A view from the hill - Linux

Everything is average nowadays

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:00:00 +0200

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.

Running Linux on Dell systems

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:51:00 +0200

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.

Hang Wire

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:55:39 +0200

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.

You gain something, you lose something

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 08:33:29 +0200

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.

How much playing time does your MP3 collection have?

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 11:42:22 +0200

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.

Rally hoe!

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Tue, 22 May 2007 09:42:25 +0200

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.

The downside of reliable hardware

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Sat, 12 May 2007 10:59:19 +0200

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.

Why did it take you so long?

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Fri, 11 May 2007 09:10:35 +0200

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).

Bug in apt-get

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:12:31 +0200

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.

Happy Easter ... Etch

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:57:31 +0200

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 ...

cl-task

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 09:04:24 +0200

Reading Bill Clementson's blog pointed me to Edi Weitz new STARTER-PACK Lisp package, which tries to overcome one of Common Lisp perceived entry level problems for newcomers, when compared to e.g. Python. Python is known to come with "batteries included" which actually means that you'll have lots of libraries for everyday problems installed out of the box. For Common Lisp, not much has been accomplished in this area, as most people still seem to be debating on comp.lang.lisp about standarization. Edi's starter pack instead does the right thing: It provides a simple selection of common packages, some of which could be called to have achieved de-facto standard level (e.g. his own CL-PPCRE package). Unfortunately, it's for Windows and Lispworks only, which Bill ported to Mac/LW.
Being a Debian user since many years (should be roughly ten years now), I think that it would be fairly simple to achieve something similar (but not at all comparable) to STARTER-PACK. There are already a lot of Common Lisp packages in Debian, what's missing, however, is a CL-TASK package. Such a package could do what all other task-* packages do in Debian: Have dependencies on the most common packages. This would provide at least a starting point for the newbies with CL in Debian. I think, I'm going to discuss this with Peter van Eynde via mail and also on cll.

Zombifying operating systems?

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 10:51:50 +0200

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.

Sing me to sleep

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:57:41 +0100

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...

Get up, stand up

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:33:04 +0100

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.

The young and the old

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 20:50:48 +0100

Finally, I wanted to give the not-so-new-by-now SBCL 1.0 a whirl. Google led me to Peter van Eynde's Dapper packages, which you can install if you add the last of the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

root@elendil:~# grep cl-dapper /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://people.debian.org/~pvaneynd/cl-dapper-packages ./

Unfortunately, on Dapper this breaks CL-SQL or more exactly the version 3.53 it is shipping with. SBCL, or more exactly PCL barfs

When attempting to set the slot's value to (OR NULL T) (SETF of SLOT-VALUE),
the slot TYPE is missing from the object
#<CLSQL-SYS::VIEW-CLASS-DIRECT-SLOT-DEFINITION CLSQL-SYS::VIEW-DATABASE>.
[Condition of type SIMPLE-ERROR]

I haven't seen any complaint about this on the CL-SQL mailing list, so I guess I'm the only one using such an old CL-SQL version with the shiny new SBCL. So, currently I have a broken CMUCL on Debian Sarge and a broken CL-SQL on Ubuntu Dapper. Sigh.

Update:Manually switching to CLSQL solved the problem. Just in case you have relied on Debian or Ubuntu to supply you with the right packages, I found replacing them to be dead easy. I just 'apt-get remove'd cl-sql, but left cl-uffi and cl-md5 in place. Then, I untar'ed the source archive of CLSQL to /usr/local/src/clsql/. One link from there to /usr/share/common-lisp/source and a 'cd /usr/share/common-lisp/systems/ ; for i in ../source/*.asd; ln -s $i . ; done' later, SBCL 1.0 loaded CLSQL 3.8 like a charm.