Here are a few Ubuntu 9.04 annoyances that I finally got around to addressing:
Constant “routine” disk checks on boot
Ubuntu 9.04 is lauded by critics for its improved boot times, and in most cases my machines running it boot to the login screen in less than 45 seconds. This is a solid improvement and it’s supposed to be under 10 seconds by the release of 10.04. The improved boot time in 9.04 is great: when I turn my computer on, I want to use it, not wait for an hour while the hard drive clicks and groans and the mouse cursor spins endlessly. It’s all well and good except that about every tenth boot takes forever thanks to an annoying disk checking routine. Are drive failures really that common that my drive has to be picked over by a fine-toothed comb every week? If so, a new storage technology is desperately needed. In the past 20 years or so, I’ve only had one memorable drive failure.
So, to fix the irritating disk checks on boot:
sudo tune2fs -c 0 /dev/s
-c specifies the rate at which your disk is checked on boot and /dev/sda1 is your boot partition.
PC Speaker
Aside from the Caps Lock key, the PC speaker is an extremely annoying and useless “feature” of nearly every PC. Depending on your configuration, quite a few things can cause the PC speaker to beep, such as hitting backspace in a console when you haven’t typed anything. For some reason, when I shut down the computer using the Gnome shut down menu, I get several beeps from the PC speaker. This appears to be a bug. The best solution appears to be preventing the PC speaker module from loading at all. Create a blacklist file in /etc/modprobe.d called blacklist-custom.conf:
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-custom.conf
Then, add the following line to blacklist-custom.conf, save the file, and exit:
blacklist pcspkr
This will cause the “pcspkr” module not to load on boot. You can unload the module without rebooting by running the following in a terminal window:
sudo modprobe -r pcspkr
Update Manager Pop-under
Update nags are one of the worst “features” of many current operating systems. On Windows XP, I am spammed by a torrent of nag balloons forcing me to install updates and restart when the installation is complete. In OS X, a similar update manager jumps out at me in the dock until I deal with it. Until 9.04, Ubuntu had it right. In previous versions of Ubuntu, a small notification balloon would appear once and go away when new updates were available to install. I could either click on it to install the updates, or ignore it if I was in the middle of something. Now, what happens is about ten minutes after turning on my computer, which is right about the time I really get to working on something, the whole system grinds to a halt with the hard drive going nuts. Then, the Update Manager window opens underneath all the windows I have running, blinking and nagging at me to install whatever it found.
To go back to the original notification window functionality, run the following in a terminal window:
gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false
Force Shutdown
When I click the “Shut Down” button to turn off my computer, I want it to turn off. No exceptions. Instead, if Firefox takes its merry time to save its session or something is running in the background (mounted drive through nfs or samba that won’t unmount), I get a nice “x is not responding. Logout anyway?” prompt. I don’t care if something isn’t responding: kill everything and shut down. To force shutdowns, edit your menu.lst:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
Scroll down and add “acpi=force noapic” to the kernel line of the default boot option:
title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
uuid f9d46e73-4aae-4203-ad97-93df87196054
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=... ro quiet splash acpi=force noapic
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet
Recent Comments