Re: [avr-chat] Reprise: AVR Studio under VirtualBox, anyone?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:56:01 -0400
"Graham Davies" <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Graham,

> Installing GNU/Linux - I chose Xubuntu 8.10.

I think some of your problems could have been avoided by using the
"regular"/Gnome version of Ubuntu, as Gnome comes with tools that
apparently gnome lacks, plus the fact that the Gnome version of Ubuntu
is where Canonical (the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu) spends all of its
work force. The derivatives are often mainly put together by a single
individual doing it in his spare time. So you just can't expect as much
from a derivative, than you could from the Gnome version.
So I suggest you consider at least trying the "vanilla" Ubuntu, then if
it works better than XFCE, maybe you can get along with Gnome, over
time ;-)
You could also simply install the meta-package "ubuntu-desktop"
package in Xubuntu install, which will pull the Ubuntu Gnome desktop.
This way you will have both XFCE and gnome installed, and you can
select which one you want every time you log in. You can have any
number of desktop environmment installed.
Also, you use bits of XFCE in Gnome, and vice versa. For example, I
used to like the XFCE window manager, so I ran the XFCE window manager
in Gnome. Or the other way around: I didn't like the File manager in
XFCE, so I installed the Gnome file manager ("Nautilus") in XFCE.
What I mean is that if a particular bit of Gnom makes your life easier,
maybe it's possible to install this bit in XFCE, if really you hate
Gnome so much that you won't use it even if it solves problems that
XFCE doesn't... I am not in your shoes, only you can decide ;-)

> In spite of hours of research and using the alternate install CD, GRUB Stage 
> 1 was written over NT Loader in the Master Boot Record even though I 
> specified that this was not to happen.  Even so, I took a copy of the first 
> 512 bytes of the GNU/Linux root partition, which is where I specified that 
> GRUB should be installed.  I repaired NT Loader by reinstalling Windows XP in 
> a temporary partition and fixed up the boot.ini file to include the line 
> pointing to the file containing the 512 bytes ripped from the GNU/Linux root 
> partition.  To my surprise, this worked just fine, so now I can continue to 
> reinstall Windows XP regularly but also boot to GNU/Linux via GRUB stage 1.5 
> whenever I want.

Forgive me, but why don't you want to let GRUB take control ? It's much
more flexible and capable/clever than the windows Boot loader (which as
I understand it, is preserved, GRUB doens't overwrite it, but just
links to it. But I am no GRUB expert).
I have had several har drives with 2 linus systems and Windows XP
installed, for year. GRUB handles all 3 OS's without any fuss, the menu
is easy to customize... and besides, I don't think Windows can detect
and load Linux systems, can it ? 

> Installing VirtualBox - The Ubuntu APT repositories are not kept very 
> up-to-date

Well yes, the repositories are fixed, once the released if out. But
Ubuntu is released every 6 months, so at worst you get a 6 month old
Virtualbok or so... is there anything the shiniest version does (that
you need) that the 6 month older version doesn't ?
If it's like avr-gcc, the latest is not always the greatest ;-)

> so to get the latest VirtualBox (2.2.0) I had to
download the .deb package

To be fair, on Windows, you would have no repo at all, old or not, so
you would have to download the program from the project's website as
well ;-)

> and install using dpkg -i.  This, of course,
> left the system broken as a bunch of dependencies were not resolved,
> but I ran APT which picked this all up and repaired it nicely.

In (vanilla) Ubuntu, there is a little utility called "Gdebi". This
allows you to simply double-click on the deb package you downloaded,
and it will install it for you. It will take care of all dependies for
you : if they are in the Ubuntu repos, they will be installed
automatically for you. for those that aren't in the repo, if any, it
will tell you their name, so you can install them manually.
I was running 2.1.2 but download the latest 2.2.0 before composing this
e-mail. As expected, simply double-clicking on it installed it just
fine. All dependencies where already satisfied, so I had nothing
special to do. It is possible however, that some of these dependencies
wher einstalled manually by myself, when I installed 2.1.2... I don't
remember. So if you say you had to install some manually, I believe
you. Still, not the end of the world for technical people like us on
this list, he ?! ;-)

> Big Disappointment - The trouble is, even if this all works when I'm done, 
> I'd have to give up something I don't want to do without, which is dual 
> monitors.  The ATI video driver for GNU/Linux only supports dual monitors of 
> the same resolution.  I have a big 1600 by 1200 monitor and a secondary 1280 
> by 1024 off to the side.  This works great under Windows, but the best I can 
> do under Xubuntu is to run the big monitor at 1280 by 1024 as well.  I'm just 
> not going to be happy with this after years of 1600 by 1200.

I don't run (any more) an ATI card, nor do I use dual monitors. However
there are two levels involved in this problem I think :

1) The video driver:

There are 3 drivers for the ATI cards. 
 - The binary/closed-source/proprietary driver, called "fglrx", supplied
by ATI/AMD of course. Bugs in this driver obviously can't be fixed,
since the Linux community has no technical (nor legal) way of workig on
this driver, just like any proprietary piece of code.

 - The free/open 'radeon' driver. It's an old driver which I used a
few years ago, when I had a Radeon 9250. It worked beautifully compared
to fglrx which was so buggy it was not usable. Unfortunately it had one
downside: 3D acceleration was next to null. however I header that
recently this driver has seen a lot of activity, and that 3D rendering
as seen much performance improvement.

- Then there is a new driver, called 'radeonhd', which is currently
being written, following a sudden change, 18 months ago, from AMD, who
decided to publish all the technical datasheet (thousands of pages...)
of their recent video chips, so that the Linux community can write a
full featured and quality driver for the recent ATI cards, and those to
come. They also give access to their engineers to help.
Despite the datasheed have been handed 18 month ago, the driver is not
finished just yet, it's a huge job it seems. However it's perfectly
usable for many people, depending which model of card you have, and what
features you need. So you should give it a try.
Here is the link to the project's page:

http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd

I don't know what driver is installed by default in Xubuntu.


2) On top of that, higher up the stack: the display configuration tool.

This tool has seen recent improvement in the latest Gnome (2.26), which
has been released last month. The next release of Ubuntu will
obviously feature it (the release cycle of Ubuntu was purposefully
chosen to track closely the Gnome release cycle), and will be out in a
week or so. So you might want to upgrade to it. You can upgrade your
current install in-situ, just run the "update-manager" tool, which
will make lots of effort to ensure a smooth upgrade (unlike the
apt/aptitude/dpkg command line tools, which aren't clever enough). I
think this Ubuntu specific tool uses a command line back-end, which can
be invoked direclty, in case you don't like the GUI. But the result
is going to be exactly the same of course. I don't know for Xubuntu, but
Ubuntu will display a notification icon when the released is out,
offering to upgrade.
Have a look at the latest display configuration tool in Gnome then, in
their release notes, scroll down a bit, to the section called 
"2.6. Support for multiple monitors and projectors"

http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.26

Looks like it allows for easy configuration of multiple displays,
including rotation, so it looks elaborate enough for the most common
dual displays arrangements.


Sorry for the long message, but I thought some of the above might be of
interest, at least to some degree...


Regards,

--
Vince