More problems with Ubuntu 10.04 on Samsung N510

More problems with Ubuntu 10.04 on Samsung N510

My main laptop’s hard disk died at the weekend, so I started migrating all my data to my Samsung N510 netbook (thank goodness for backups). Unfortunately, I hit this Ubuntu 10.04 bug, which meant my netbook was crashing sporadically when I ran lots of programs – firefox and thunderbird simultaneously:

Bug #539482: Page allocation failures on Dell E5500

I tried installing mainline 2.6.34 kernel builds, as described by the Ubuntu Wiki Kernel/MainlineBuilds page. The 2.6.34 kernel seemed to hang the netbook hard.

Instead, I decided to try a backport of the Ubuntu Maverick kernel, as mentioned on Ubuntu Updates Lucid kernel page. I installed the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kernel-ppa/ppa

sudo aptitude update

sudo aptitude install linux-image-generic-lts-backport-maverick linux-headers-generic-lts-backport-maverick

The current backport kernel is 2.6.35-19-generic.

The boot process appeared to hang, so I disabled the boot splash screen, by editing /etc/default/grub:


#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

and then ran sudo update-grub.

I also had to build the module for the wireless chipset – Realtek 8192 PCI wireless – because the built-in wireless driver in 2.6.35 does not appear to work with my WPA-enabled access point. That is a story for another blog post… In the meantime, I have seen reports that switching the access point from WPA+WPA2 to just WPA mode helps.

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