Tag Archives: ThinkPad

Solve audio troubleshooting on Ubuntu and start planning to migrate to another Linux OS

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It was just a simple system update which dropped off audio on my Ubuntu 12.04. It was really strange to admit that I had experienced a crash (better: an audio crash) on a Linux but the 12.04 Ubuntu actually caused similar problems to a numerous bunch of long-term aficionados around the world.

The real problem with the last Ubuntu versions is that this OS is not supporting properly “old” hardware as it did previously during so many years. Reading some other bug reports on the web I discovered that these audio troubleshooting crashes happen principally to “old” IBM ThinkPad and Dell. I hope Ubuntu developers will consider to solve immediately these kind of issues or many users certainly migrate to other Linux version.

In any case the best and complete guide to solve audio troubleshooting has been developed by Ubuntu itself. The guide is very detailed but, if you want to definitively solve this bug, you have to spend more or less 40 (forty…. sic!) minutes and follow all the 17 (seventeen… sic!) steps.

In my case the audio was back after the first step and I decided not to follow the other instructions but the audio troubleshooting comes back, more or less, every two months. Just to you if you want to spend 40 minutes only one time or a couple of minutes every two/three months.

When I consider all the problems I had with Ubuntu on “old” hardware starting from the 12.04 version, my advice is to start thinking about a migration to another Linux OS. I am testing some Ubuntu alternatives and in the next weeks I will post something about the tests I’m doing on old laptops. Stay connected!   AddThis

How to install Ubuntu 12.04 on old computers with non PAE CPU

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When I tried to install Ubuntu 12.04 on an old ThinkPad X40 I was surprised to discover this warning on my screen:

This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU:
pae. Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.

In few words I wasn’t able to install Ubuntu 12.04 because the kernel on Ubuntu 12.04 was not supporting my CPU and I was really upset because I have always promoted Linux distributions as the most versatile and appropriate OS to keep using “old” hardware.

Sincerely, as described in an older post, I previously decided to install MATE desktop environment because the graphic cards on many laptops didn’t support Unity and Gnome 3 but this was the first time I had to renounce the installation of Ubuntu. I didn’t want to surrender to this difficulty (that appeared to me as a bug)!

First of all, I discovered that pae is “a feature to allow 32-bit x86 processors to access a physical address space (including random access memory and memory mapped devices) larger than 4 gigabytes“. After I clarified this point, I was not sure that my processor was totally inadequate to support Ubuntu 12.04.

After some web surfing I discovery that there are two easy solutions to avoid this problem.

1 – As first solution you can install Lubuntu (my choice) or Xubuntu on your computer then you can install the ubuntu-desktop using the Package Manager.

2 – If you prefer not to use the Package Manager you can install Ubuntu 11.04 or 11.10 and then upgrade Ubuntu to 12.04.

More in general, it is also possible to assume that if you have a non PAE CPU, your hardware could not be able to support the Unity desktop. For  this reason you can keep your Lubuntu – Xubuntu (based on the light but effective LXDE desktop) or switch your desktop environment to Gnome (the Classic, of course) installing the gnome package instead of ubuntu-desktop.

In any case, if you want to know if your CPU supports pae you have to open a Terminal and type:

grep --color=always -i PAE /proc/cpuinfo

If something like “flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8…” outputs on your Terminal, you have a pae CPU otherwise your CPU doesn’t support pae.  AddThis