Linux

Debian just published an update to their stable distribution etch dubbed etch-and-a-half. The big news here for everyone not accustomed with Debians release cycle anyway is that it's the first time that it's not only a point release that fixes security issues but it's an update to the stable release that gasp adds support for new hardware, too. It even brings important fixes for some applications.

First of all, that's a tremendously good step in the right direction. In the past I've been bitten more than once by the long release cycle of Debian, outlasting all care taking of hardware compatibility. It's the primary reason that the only machine under my direct control running Debian is my rusty private workstation at the moment, all other machines needed newer drivers and hence are installed with Ubuntu. So, if Debian finally realizes that it has to change something to support newer hardware that's more than welcome.

However, it's not really etch-and-a-half. It's not much more than a new kernel which I would compile regularly from kernel.org myself anyway. Admittedly, there are also two new xservers (for nv and intel), but that's still not very helpful for people with newer ati hardware, for instance. But I'm a developer and much more than any hardware hassle I'm much more bitten by really outdated development tools. I've written only one blog entry about the issue, but it's a topic that most developers could write books about -- or maybe not, most of them probably just compile newer versions as needed and are done with the issue. This looks like the easy way out but it doesn't really solve the issue: if you've got to deploy your software you'll need to ensure that what you need is there. But using newer versions of base libraries forces you to deploy them yourself, which also means that you got a problem whenever a security issue will be found in those libraries. On the contrary, with system libraries you don't need any manual deployment of libraries you're only using and you can hope to participate of all system updates. So, in my eyes that's clearly a big advantage for using system libraries. But with Debian (and etch-and-a-half doesn't change this) you're stuck with older libraries which a) might lack long wanted functionality and b) are incompatible with versions from other vendors, which is a pain if you need to deploy on different platforms. Now, granted that the latter problem is not only tied to the age of libraries, but it would be a lot smaller if Debians general release cycle wouldn't be that long. I know of software vendors who have thus decided to develop for Ubuntu but not for Debian, in order to minimize portability issues due to library/functionality mismatches between platforms. To me, that looks like quite high a price to pay.

I've tried Compiz with Metacity again and switch it off after a day -- again. I'm not willing to do without working software suspend just for some graphical whizz. I've been using Metacity for, I think nearly two years now, on my work computers and have somehow accomodated to it's various glitches (for instance the unusable keyboard settings). On my trusty home workstation, however, I've stuck with WindowMaker, which I think I've been using roughly since 1997 (I can't remember the version number, but it was fairly low). Unfortunately, development seems to have stopped -- since quite some time there is no sign of activity on the webpage and the mailing list archive is dead.

Yesterday, out of a current frustration about Metacity, I installed a naked current version of WindowMaker on one of my machines, under Ubuntu 8.04 (don't try to make WindowMaker work under Gnome: While WindowMaker does "work" under Gnome, it is really crippled. For instance, the keyboard setting know nothing about WindowMaker but still override your keyboard settings via, say, WPrefs.). Nearly everything worked as expected, but there were two glitches: the menu didn't reflect the installed software. Having customized the thing under my Debian system, I knew that this was supposed to work with the update-menu script, but that was missing. Some web-searching revealed that for some reason or other Ubuntu no longer installs the menu(-xdg) package. The other glitch was a very old complaint: That WindowMaker doesn't ship with a virtual desktop switcher or pager. You don't need to tell me about the different philosophy of WindowMaker, I know all about it. However, I've been using Fvwm and OpenLook (OLVWM) too long.

I could use gnome-panel (which I've done before in the past), but of course that brings me those two panels that make sense for Metacity and besides it also means that I would still depend on gnome. I've did quite a bit of looking around to find out what all the cool Fluxbox, Openbox etc. users are using and finally found fbpanel (the trick was to search for "taskbar" instead of "pager"). So, finally thanks to netwm support (which I think is in WindowMaker since 0.90), the one missing bit from WindowMaker is finally there without Gnome. Oh my, I'm finding this out really late.

Dell is selling Ubuntu equipped systems since about a year now and seems to be quite happy with it. Whatever that effectively means, at least I can tell that I'm quite happy with Linux on Dell systems, too.

Through the last five years, I've been using Linux on a number of Dell systems. Under my personal control there have been three laptops (Dell C610, D610 and a Latitude 640) and a desktop (Optiplex 755), on which I have been running Debian Sarge, Ubuntu Dapper, Feisty and now Hardy. We also had several Dell servers at work running more or less smoothly with Debian (sarge, etch). Using Linux wasn't always without problems: I had trouble with built-in modems, PCMCIA ISDN cards and acpi/hibernation. For example, on my private Latitude 640, I have trouble suspending at all, because of the ipw3945 driver for the wlan. But the important thing to note is that basically all problems were really small and never of a size requiring me to use some other OS in the first place.

The only real issue is not with Dell per se, but more with my favourite OS, Debian: over the years, and especially with the ever-lasting sarge release, getting Debian to run on a recent system got more and more difficult. That's the main reason why I've been using Ubuntu on all recent hardware I had contact with: it's more or less (more so than less) a Debian system but does run on modern hardware. Main issues here were graphics adapters, sata/scsi hostadapters and network/wifi cards, or to put it otherwise: too old kernels, too old X.org. Both problem sources can simply be solved by using a recent version of Ubuntu. Sorry, Debian, but your release cycle is just too long to be acceptable. Granted, all these problems are mostly an issue when installing a new system, but it's not always possible to plug in some old disc with a working version of Linux.

Recent fun:
- Working hibernate/suspend without any manual configuration on a brand new Dell desktop using Ubuntu 8.04 (beta).
- Watching a self-generated video CD (probably done under Windows) under Linux without any problem with my wife that we couldn't watch on Windows due to scrambled colours under Windows media player.

Recent less fun:
- Hibernate/suspend on our older Dell laptop with Ubuntu 7.10 and finding it's a known issue with the ipw3945 driver.
- Getting vmware to work on a recent 2.6.24 system.
- Having fixed that finding out the hard way that Aero won't display in the VM, requiring to go back to cloning the (not so small) physical machine a third time.
- Being unable to get a DHCP lease over the rt2x00 driver for my USB wlan stick with kernel 2.6.24, despite being able to get a sucessful connect via wpa_supplicant/wext.

Two days ago, I updated my laptop from Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" (aka LTS) to "Feisty Fawn", aka version 7.04. Just in case you wonder, how I did that, I just followed the usual directions and first updated to Edgy and then to Feisty via issuing "gksu 'update-manager -c'" twice. Things went quite smoothly, but I did encounter some problems:

- I lost access to my databases during the migration from Postgres 7.4 to 8.2., i.e. there was no proper migration and as support for version 7.4 has been dropped, I even have no way to dump the old data and import it again. I need to figure out whether I can easily access the old dbs from Postgres 8.2 (mind you, I'm talking of the raw data and the DB server, not client access).

- As a result, my local copy of serendipity stopped working. I re-installed serendipity (a clean start seemed to be a good idea), but still Iceweasel gets wrong information about the phtml files it generates. Probably a problem with the PHP installation, which I need to get straight (I'm not a PHP guy, though).

- When booting into Edgy, when switching from the splash screen to X. the screen went black and there was no way to get a display. I solved that by ssh-ing into the box, modifying /etc/X11/xorg.conf by using the ati driver instead of the fglrx driver and then editing /boot/grub/menu.lst so that it wouldn't show the splash screen or suppress messages. The problem went away after going to Feisty.

- To get VMware running again, it wasn't enough to issue the usual /opt/bin/vmware-config.pl that you have to do with every new kernel. It kept telling me that the headers directory wouldn't fit my current running kernel. Fortunately, I already had loaded the new version down which solves the problem (I guess there is a new version numbering scheme in newer kernels).

- The update of course also brought with it the switch to Iceweasel, so of course, I lost some of my trusted extensions (Reveal, Surfkeys).

- What really annoyed me was the ugly, fat looking "optimal" font that I encountered in most applications. Why Gnome doesn't use subpixel hinting as a default is beyond me (especially as I'm quite certain to have had that setting in the old setup, too).

- The new eclipse version of course knew nothing about my local installed plugins, implying that I had to reinstall them.

On the nice side, my mail setup kept working and the network setup kept working, which I think is way more important.

I love the Unix toolbox:

[elendil->Get_the_gore]mp3info -p "%S\t%m:%02s\t%t\n" * | perl -ne '{ $time=$time+$1 if (/^(\d+)[ \t]+(.*)$/); print $2."\n"; } END { print "Total seconds: $time\n"; $min=$time/60; $secs=$time%60; print(sprintf("Total time: %d:%d\n",$min,$secs)); }'
2:10 Fox in a box
3:16 Loaded heart
2:53 All grown up
3:07 Pleasure unit
2:51 Where evil grows
3:16 Casino
2:38 Don't cry
2:24 Mary Ann
3:48 You lied to me before
1:50 So sophisticated
2:50 Little baby
2:44 Sweet potato
2:56 Voodoo doll
1:51 Hammer stomp
Total seconds: 2314
Total time: 38:34


Printing out the track number and the track title works only if the file contains an ID3 tag, of course.

Etch ships with drivers for the Ralink RT2570 wifi/wlan chipset in the package rt2570-source. However, for whatever reason, if I try to use that package (i.e. compile it the usual Debian way via make-kpkg modules-image and install the resulting deb), modprobe rt2570, I only see that the usb subsystem sees the adapter but I get no interface (rausb0). I then just recompiled my local CVS copy from last summer, modprobe/insmod it and everything is fine. Huh?

Update: I updated to 2.6.21.1 today, using a fresh vanilla kernel. Still Debians module compiles flawlessly, can be installed and the module installed, but no working interface shows up. Manual compiling/installing the old CVS version (probably by a month younger) works out of the box.

In my workstation I still operate a Matrox G400 back from 1999. It was a state of the art graphics card for its time, and especially well supported under Linux/XFree86. Well, time went on and now everybody's using X.org. Since two days ago, my workstation joined the club, finally having been updated to etch. And then I find a discussion in the Usenet group de.comp.os.unix.linux.hardware with somebody complaining about a freezing system with X.org/mga when switching to the framebuffer console. And of course, I can easily reproduce it: Switching back to X immediately hang the system. Suspend to disk hangs up the system, too. Great.

A little bit of searching quickly revealed this horrible list of bugs for xserver-xorg-video-mga in Debian, from which one bug in particular links to this upstream bug entry. See the date of the last change to this bug? It's almost three years old! I am now trying with "UseFBDev" set to "false" and at least I could switch three times back and forth, but we will see.

Since over a month, I have a Debian Etch DVD lying around. Last night, I finally finished backing up any valuable data and started the upgrade, closely following the careful upgrade instructions given in the release notes. This worked quite well, some minor glitches have happened, though. For instance, wmsensors and wmwifi were removed, although at last wmsensors is included in etch; I haven't checked wmwifi yet. Then my mouse stopped working. Turned out, I never updated gpm.conf from my old serial mouseman configuration to the newer usb mouse I have since quite some time. This was easy to fix, though. Finally, the installation of iceweasel aka Firefox 2.0 resulted in the loss of two of my favourite extensions: SurfKeys, which for instance allows to move between tabs with "o" and "u" and Reveal, which shows mini views of the contents of other tabs. I can live without Reveal but I'm going to look for a replacement for SurfKeys (yes, I use hit-a-hint and keyconfig, but I don't know how I can configure moving between tabs). There is probably more that needs fixing, but nothing spectacular so far.

Update: The surfkeys problem can be solved (see this discussion).

Was wir seit einiger Zeit an diversen Ereignissen, Vorhaben und sonstigen politischen Hirngespinsten präsentiert bekommen, habe ich neulich ja noch als Masche abgetan, möglichst maximalen Unsinn zu fordern, um damit deutlich mehr (im Sinne von Zugriffsmöglichkeiten und Einschränkungen von Bürgerrechten) rauszuholen als sonst möglich wäre. Aber entweder sind selbst die intelligenteren Mitbürger mittlerweile total abgestumpft oder durch das ganze Terrorgefasel derart weichgekocht, dass die selbst den größten Unsinn noch durchbekommen, wenn nicht bald mal mehr "normale" Leute sich ihrer Bürgerrechte und -pflichten erinnern. Da kommt doch eine Anleitung zum Lobbyismus für Nerds doch genau rechtzeitig. Allerdings wäre es wohl nicht im Sinne von Hannos Anleitung, zu einem evtl. Termin dann ausgerechnet in diesem T-Shirt zu erscheinen (via Kristian & Fefe). Aber vielleicht ist es das Wichtigste, überhaupt mal aus dem Quark zu kommen.

Today, I've been bitten by this bug in apt-get -- running apt-get update/upgrade or any other application depending on apt, like, e.g. aptitude or apt-cache would simply segfault. This is the first time in roughly ten years use of Debian that I encountered a bug in one of the major administrative tools. I'm not sure I should be happy that it took so long or unhappy because it happened today. Anyway, the bug report (actually, I think there are probably two bugs lurking, the segfault I encountered is the same as the second backtrace) contained the required information to work around it: (re)move /var/cache/apt/*.bin and everything worked again. Strange.

Back from the usual familiy visit for Easter, I discovered that the rabbit had a very special egg for the open source community: Etch(aka Debian 4.0) has been released. So, while I wanted to do some running in the afternoon, my server is going to do something for his fitness ...

Dear Lazyweb: Are there any good tutorials on turning a running native Windows installation into a Xen instance (i.e. without a fresh installation)? Preferably on an Ubuntu (edgy) host? Alternatively, Debian etch would also be an option, though I don't believe the OS of the host system matters much. Yes, I know, I need paravirtualization for that, but apart from that I know next to nothing about Xen, so all up-to-date tutorials on Xen are welcome, too.

The other issue is that I never got hibernation working on the server and I fixed that today, too. I use a vanilla kernel.org self-compiled kernel on the box, so I could have gone for Suspend2, but as I have sysfs_power_state working on my Ubuntu laptop without much hassle, I wondered what was the problem on the server. As it turned out, suspend to ram (mem) doesn't seem to work and as that always had failed, I think I never really tried suspend to disk. Additionally, I hadn't added a resume line to my grub configuration, so it wouldn't have worked anyway. After a freeze in NetworkStop on my first try with suspend to disk, I added the rt2570 module to the list of blacklisted modules and now suspend to disk (and resume, of course) works. Yay! I'll be able to continue my hacking on UCW without having to boot it all the time, for instance. Here is what is actually doing the work from the config file:

[root@bauhaus->root]grep -v '#' /etc/hibernate/hibernate.conf | sed '/^$/d' UseSysfsPowerState disk PowerdownMethod shutdown Verbosity 1 LogFile /var/log/hibernate.log LogVerbosity 1 Distribution debian SaveClock restore-only UnmountFSTypes smbfs nfs UnloadBlacklistedModules yes LoadModules auto DownInterfaces rausb0 eth0 UpInterfaces auto XStatus x XSuspendText Preparing to suspend... XResumeText Resuming from suspend...

I finally fixed a very annoying bug in the network setup. Bauhaus is connected via an USB wlan stick by Conceptronic, which has a Ralink chipset (rt2570). I made that thing work quite some time ago, although the (legacy) module from
rt2x00.serialmonkey.com required a small patch at the time.
What I couldn't fix though was a very annoying behaviour of the driver: It wouldn't connect on the first try. Only if I re-started /etc/init.d/network, the server would connect to my AP. I had figured out that the driver required the interface to be upped before you would be able to set ESSID etc., but I couldn't get it to work with Debians ifupdown scheme. Some days ago, somebody in de.comp.os.unix.linux.misc posted his configuration and he had a pre-up ifconfig rausb0 two times, so that makes three times the interface gets upped. This actually did the trick. I now have the following in my /etc/network/interfaces:

# The wlan interface auto rausb0 iface rausb0 inet dhcp pre-up ifconfig rausb0 up pre-up iwconfig rausb0 essid XXXXX pre-up iwconfig rausb0 channel 10 pre-up sleep 3 pre-up ifconfig rausb0 up pre-up iwpriv rausb0 enc 3 pre-up iwpriv rausb0 auth 3 pre-up iwpriv rausb0 wpapsk XXXXX pre-up sleep 3 post-up /etc/network/if-post-up.d/bauhaus.fw

And this finally allows to connect the damned thing at boot time, which is nice for two reasons: It speeds up my boot process (before dhclient would fail after an awful lot of time) and my clock will be much more precise. Now the next thing would be to try the new implementation of the driver, aka rt2x00, and go for WPA2 (which the current legacy driver is not capable of). I'll leave that for another day, though.