A view from the hill

November is here and Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is there, too. As one of its promises is faster start-up time, I used the weekend to update my laptop (a Dell 610) which was still running Hardy (8.04). The upgrade path (hardy->intrepid->jaunty->karmic) took quite some time and I'm not entirely sure it was worth it:

- Bootup time doesn't seem to have improved, quite to the contrary. I'm mounting ntfs volumes on startup and it seems that
the new parallel bootup procedure seems to run into trouble with that.
- I lost support for fglrx, the proprietary driver for the ATI graphics. It's possible to reinstall the package, but modprobing the module gives a "failed to allocate memory" error. Hence, no "graphics effects" (aka) compiz for me.
- Gnome-Shell isn't installed by default for me.
- The xemacs21-mule package postinstall script fails. This has the not exactly nice side effect that the upgrade procedure decided to quit after installing new packages, which means that it didn't clean up the cruft left behind from the old installation and also didn't boot into the new kernel.
- The update to grub2 didn't honour my old selection for which OS to boot by default (the laptop is mostly used by family members who prefer alternative systems).

And as always on Ubuntu update, a lot of crap that I got rid off previously, gets reinstalled. Like fspot, tomboy and wvdial, to name but a few. I can't help being reminded of adware.

Update:Turns out that newer fglrx modules don't support my ATI Radeon Mobility 1400 any longer (since jaunty, that is). To get GLX working, I had to un-install everything related to fglrx and re-install mesa. What I learned again the hard way during me fiddling with my old xorg.conf is that gdm is a real PITA if you have no working X configuration. What really annoyed me, though, was that status messages from dosfsck hosed the recovery (boot) mode in that the keyboard became unusable. Worse, my hard configured wlan setup at boot time is currently not working anymore, I can connect to my WiFi only through network manager. But without X I couldn't startup network manager, of course, so I also could't do a remote login. And the Wifi connection is really flakey whereas it had been stable ever since with the older hardy installation. Probably a driver issue. Update 2: Various forum entries suggested using backported modules for wifi, including a newer version of the iwl3945 driver. However, this didn't solve my problem. Another entry suggested switching to wicd instead of NetworkManager. And yes, indeed, my wifi problems are gone now.

ObTitle: Gorillaz, "Demon Days"

So I finally bought a new desktop computer in order to replace my old and loud one. The new one should fulfill two more or less conflicting requirements: it should be fast and quiet. "Fast" mainly refers to cpu and disk speed, for the gpu I only had the minimal requirement that it would be possible to see videos (non-HD) and show some basic 3d effects. I left most of the details to a local dealer, but I verified that the components would work with Linux, which actually means I only needed to ensure that the board, an Asus P5Q-VM, which is based on the intel G45 chipset, would work. A little digging showed that there might be some problems with X11 if the distribution didn't provide new enough drivers but I found enough success reports to be optimistic.

Well, I finally got the new workstation. It's an impressive black box with a Silentmaxx ST-11 tower which is really very silent -- it's so quiet that they provide large blue leds on the box to that you have a reminder that the system is on -- this was one of the details I wasn't aware of when ordering the system. I started installing Debian Lenny on the box, as I always followed the rule that buying a new computer is a good point in time to install from scratch and get rid of old software cruft. So I did nothing to carry over my old installation which I had regularly updated at least since Sarge. That was actually a quite pleasant way for me as it was the first time I've got to see the "new" graphical installer. There were some minor obstacles, though. First, this time I wanted to have both an LVM setup and encryption running. I was pleasantly suprised to see the installer providing an option for such a setup, but quite less suprised to see it fail with a segmentation fault during wiping the (500GB sata) disk. Fortunately, the manual partitioning option provided enough easy guidelines to quickly rebuild the setup of the automated partitioning scheme while allowing to leave out the unneeded step to clean the disk, so this was not a big issue. Another point that I think is interesting is that hibernation worked out of the box even with the LVM/crypto setup -- I had thought that hibernate or better said, suspend to disk, would requre the swap to be unencrypted but apparently I was wrong. Very nice.

I went on to install a very minimal system without any desktop setup. I went away from Gnome back to WindowMaker some time ago, but I had seen the LXDE as an install option which is a much smaller "desktop environment" with OpenBox2 as the central window manager. Now, compare the list of packages for Gnome with the list of list of packages for lxde -- that's quite a difference. But soon enough I realized how difficult it has become to avoid the larger environments. There are quite a lot of applications which I am used to using right now (having installed Gnome on my older desktop as well as running Ubuntu with Gnome on several other installations) which depend on Gnome. Evolution, for instance, which I privately mainly use as a glorified calender, depends on Gnome just as Rhythmbox does. This may hardly come as a suprise, but I've simpy not thought about it in advance. So I'm now looking for replacements for some applications.

Of course, in order to run any desktop environment you have to have a running X11 installation. This failed at first: I had connected my 19"-TFT (an old Benq one) via VGA to the on-board graphic chipset from the G45, which resulted in the monitor proclaiming to get out-of sync timings. After replacing the VGA connection with a DVI one, the vesa driver provided a working X11 setup. However, I soon discovered that I would not want to stick with the vesa setup, as for instance there is no xvideo extension. Unfortunately, the xserver-xorg-video-intel package in Lenny is version 2.3.2, which is too old to support the G45, so even though I specified the intel driver in the device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I didn't get a usable screen. However, packages for Xorg in version 2.8 had entered unstable some time ago -- as I had quickly installed kernel 2.6.30 from backports.org and the packages doesn't have to broad version requirements on other packages, this seemed like a viable option. So I know have an up and running intel driver for X11, but it remains to be seen how stable it really is over time. And, of course, I've got to keep an eye on security updates.

ObTitle: Björk, "Post", (more info)

Some time ago I updated my trusty old workstation from Debian Etch to Lenny. As always, there were some minor glitches, not necessarily all of them were due to Lenny itself, though. Here's a rough list.

One really annoying issue was that my trusty old Matrox G400 suddenly behaved unbelievably slow under X11. I could nearly watch the pixels going by. I could tell by the X server log that some things had changed (like Xrandr now running) but I couldn't tell what was responsible for the problem. Explicitly setting the option "NoAccel" to "false" and "NoHal" to "true" (I have a single screen setup) finally settled the problem. I also tried "UseFBDev" "true" but this only works for me with a Depth of 24, which in turn screws my screen whenever I switch to the console (for instance on hibernate), so I'm back to not using the framebuffer device (and a depth of 16).

The Postgres update didn't work for me. I guess that this was mainly due to a lack of disc space. It took me some time to figure out that no default cluster had been created, which was the reason that the manual restore of the DB backup I had made failed.

I took the chance and finally updated to Iceweasel (firefox) 3. Some of my extensions were lost this way, but I managed to replace or update nearly all of them. Only Hit-a-Hint required a manual intervention directly in the install.rdf of the extension.

One typical annoyance of updates is that user settings are often not updated. This time I experienced that mainly with FBpanel in which all icon settings were broken.

Of course, the update broke some of my proprietary programs because of library problems. Korrektor, BMM, all are history now. As are some trusty old programs I still used, for instance xmms is gone, too. I used to stick with xmms mainly due to the Windowmaker mini app wmusic which allowed control of xmms via the dock, but as I've been using Rhythmbox for quite a while now, which has a NETWM compliant panel control, I could finally let it go.

ObTitle: Amy Whinehouse, "Back to black"

Some time ago I started having nothing but trouble with my rt2570 based USB wlan stick. After we moved into our new flat, I finally started out and looked for a better solution. Looking through some retail market I found a package claiming it would support linux. After I was ensured I could return the thing in case of trouble (like outdated proprietary drivers), I bought it -- a Dlink pci card. After installing the thing, I quickly discovered that it's again a Ralink based product -- this time a RT61 based one, requiring firmware. I'm not happy with that but at least my workstation has wifi again.

One thing has changed, btw.: the newer kernels (I run 2.6.27 at the time of this writing) happily support the driver out of the box (i.e., after a recompilation and figuring out where to put the firmware), no more manual compiling and patching of drivers is required. And then you can also use wpa_supplicant to configure the network, which makes the entry in /etc/network/interfaces alot simpler:

auto wlan1
iface wlan1 inet dhcp
      pre-up ifconfig wlan1 up
      wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
      post-up iwconfig wlan1 rate 54M
      post-up /etc/network/if-post-up.d/bauhaus.fw

Unfortunately, as you can probably guess, my connection is rather lousy and setting the rate up doesn't help much. It's wlan1 for me, btw., because I told /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules to configure it that way.

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.

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.

I want that keyboard, really. Now, if He would lend me one right hand for one of my two left ones ...

No, I'm not talking about the lasershow Tool were playing their music to.

Yesterday, I finally got my new printer, a Lexmark E240. I was pretty certain that it would work, as the E120n is known to work as a Generic PCL6 printer and Lexmarks specs for the E240 claimed it understood PCL6 as well. So I just tried the driver (pxlmono) that's recommended for the E120n and it worked right out of the box (the entry for the E240 is from me). I believe that the E240d(n) as well as the E340 series are likely to be the same as the documentation coming with the E240 applies at least in part to those as well.

Lexmark does provide it's own set of drivers, btw. They ship (at least on the supplied CDROM) as RPMs, although they claim to support Debian. It looks like they provide some administration tool, and from a quick sketch in the documentation, I think they mainly provide a wrapper around the usual printing tools. But I haven't tried this stuff at all. Speaking of documentation, the Unix docs ship as HTML, and at least in part they are broken. I.e., the main navigation frame links to some HowDoI.html file, but on the CDROM there's only howdoi.html. Let's hope the hardware engineers paid a tiny bit more attention to what they were doing.

Peter vanEynde discusses his experience with binary-only drivers for his ATI card:

The machine (a Lenovo Z61m) uses a X1400 ATI chip, so I have to use the ATI binary-only driver. Well. I'm trying to use it. The amount of grief I'm getting from it would convince even billg himself that opensource drivers are mandatory in an opensource system. Strange errors pop up and you're just lost, googling only gives you forums where other poor users are trying to make it all work.

I think he's wrong about convincing that billg. Isn't that just the current Windows experience brought to Linux?

FWIW, when I needed a new laptop for work, I also ordered one with an ATI chip. There is a working X.org driver for it, though, and I double-checked prior to the order. On the other hand, I'm currently using the Ubuntu provided proprietary ATI driver without any trouble. But even if ATI decides in half a year that it no longer wants to support my ATI M300 with their linux driver, the open source driver will be there. So yes, I'm all for open source drivers, but I would be happy with a scheme that has been applied by several vendors in the past: keep the driver proprietary for some time, but release it as open source when your technology has moved to new heights. Perhaps Nvidias and ATIs current behaviour just reflects that there hasn't been any advances in their drivers?

It's no fun when the only thing you can't check in a virtual machine test installation is the connection thingie you have to use when on the road. In my case, the AVM Fritz capi module shipped with Ubuntu Dapper Drake is broken. The bug report is about two months old and still has status "unconfirmed"? At least the bug is not in the binary only firmware but in the source around it. I knew there is a reason I like open source, even if this "open" tastes more like "open beer" in this case (the Fritz drivers still only target the ancient SuSE 9.3).