Relative newcomer to Linux Compaq R3240 with Ubuntu-64 Breezy, wifi via ndiswrapper (works)
For a long time I have been frustrated at not being able to get several things installed on my 64-bit Ubuntu, most specifically RealPlayer, Adobe Reader 7.0 and Flash. I resisted it but eventually decided to bite the bullet and learn how to install chroot. Amazingly I succeeded the first time. And, using Synaptic32, I installed RealPlayer and Adobe Reader 7.0. Nether made a launch item on the Gnome Applications menu, but I fixed that esily enough by adding them as dchroot -d <program_name>. However, I still couldn't get Firefox to see the RealPlayer and Flash plugins. After fiddling for a while I decided to go ahead and install Firefox in chroot as well, via Synaptic32. After doing so I was thrilled to see that all the plugins were working. Yay! Note that all this was done from home where I have Comcast cable and the R3240 is connected via my ethernet, the same as my Windows 2000 desktop. The fact that these things were all installed from home is important later in the description of the problem. So, assuming that I had everything working fine, Wednesday I went to the university. When I got there I was unable to connect to the university wifi. Nor was I able to connect to wifi in nearby coffee houses. I tried and tried, but nada. I went to the university IT department where they have a help desk for students. After fifteen minutes of fiddling they were unable to figure it out either. Finally we decided to use the Windows problem resolution method -- reboot. And, as the computer rebooted, I suddenly noticed the new lines for chroot: /home on /chroot/breezy/32bits/home type none (rw,bind) /tmp on /chroot/breezy/32bits/tmp type none (rw,bind) /dev on /chroot/breezy/32bits/dev type none (rw,bind) /proc on /chroot/breezy/32bits/proc type none (rw,bind) /media/cdrom0 on /chroot/breezy/32bits/media/cdrom0 type none (rw,bind) /usr/share/fonts on /chroot/breezy/32bits/usr/share/fonts type none (rw,bind) [FAIL] (in red) "Aha!" I thought to myself. I never had any problem connecting at the university before, and chroot is the only new thing. So, thinking quickly, I opened a terminal and typed "firefox." Since I had not uninstalled Firefox from the 64-bit world, the old version came up. And sure enough, no problem connecting. Everything worked as before. (Except no Flash, no RealPlayer, no Adobe Reader.) Then I decided to find out if the problem was general to the chroot environment, or was just a Firefox problem. I went into chroot and launched Synaptic32, and went to install Evolution into chroot. Well, I got the answer to my question right away, because Synaptic32 couldn't find the internet either. Therefore, clearly the entire chroot environment was not getting out. In all this time the wifi light on the corner of the case was lit up. System > Administration > Networking said the wifi was active and connected. The IT people had already confirmed that there was zero traffic from me. And in the Networking tab in System Monitor the network traffic was flat-lined. I didn't think of it at the time, but later someone suggested it might be DNS related. So yesterday I went to a place where they have wifi and I connected. Everything was fine with Firefox in the 64-bit world, but as at the university, nothing in chroot was getting out. So then I opened a terminal and entered the chroot environment. And then I tried to ping my university (pdx.edu). Nada. I opened another terminal (64-bit) and pinged it again. This time it answered and gave me the IP address as 131.252.120.50. Switching back to the chroot terminal I pinged 131.252.120.50. And it immediately went out and got a reply. So now I know the problem is DNS resolution from the chroot environment. However, I know little of how this stuff works. Note that there seems to be no problem with name resolution in chroot when I am at home on Comcast cable. It is only the wifi that is not finding a DNS server (or whatever the problem is). I googled on dns and chroot and found the following site (among others): http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/sw/bind/ Evidently BIND is supposed to be working and has something to do with DNS name resolution. And if you scroll up in this message you will note the lines from my boot screen -- every one of the chroot lines ended in [FAIL] (although it displayed one [FAIL] message for all of them at the end). And each line involves BIND. Somewhere in the above lies the solution to my problem, but I don't understand enough about how the internet works to get any further. Oh, and one more thing. Someone asked me if I had a resolv.conf file in the chroot environment. I do, /chroot/breezy/32bits/etc/resolv.conf. Its contents are: search Comcast.net nameserver 216.148.227.79 nameserver 204.127.202.19 And there is another one in /etc, with the same exact contents. I don't know what this file does. I mention it because a local Linux guru asked me about it, so maybe it is significant. Does anyone have any idea how to get the chroot environment to find the DNS server? _______________________________________________ LinuxR3000 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pcxperience.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000 Wiki at http://prinsig.se/weekee/
