grub rescue Error : the symbol ‘grub_xputs’ not found.

 Linux, Working Notes  No Responses »
Oct 202011
 

So there I was, installing a Linux distribution on my new laptop. Got to the end of the installation when it refused to install grub in the master boot record. Opted to try another partition, and rebooted. At which point the infamous error “Error: the symbol ‘grub_xputs’ not found” was shown with a “grub rescue” prompt.

At which point I had a laptop that wouldn’t boot of course.

To cut a long story short, because it’s only the fix I’m interested in recording for posterity, I sorted this out by booting off an emergency USB stick (unetbootin is a good tool for writing one … if you have a working system). Once booted, I setup an environment where chroot would function well. This is basically where you start a shell whose root directory is a directory under the normal root directory. This allows commands to be run almost as if the non-bootable system was booted.

mount /dev/sda5 /mnt # Mount the root filesystem of the unbootable system under /mnt
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot # And the /boot filesystem
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys
chroot /mnt

Once that is done, there are quite a few things that can be done to repair a broken system, but I just needed to re-install grub to the MBR of /dev/sda :-

grub-install /dev/sda

Once that was done, everything booted fine.

Of course all that comes with the experience of a lot of time with Linux. Those who have not used it since the 1990s will not be as lucky, but there’s a few key points there :-

  1. Don’t panic. Just because it won’t boot doesn’t mean everything is lost.
  2. Write down the error message exactly as it appears on screen. A small mistake here can make searching for the error almost impossible.
  3. Get a rescue USB stick. Ideally before you break a system, but afterwards is usually possible even if you don’t have another working system – you have friends, or there are ways to write a USB stick at work.
  4. Search the Internet for the problem. You may have to spend quite a while reading other people’s problems that may or may not relate to your problem. You may have to improve your search methodology. Putting the error message in quotes is usually a good method.
  5. And if you find a solution to your problem online, check the date of the solution. Something that worked 5 years ago may not be the best solution today. And that applies to this page just as much as any other.
Oh! And to those who would jump and down screaming about this wouldn’t happen with Windows or OSX, please grow up. Such problems occur with any operating system – and I’ve seen them.

Long Exposure Needs Practice

 Photography  No Responses »
Oct 112011
 

Well, it turns out that I need a lot more practice at long exposure photography :-

The Beach

This is Southsea beach at around 5:30 in the morning. A 15 minute exposure …

  1. It may look dark but there’s still a lot of lights around – use a long lens.
  2. Go further along to find darker places.
  3. 15 minutes is just about the minimum exposure. No matter how frustrating (and cold) waiting for it is.

Remembering Steve Jobs

 Computing  No Responses »
Oct 062011
 

Today was the day we learned that Steve Jobs died. This is of course massive news within the technology industry as Steve Jobs has been such an important player in the industry since the beginning of the personal computer revolution (long before the iPod and all the other iThingies). As with everyone who dies, my sympathy goes out to anyone who knew him.

The reaction has been … interesting. Amongst the other compliments he has been called a great innovator, which to those who observe the industry closely seems a touch inaccurate. There are plenty of things that Steve Jobs was – he was a great businessman who not only built up Apple in the first place, but returned to rescue it from obscurity (and possibly saving it).

He had the ability to take innovations and introduce them to the mass market – he could somehow lead his engineers into producing usable mass-market products. But without meaning to criticise he was not as much of an innovator as is sometimes made out to be.

Looking through the history of the products he brought to the mass-market …

Apple I & Apple II

Neither of these were truly original. The Apple I was one of the first personal computers that were available fully assembled, but it was not the first. The basic concept of the personal computer released as a product can be traced to the IBM 5100 (1975) or the HP 9830 (1972). These may have been a lot more expensive but were probably more successful than the Apple I which only sold about 200.

The Apple II was a good deal more successful – probably the closest to a dominant personal computer around before the original IBM PC took off, but was no more truly original. For instance amongst the hordes of similar personal computers around at the time, there was the quite close Commodore PET (which was admittedly somewhat less expandable).

And the least said about the Apple III, the better!

The Macintosh

Most people assume that the Macintosh was the first computer with a graphical user interface, but it was not even the first from Apple themselves! They brought out the somewhat less successful (and very expensive) Lisa first. The first GUI computer was the Xerox Alto first built in 1973 – before Apple even existed! Admittedly this was never a commercial product, but Xerox did eventually launch a commercial workstation based on this early experiment – the Xerox Star, in 1981. That’s still 2 years before the Macintosh.

The Macintosh did however bring the graphical user interface to a mass audience even if the first Macintosh computers were more than a little constrained by lack of memory (128Kbytes anyone?).

The iPod

After a few successful years with the Macintosh (and having ditched Steve Jobs in 1985), Apple started to go downhill. Until Steve Jobs returned, and helped to turn the company around with the launch of Macintoshes that were better designed in terms of styling. Although he was probably right to kill it off, he also did something interesting on his return – he killed the Newton product line which although it was not really recognised at the time, was actually Apple’s first slate computer (it was marketted as a PDA but with a much bigger screen than most PDAs).

But the next big thing was the launch of  the music player that nearly everyone has tried at one time or another – the iPod. Again to disappoint the reflex Apple fans, this was not a massive innovation from Apple – there were portable digital music players launched before this. Such as the music player (with a somewhat limited capacity of 3.5 minutes!) envisaged by Kane Kramer way back in 1979 (and patented in the UK in 1981). Apple even hired him when they were facing patent litigation over the iPod.

Altogether there were five different music players launched in the market before Apple took a hand. But of course Apple made it easy enough for the man in the street to use.

The iPhone

The iPhone was an interesting product – a “smartphone” (it might have been more accurate to call it a featurephone) that on the basis of pure feature comparison was weaker than the competition in every way – a less capable data network (no 3G), many missing hardware features that were present on other smartphones (GPS, proper bluetooth support, a slot for memory expansion, etc.). It couldn’t even load additional apps – Steve Jobs tried telling everyone that apps should be on the Internet and not installed on the phone!

It did do two things better than the competition though – firstly the CPU was of reasonable strength to run a smartphone with. At least the pre-iPhone smartphones I used were positively anaemic in performance due to weak CPUs. Secondly, the iPhone made using a smartphone simple. And that was the real reason the iPhone took off – anyone could use it.

The iPad

And yet again Steve Jobs does it – take a product that was pretty much universally unpopular, or at most was popular only in certain vertical markets, and pushes it out to the mass market in a way that everyone can enjoy. Again very little in the way of innovation, but a great product (with some odd weaknesses until the iPad 2).

iPhone 4S: Yawn or What ?

 Computing, iPhone  No Responses »
Oct 042011
 

So it has been announced at last. The iPhone 4S, which is more or less an iPhone 4 with some fiddling – a faster processor, an improved antenna, and a software update that gives it a feature that Android has had for a while. That is voice control.

Undoubtedly it will all be done in a very slick way – that is the Apple way, but is it enough ?

Well it all depends on what you mean by “enough”. It will undoubtedly sell – both to the Apple fans who worship anything Apple produces whatever the merits, but will it sell enough to keep Apple’s current level of influence in the mobile smartphone sector ? After all, Steve Jobs has now left and everyone is wondering how the new Apple will maintain it’s leadership in the smartphone and slate market.

Well the iPhone 4S is nice, but so is my iPhone 4. But it is hardly a major improvement – yes it’s faster; probably a lot faster. And the antenna improvement will please those who managed to tickle the antenna problem on the iPhone 4 (I could only do so by going through ridiculous contortions).

It’s a perfectly reasonable mid-life facelift, but it’s a touch late for a mid-life facelift, although admittedly a bit early for a whole new phone. Oh! Sure Apple will claim that the internals are completely different, but it’s still an improved iPhone 4 rather than an iPhone 5. Although it’s unreasonable, Apple’s problem here is that the iPhone 4S looks a little boring and in a post-Jobs era, they need to convince people that they are still able to release exciting products. And this isn’t it.

The big problem I see from my personal perspective is that there is no option for an iPhone with a big screen (and no I don’t mean an iPad!). If you look at the oodles of choice you can find in the Android phone market, you will find examples of premium smartphones with larger screens than the iPhone. Such as the Samsung Galaxy S II with a 4.3″ screen, and that is not even the largest smartphone screen you can find (although it may well be the best).

Sure not everyone wants a large screen on their smartphone, but I do and Android gives me that choice. And plenty of other choices – 3D screens, physical keyboards, etc. And no being chained up in Apple’s walled garden!

So yes, sorry Apple but it’s a bit of a yawn event. Try again with a proper iPhone 5 with a large (for a smartphone) screen.

Palestine Asks The UN To Recognise Their Statehood

 Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Sep 232011
 

As expected the Palestinian authority has asked the UN to recognise them as a state.

As expected the Israelis stood up to protest about the idea of giving statehood to the Palestinians and undoubtedly their tame lapdogs, the US government will veto the request.

But would it do any harm if the UN recognised Palestine as a state ? And would it actually help make things a little better ? Quite possibly. Although it would not do much in itself, it send a message to Israel that the world’s patience is limited and that it expects Israel to negotiate in good faith – which it appears unable to do so at the moment.

As an example, in his speech to the UN, the Israeli Prime Minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) kept going on about how Israel needed military security – to include the freedom to place Israeli forces inside Palestine, to demilitarise the Palestinian state, to keep control of the Palestinian air space.

The way that he put it sounded almost reasonable – well he’s a politician, so he should be able to make almost any position sound reasonable. But would Israel accept their own demilitarisation ? Or Palestinian forces being free to wander around Israel ? Or Palestinian control of the Israeli airspace ?

According to the number of casualties suffered by each side, Palestinians have far more to fear from Israeli forces than visa versa (although Israelis do have legitimate concerns) – according to the Wikipedia article on the conflict, there have been 7,978 Palestinian causalities since 1987 and 1,503 Israeli casualties. More than 5 times as many.

Recognising the state of Palestine is not going to bring peace; neither is ignoring the Palestinian request. But recognising the right of Palestine to be recognised as a state will send a signal that the world recognises their right to exist as a state – in the same way that the world recognises the right of Israel to exist as a state.

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