Ubuntu 15.10: Some post installation fix

After upgrading my desktop computer to Ubuntu-Gnome 15.10 I went on with installing software packages I needed and it took me a while to notice there were problems in my network disk mounts. I had the configuration copied from the previously backed-up “fstab” configuration file. Everything was working fine before upgrading but in the new installation the system started with the configured Samba shares unavailable. Manually re-executing the mount sequence (with command “sudo mount -a”) solved the problem until next reboot.

I checked the system log and got the following error message:

…
Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 kernel: [ 20.826880] CIFS VFS: Error connecting to socket. Aborting operation.

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 kernel: [ 20.827770] CIFS VFS: Error connecting to socket. Aborting operation.

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 mount[680]: mount error(101): Network is unreachable

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 mount[680]: Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 kernel: [ 20.828593] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -101

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 systemd[1]: media-nas.mount: Mount process exited, code=exited status=32

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 systemd[1]: Failed to mount /media/nas.

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 systemd[1]: Dependency failed for Remote File Systems.

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 systemd[1]: remote-fs.target: Job remote-fs.target/start failed with result 'dependency'.

Jan 3 11:15:05 veritons661 systemd[1]: media-nas.mount: Unit entered failed state.
…

Apparently, during the boot process, the system tried to mount network drives before the network was up and ready. I quickly discovered I wasn't alone with my problem, AskUbuntu pages offered some solutions. The first I tried, using the “_netdev” mount option in order to force the system to wait for the network to be ready, didn't work for me. The second solution has been configuring the network shares to be mounted only at the first access using “noauto” and “x-systemd.automount” mount options.

Here is how my “fstab” configuration looks like:

…
# NAS

//192.168.0.110/sh_maxx /media/nas cifs noauto,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.device-timeout=3,uid=maxx,credentials=/home/maxx/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

# Public

//192.168.0.110/public /media/public cifs noauto,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.device-timeout=3,guest,uid=maxx,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0
…

The network shares are now correctly mounted and there is no noticeable delay at first access. Only Nautilus seems to have been driven a little crazy about it since it shows drive icons doubled.

More Mint 12 tuning on the EEEPC 900

After installing Linux Mint 12 on the EEEPC and fixing some immediate post installation issues my netbook has been working fine in all but one last thing. When running on battery power the EEEPC often warned the battery being near to full discharge. Sometimes the computer went in automatic power off even with the battery almost fully charged.

It's no new that the early EEEPCs battery aren't properly recognized on most of Linux distributions. That's because of the buggy way EEEPC BIOS handles ACPI, I noticed it since I first installed Ubuntu years ago, but it usually never been a problem apart from some meaningless estimation of the battery duration.

Linux Mint (on the EEEPC): fixing some post-installation issues

The installation (upgrade) of Linux Mint 12 on my EEEPC left the system with some little problem to be solved together with many applications that had to be reinstalled. Not all of these problems are Mint-specific since one, at least, hat its solution reported on a Ubuntu forum. And I'm not also sure if these problems appears after upgrading from Ubuntu to Mint 12 or after a fresh installation too. By the way all have been solved with a couple of shell commands. I spent more time looking for solutions than executing them, so I hope it might be useful to have them all in the same page.

Missing Windows boot option

The first thing I noticed once I rebooted the EEEPC just after installing Linux Mint was that the Windows boot opting was missing from the Grub boot menu. After a brief looking for it in the 'net I did find on Mint forum a couple of commands to solve it:

sudo os-prober

sudo update-grub