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit ---> HA!! Not in my house!
  * • 2nd generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2310M Processor (2.1 GHz, 3MB L3 Cache)
  * • Intel(R) HD Graphics 3000 [HDMI, VGA]
  * • FREE Upgrade to 6GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
  * • FREE Upgrade to 640GB 5400RPM Hard Drive with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
  * • No Additional Office Software
  * • No additional security software
  * • 6-Cell Lithium-Ion Battery (standard) - Up to 5.25 hours of battery life +++
  * • 17.3" diagonal HD+ HP BrightView LED Display (1600 x 900)
  * • SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-R/RW with Double Layer Support
  * • HP TrueVision HD Webcam with Integrated Digital Microphone + HP SimplePass Fingerprint Reader
  * • Intel 802.11b/g/n WLAN with Wireless Display Support
  * • Standard Keyboard with numeric keypad

and are you using the latest driver for it?

I did not install anything for it; immediately after installing 11.04 I ran the "Additional Drivers" thingie and it reported that "No proprietary drivers are in use on this system."

[oshunluvr]

Re: [SOLVED] Mega problems on new laptop

Check this out:


https://launchpad.net/~kamalmostafa/...l-mjgbacklight


All my laptops' brightness work so I can't help much more than this, sorry. I would suggest a new thread with a specific title to generate more expert interest. Good Luck.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: [SOLVED] Mega problems on new laptop

Check this out:

https://launchpad.net/~kamalmostafa/...l-mjgbacklight

All my laptops' brightness work so I can't help much more than this, sorry. I would suggest a new thread with a specific title to generate more expert interest. Good Luck.

Thanks for the link. Unfortunately, it says that it may not solve the issue on KDE, only GNOME. But maybe I'll install GNOME just for the hell of it and see if the brightness control works. Also--and this again makes no sense--SOMETIMES the onscreen display works and sometimes it doesn't. No idea why!

[oshunluvr]

Re: [SOLVED] Mega problems on new laptop

The "sometimes" part of it makes me think something os crashing/failing. Start looking through logs immediately after you attempt brightness changes and see if anything appears.