Simon Scullion

Since I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04, I had noticed that Update Manager was hanging, but not bothered to look into fixing it.

Tonight I did, and a quick search on google lead me to this post on Joe Wein’s blog with a clear explanation on how to solve the issue:

Last month I upgraded my notebook from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 (”Hardy Heron”). Since then, whenever I tried tried to install the up to 133 updates that had become available, the Update Manager would hang indefinitely instead of prompting me for the user password.

If you’re in the same situation, the following tips might help you. Edit /etc/hosts with an editor of your choice (e.g. sudo vi /etc/hosts). There should be two entries with IPv4 addresses starting with 127.0.x.x, like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 mycomputername.mydomain

Remove the domain name from the entry starting with 127.0.1.1, leaving only the computer name and save the file. Now try again.

When I made this change I got the password prompt as expected and all the updates where downloaded and applied.

Thanks Joe!

My Ubuntu PC at home occasionally has suffered with a rather annoying issue, whether the CPU runs at pretty much 100%, and the temperature to rise causing the BIOS to make an awful and incessant beeping sound!

Well tonight it just got too much for me, and I decided it was time to look into the cause.

A quick google search had me run “top” from a command line, which showed that a process by the name of “kacpi_notify” was consuming all the available CPU! So another search lead me to this page on the fantastic ubuntuforums.org, with a possible solution.

So just for the record, I applied the following changes:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Then modified the line:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-386 root=UUID=d17c8a59-107b-4454-9369-f24aaa7776f0 ro quiet splash


to

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-386 root=UUID=d17c8a59-107b-4454-9369-f24aaa7776f0 ro acpi=off apm=off quiet splash


Lets hope that does the trick!