This was originally written to collect a series of tips about augmenting the build, but I have a problem with stability and reboot. Here are my notes …
Stability
The system often hangs and on reboot requires a manual fsck on reboot. think it was fsck /dev/sd5a; it was and using the -y flag is good idea. The ‘net suggests that there are also problems with journal writes on close down which I have observed and I have also been stuck when performing an apt.
I ran this query, “why is ubuntu 20.04 so unstable, requires fsck to reboot” on lmgtyfy, which gives nothing obvious.
One piece of correspondence suggests that the power subsystem is a problem, I have a battery that is very hard to fit into the enclave and thus the software fails to ‘see’ the battery.
What is the name of the pre-boot shell? How do you exit it to multi-user? One name is the single-user shell, but it looks more like a bios although many of the commands are UNIX commands.
It seems we now have ZFS, which would be good if I knew how to use it. This, on ubuntu.com suggests it might be the disk; the system is very old. It also gives me some ideas about looking at the logs. See also, Analyzing a Faulty Hard Disk using Smartctl
I installed smartmontools.
The system is an HP Probook 5320m.
Configuration and augmentation
One of the Firefox releases 96.1?, had a problem with sound, and one or two other things on ubuntu 20.
- https://idroot.us/install-vivaldi-browser-ubuntu-20-04/
- https://askubuntu.com/questions/1246474/suddenly-no-more-sound-on-ubuntu-20-04 for me, I think it was Firefox only but, I needed to install pulse audio control [
pavucontrol] - how to install spotify
- Some notes on onedrive and on this blog.
I made separate notes on the video codecs
I amended this today, decided I needed to hunt down the runes to stop the laptop performing like a pos.