Can't call method "value" on an undefined value at /usr/share/perl5/IO/Uncompress/RawInflate.pm line 64.

As it turns out, there’s a whole slew of Compress::Zlib modules and IO::Compress modules that are all related. They are all packaged separately, and have the same version numbers. The problem happens if you upgrade one of the modules, without upgrading all of them.

The solution: make sure to upgrade all the modules to the same version at the same time. This means that if you’re using CPAN, you might have to install the remainder by hand. A good check to find what modules differ for you is to run dpkg -l | grep compress | grep perl, and make sure versions match up.

As it turns out, Lenovo recovery CDs are very picky about their hard drive setup. They need to copy files to disk for a variety of tasks, so if you’re using up all the partitions, then the CDs will stop booting, but give you no other errors.

I had previously installed Linux on the machine, so my partition tables were in a state the machine didn’t really understand. What I needed to do was trash the existing partitions, and flush out the boot record.

Easy enough — I fired up the Ubuntu live CD, and launched the partition editor in System -> Administration. I had to turn off the swap space, by right-clicking on it in the partition editor, and selecting “swapoff”. By default, Ubuntu live CDs will scan your drives for partitions marked as swap space, and use it, so you have to turn off this usage to delete the partitions. I ran through and deleted all the partitions, and applied the changes.

I next had to clear out the master boot record, but I could do that right from the live CD. After doing that, I rebooted with the Lenovo Rescue and Recovery CD and said a little prayer.

Once I had done these steps, the recovery CD started right up. I’m surprised Lenovo doesn’t give more details on this in their support knowledge base.


perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.

perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory


This occurred on both Dapper Drake as well as Feisty Fawn versions of Ubuntu. It was really annoying to see this whenever running apt-get. Fortunately, the solution is pretty simple. As noted above, this is a locale error, so the trick here is to install the language pack for my language. In this case, that would be English, so I ran the following:


sudo apt-get install language-pack-en


This added a dependency for language-pack-en-base, but after installation, the error went away.

After installing iTunes 7, I tried launching it, and got this error:

The iTunes application could not be opened.  An unknown error occurred (0x666D743F).

That’s awful cryptic. With a little digging, I found that the reason was because I was using Remote Desktop to access my PC remotely while trying to launch iTunes. Apparently, iTunes 7 doesn’t like it when you redirect sound, which is what Remote Desktop Connection tries to do by default. In the Remote Desktop Connection settings, I went to the Local Resources tab, and changed “Remote computer sound” to “Leave at remote computer” and things worked fine.

This error may also occur if you have third party sound plugins, or are otherwise redirecting the audio. For example, if you were using the Volume Logic plugin, you may get this error, or find that the plugin mysteriously stops working (uninstallation of this plugin is recommended until Volume Logic can release a new version). Total Recorder is another program that was causing problems. Also check is in Control Panel, Sounds and Audio Devices; make sure that in the Audio tab that your sound card is selected. Under the Volume tab Speaker settings, click Advanced, and play around with the Speaker setup drop down — try setting it to headphones, for instance, and see if that fixes the problem.