Thus I should happily use CPAN to add any modules I might need. Maybe not the most secure thing in the world to run as root, but that’s the expected way to do it…

Turns out there is still a hiccup, but apparently just with Xcode 4: there is no ppc assembler on the system, but Perl is configured to expect one. Fortunately others have already figured this out — the full problem and a fix are presented in Perl and Xcode 4.

I guess I should be backing up the list of installed Perl modules somehow.

My research led me to KeyRemap4MacBook. It comes with a kernel driver that lets you map any key presses you like, in one or more applications, on one or more keyboards. All this power is configurable in XML and selectable through a preference panel applet.

I haven’t fixed my Windows keys yet (partially because I realized I might want to keep Alt as Alt, instead of using Cmd), but I have added a binding to switch keyboard layouts using a combination similar to the one used on Windows: Command + Left Shift (or Shift + Left Command, if you prefer). As far as your muscle memory is concerned, this maps to Alt + Left Shift on a PC keyboard.

I switch between the Finnish and US English layouts, so I also needed to add support for the Finnish input mode. This is why I added the bindings in checkbox.xml instead of private.xml (see patch) — you could add similar entries in the latter file for the input modes you need.

Update: My patch has been merged upstream and is included in version 7.2.47 and later.

Turns out that insserv(8) isn’t happy on Ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04, so now vmware-config-tools.pl falls back to using update-rc.d(8). However, since old rc.d links have been left behind, update-rc.d won’t do anything at all. On top of that vmware-config-tools.pl calls it incorrectly.

Before running vmware-config-tools.pl or vmware-tools-upgrader first remove all the rc.d links:

cd /etc
rm -f rc?.d/*vmware-tools

On one of my systems I had multiple links at each run level, with different priorities, left behind from earlier VMware Tools installations. I guess regular manual inspection of the state of the links is warranted.

You may also want to apply this patch to vmware-config-tools.pl before running it:

--- vmware-config-tools.pl.orig 2010-06-06 19:45:49.176241344 -0400
+++ vmware-config-tools.pl      2010-06-06 20:25:56.000000000 -0400
@@ -1495,7 +1495,7 @@
    if ($gHelper{'update-rc.d'} ne '') {
      if (0 == system(shell_string($gHelper{'update-rc.d'}) . " " . $service
                     . " start " . $S_level . " S ."
-                     . " start " . $K_level . " 0 6 .")) {
+                     . " stop " . $K_level . " 0 6 .")) {
        return;
      }
    }

If your Linux kernel is 2.6.32 or later, the vmci module probably isn’t compiling for you either. Unpack the sources:

cd /tmp
tar -xvf /usr/lib/vmware-tools/modules/source/vmci.tar

Then apply this patch:

--- vmci-only.old/vmciKernelIf.c        2010-05-07 00:11:18.000000000 -0400
+++ vmci-only/vmciKernelIf.c    2010-06-06 20:39:40.693377830 -0400
@@ -44,6 +44,7 @@
 #include "compat_page.h"
 #include "compat_mm.h"
 #include "compat_highmem.h"
+#include "compat_sched.h"
 #include "vm_basic_types.h"
 #include "pgtbl.h"
 #include <linux/vmalloc.h>

Then replace the source tar with the patched files:

cd /tmp
tar -cvf /usr/lib/vmware-tools/modules/source/vmci.tar vmci-only

Now run vmware-config-tools.pl and everything should compile fine and you should have good start and stop links in your rc.d directories. Note that a start link is only installed in run level S: that’s okay, as according to the documentation that level is always run on boot. Seems to hold true, as the tools are now loaded fine on my systems.

The fix is controversial: I’m disabling STUN.

gconftool-2 -s /apps/ekiga/general/nat/stun_server --type=string

However, this means Ekiga won’t work from less “intelligent” networks anymore. Since I’m considering Ekiga for my laptop, this might be a problem. Maybe I should try X-Lite under Wine.

When debugging the issue, I saw that a ping running on the system would often just sit there, not sending more packets, sometimes for seconds on end (I didn’t always wait to see if it would ever continue). Since hitting a key on the keyboard would immediately be echoed back, it wasn’t a problem with the terminal or ssh connection. Pinging the system from another would work without problems. Interrupting ping would report no packet loss (which was true — you can’t lose replies to packets you didn’t send).

My best guess is that the alternative scheduler chosen by the Ubuntu developers for the server kernels doesn’t work as intended on AMD CPUs (or just the Athlon XP, or some other part of the hardware I’m using).

My “fix” was to switch to Debian 5.0 (lenny), which doesn’t exhibit this problem at all.

I could have tried with the desktop edition of Ubuntu, but can’t really spare the time right now. Especially since I now have something that works reliably again.

I did try with different network hardware, though. I was originally using an SMC card based on ns83820 (but for some reason not reporting anything at all with ethtool — works fine with the gsip driver on NetBSD). I then switched to a Netwjork “brand” card based on r8169 (well liked by ethtool). No difference, but stayed with the latter (working ethtool is always nice).

aptitude install asterisk
m-a a-i zaptel
modprobe ztdummy

Also add ztdummy to /etc/modules so it gets loaded when the system starts.

If the m-a command is not found, install the module-assistant package.

Yesterday I ran into a problem, though, which was only saved by having remote console access. I have a system with a slightly more complicated disk setup: it has two SCSI disks running as a RAID 1 array using md and lvm. Upon rebooting after the upgrade, the system didn’t reappear on the network. What I found on the console was the initramfs panic shell: the root file system had not been found. Rebooting the old etch kernel worked fine.

The workaround proved to be very simple, once I distilled it from the search engine results. Just add rootdelay=10 to the kernel options in the bootloader. I’m using GRUB so this translates to editing the kopt line in /boot/grub/menu.lst and running update-grub.

I had also added raid1 to modules in /etc/initramfs-tools and regenerated the initrd, but that (alone) didn’t help. I’m not even sure it is needed at all — it might already be included anyway when using MODULES=most in initramfs.conf.