Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark Lenovo P70 Mobile Workstation

Summary

These are notes on installing Ubuntu OS 17.10 Artful Aardvark on a Lenovo P70 mobile workstation. After an initial pronounced negative reaction to Artful Aardvark Ubuntu 17.10 I had a brief fling with Fedora desktop (run away, run away!) and Linux Mint (ugh!) and so came back to deal with the Artful Aardvark install and post-install config issues and in the end am far happier with Ubuntu (yet again) than I could ever be with Fedora desktop or Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop (I didn't bother to try the other Linux Mint desktop optons). No offense to Fedora and Mint fans everyone has their favorite.

Why am I happy with Artful Aardvark Ubuntu 17.10? Well, for one thing I was able to get my 2 x 55" Westinghouse external displays to play reasonabiy well with Artful Aardvark Ubuntu 17.10. The VGA 55" monitor does require a manual adjustment after each reboot which despite quite a bit of adventure tinkering, does not seem to be resolvable except by doing a manual "auto configuration" with the remote after each reboot (see below for details). I will say that out-of-the-box, Linux Mint 18.2 Sonya did NOT in my humble experience handle the external monitors as well as Ubuntu 17.10 and for me that's a biggie.

So, all-in-all, competitors had a chance to win me over, but Fedora 26 was too hard, and Linux Mint 18.2 was too soft, but Ubuntu 17.10 was, well, pretty much nearly as close as i could get for now to "just right". But don't get over-confident, Ubuntu: the "apport" issues with the post-install update/upgrade were really annoying and shoulda coulda been caught before release.

Issue #1: "apport"

Begin: Update December 2017

Installed Ubuntu 17.10 Aartful Aardvak desktop again on December 13 and there were no apport issues. It may have been fixed quietly in the distribution. However, this time I did the updates using "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get upgrade" from the CLI instead of using the GUI Software Updater and although I don't see why that would make any difference (it shouldn't) nevertheless that's what I used for that install and I had NO issues with apport update this time.

Begin: Update November 2017

There seems to be an issue with apport causing the post-install update/upgrade step to hang. This happened to me on more than 1 install so there is some issue. How I got past that one I'm not exactly sure. It involved trying to uninstall apport (which failed), then trying to reinstall apport (which failed), a reboot, and finally a successful upgrade/update YMMV. But be aware there is definitely some glitch with apport and doing the initial OS update/upgrade immediately after install.

Issue #2: "wlp4s0: failed to remove key (1,ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff) from hardware (-22)"

This message appears on the black screen during shutdown and it just hangs forever there on the latest pushed kernel (4.13.0). This hang can be fixed two ways, take your pick, or find yet another way.

Workaround #1

Upgrade to a more recent kernel than the latest pushed kernel. It seems that 4.13.6 and higher will successfully shutdown the machine (even though the error still appears briefly during shutdown, it no longer hangs the shutdown or reboot once kernel 4.13.6 (or higher) is installed). However, I personally on vanilla desktops like to keep the desktop as vanilla as possible so I don't like to jump ahead of the pushed update level on kernels. Fortunately, there is another way to prevent the shutdown/reboot hang due to this error.

Incidentally, use the tool called "ukuu" to upgrade your kernel if you choose this workaround. The "ukuu" tool works great.

Workaround #2

You can simply edit /etc/default/grub file and change it as shown below. After making the change shown below, run "sudo update-grub" and reboot. From then on the shutdown/reboot hang due to the "failed to remove key" issue should be gone, no newer kernel needed.

ubuntu@athens:~$ cat /etc/default/grub

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update

# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

# For full documentation of the options in this file, see:

# info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'

GRUB_DEFAULT=0

GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0

GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true

GRUB_TIMEOUT=0

GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" <-- REMOVE "quiet splash" so that it just has "" (no arguments at all).

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs

# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains

# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...)

#GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)

#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

# The resolution used on graphical terminal

# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE

# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'

#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux

#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries

#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start

#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"

ubuntu@athens:~$

Issue #3: VirtualBox

Begin: Update December 2017

VirtualBox 5.2.2 (latest version as of December 14, 2017) is now available explicitly for Ubuntu 17.10 Aartful Aardvark (it's apparently the same distribution as is used for Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus) and is available here.

Begin: Update November 2017

There is no release of VirtualBox listed as of today (November 2, 2017) at the VirtualBox downloads site for "Ubuntu 17.10" so I tried the 17.04 VirtualBox but it only provided support for 32-bit OS'es and did not seem right.

So I tried getting VirtualBox from the Ubuntu Software Store icon and voila, that worked! and it offers all options both for 32-bit and 64-bit VM's so my recommendation is install VirtualBox using the Ubuntu 17.10 desktop "Ubuntu Software" icon at least until VirtualBox releases a current version at their downloads page for Ubuntu 17.10.

Issue #4: gcc-7, g++-7

Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Ardvark server edition canonical repository build-essential package delivers gcc-7 and g++-7 which is a new departure from the gcc-6 and g++-6 that were delivered in recent previous releases such as Ubuntu 17.04. There can be some issues with trying to build software from source on Ubuntu 17.10 if you have installed the 17.10 repository build-essential package and consequently the gcc-7 and g++-7.

If you attempt to build software and get an error similar to this;

Option #1: systemd-resolved DNS Resolution on Systems with NetworkManager Installed

See my page on this here. The guide at the link explains how to configure /etc/resolv.conf for systemd-resolved on a system that also has NetworkManager installed and active.