Etymology of "Foo"
After some struggles to get the PS3 Media Server to run on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ozelot), somebody must heard my prayers (not that I prayed, but anywhoo). You can install PMS now using a PPA and there is even some official documentation from Ubuntu available here. And the official PMS forum thread can be found here.
This new repository makes it kinda foolproof to install PMS on Ubuntu and here everybody is happy to have their movies and music again.
We are a step further. I changed the partitioning so that the new and bigger core.img of GRUB fits on the disk. I manually selected the boot device because the drive enumeration changed with the new kernel. All is good. The system is installed and boots….
But all I got is a blank screen and a bunch of hard disk led’s that are working overtime. So I thought it might be a problem with the syncing of the newly created RAID. Time to take a nap…
After the nap and some other things, I returned and still all is black. But the keyboard reacts to Num Lock changes and it seems alive. Just no video. So the framebuffer hit me again. Why is that used by default anyways? Lets switch it off.
That sounds easy and it is. Just restart and in the GRUB menu screen hit e for edit the entry of Ubuntu. You get a nice EMACS style editor where you can remove the line that says:
gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode
After the change press F10 to boot the modified entry.
In my case I could see that one of my RAID’s was in degraded mode and the system was waiting for input. I really don’t understand why we are not in text mode here or why the framebuffer is not able to show this information. Anywhoo, I am now fixing my RAID and hope this information might help others.
And here we go again. It was about time to update my server to the latest Ubuntu. Everything seemed fine and the installation went its usual way. Beforehand I made sure that I new what partition will be what and what data on what partition is worth keeping.
The partitioning tool in manual mode did what it should do, the packages installed and then came the famous question if you want to install GRUB in the MBR. Of course I selected “yes” and all I got was an error.
Switching to the fourth console (I chose the server ISO) revealed the culprit. Obviously the size of the core.img increased again. Here an excerpt of the error message:
/usr/sbin/grub-bios-setup: warning: your core.img is unusally large. It won't fit in the empedding area. /usr/sbin/grub-bios-setup: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required for RIAD and LVM install.
This turned out to be a little problem. The RAID partitions start too early for the new GRUB 2.00 but I have some data on this RAID that I need to keep.
Luckily I had another RAID device with enough space so that I could backup all my data. And now I can start the installation again, but this time I have to wipe the the LVM and the RAID on the boot drives.