So I’ve been running gutsy on my main machine, eg. my laptop (thinkpad z61t) probably since July. In fact it’s been so long that I forgot exactly how long ago I decided to take the plunge. I always run pre-releases way before there even is an iso for it. What I do is give an the current development release one or two months to get all the crazy changes in, the new glibc/gcc/toolchain/what_not to get in, and then I’m on the band wagon.
With the 6 month Ubuntu release cycle that comes out to be 4 or 5 months out of the 6. In real life, I don’t like to consider my self crazy, just eccentric.
With this comes a few benefits like being able to play with the latest gnome/desktop apps… basically all the time. And it isn’t without downsides. I remember a few of them like a broken libc, all my fonts being rectangle outlines, non working sound, wireless you name it. If I’m particularly busy I’ll go a week or two without upgrading my bleeding edge ubuntu, just so i’m not up till 4am getting my machine working. That’s only sometimes.
There’s two “weird” things that happen when you run a pretty much bleeding edge distro all the time. One is the steady stream of improvements, many of which are quickly forgotten and replaced by the feature/improvement of the week. So once release rolls around there aren’t many distinctive new improvements one can point to. The second one is a mild annoyance when having to work with a (someone elses’) machine that isn’t the current bleeding edge version. All of us share the pain when we run an application and it’s missing some feature or has some bug that’s been fixed since in a new version… that we already used. For some reason, even the tiniest polish or more like the lack of thereof is noticed when taking a step back.
Now today I discovered a feature that somehow slipped my radar in the gutsy development cycle. You can probably tell I was pretty stoked when I found it, after all I’ve dedicated a number of paragraphs leading into it. So let me take you on a journey below.
That great feature is my working hot-plug for the Ultra-Bay CDRom drive in my Thinkpad. I’ve discovered it while laying on the couch reading the Internet… out of self induced evening boredom; more on this later. Now to understand how monumental of an even this discovery was in my life, you have to understand what happened last year when i had edgy on my laptop.
After owning my laptop for oh, lets say a couple months… I’ve became obsessed with the little lever on the bottom of the ultra bay on my laptop. A little level that came out when you pushed another little lever, a release mechanism of some sort. So what happened is you pushed one level and then out came a second lever. Now when you pulled on this second level, whatever was in your ultra bay came out, in my case, the CD writer.
Before I’ve avoid pulling on the second level, mostly out of common sense, knowing that it would most probably cause Linux to do something that I wouldn’t like. But at some point the urge became to powerful, and one day I pulled on the second level, not only did I pull on it, but also pull on it when the laptop was powered on and chugging along with whatever task it was chugging along. The machine started to make continuous beeping noises, which was intriguing and mildly annoying. But besides that, more importantly it keep working, much to my amazement. A quick look at dmesg, reveled that the Linux kernel decided to not be my friend and write a lot of nasty things about me and my SCSI CDRom drive (keep in mind that this is a SATA CD recorder).
Being generally thick skinned, I quickly shrugged the insults off. However, the annoying beep, that kept on going changed from a mildly annoying beep to a slightly more agitating beep. Something in my laptop didn’t like parting ways with the CD recorder, and wanted it back. To this day, I’m not exactly sure what wanted it back, but I knew I wanted it back, after all the logical conclusion was that whatever it was, it was missing the CD recorder, and if the CD recorder was put back it would at least stop beeping. There also was a slight glimmer of hope in me (however slight it was) that the CD drive would work after plugging it in.
Well, after pushing the CD drive back in, the beeping did not subside. Agitation grew, so i quickly progressed onto pushing the second level back in. Which did not make the situation any better. So I thought to my self, well it’s still beeping, but lets see if it works. However, after a quick mouse move, banning on the keyboard and finally the dreaded ALT-CTRL-SysReq combination I concluded that the machine has hard locked. In hind sight, I’ve concluded that this happened somewhere between inserting the CD drive back in and pushing level number two back in.
The entire traumatic experience was chucked up as a lesson in… not trying to hot-plug (or in my cause hot=unplug) things in Linux I did not expect to work in the first place.
Now fast forward a year later. I’m lying on couch reading yet another Ron Paul headline on reddit. I again get the sudden urge to play with the level again. Before long the second lever pops put. Now I should of know better, after all it was a traumatic exercise last time. How can I forget? However, this time around I’ve decided to look at dmesg right after pulling the second lever, but before pulling on it to get the CDRom drive. This time I was pleasantly surprised to see some ACPI message, in fact, an ACPI event, a bunch of hex numbers intermixed with some scary messages including the words reset, failed, exception, mask, disabling.
More promising then last time then my last quest, scary never the less. So, now’s the time, now or never, to pull the lever and the drive with it. Will I do it, or choke? Bad memories of scary beeps rush to the front of my memory banks.
The drive is out, one second, two seconds, three, five, ten. No beeps. Now, that’s a development. Nothing left but put the drive back in, let the machine crash and reboot. So in goes the drive, but no crash. In fact, according to dmesg my trusty SATA drive is recognized a SCSI (as good as it’s going to get, I guess) CD recorder. Victory.
Too make a long story short(er), the drive works, the CDs work and all is good in the kingdom.
One neat little feature amazes me to write an entire novel about it. Thanks Ubuntu, I’ll be “trolling” launchpad next time you guys break my libc in the development release.
