Fixing sound in Debian Lenny for PCs with ESS Allegro/Maestro3 sound chips, plus a lean Lenny install made easy

Why Debian decided at this juncture to remove the binary blog that supports sound for those with ESS Allegro/Maestro3 chips -- including The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) -- I don't know.

The problem -- i.e. no sound -- reared itself in the newish 2.6.24-1 kernel that recently rolled into Debian Lenny. It took me awhile before I figured out that booting the previous kernel -- 2.6.22-3 -- brought sound back.

But what if I have to reinstall Lenny and don't get the older kernel? Or what if want to use the new kernel ... and those that follow?

Well, I checked back with the bug report, and there's a fix that involves getting the binary blobs yourself, courtesy of Gabor Burjan:

You do not need to recompile the kernel, you need the appropriate binary firmware blob. Get the firmware package

ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/firmware/alsa-firmware-1.0.16.tar.bz2

and run ./configure && make && make install

After this you should have the following files present:

/lib/firmware/ess/maestro3_assp_kernel.fw
/lib/firmware/ess/maestro3_assp_minisrc.fw

Then, run rmmod snd_maestro3 and modprobe snd_maestro3 again.

I haven't tried it yet, since I still do have the older kernel. I probably will try it, but I'm not happy about it. I have half a mind to wait until the next kernel upgrade to see if the Debian team has come to its collective senses. I can understand distros/projects that really could care less if you used their code or not (OpenBSD comes to mind, but since it's so good, I'm using it anyway ... and the growling and grumbling is part of its charm), but Debian doesn't strike me as one of those projects that either wants to, or can afford to, alienate users new and old with crap like this.

Along this same line, I hope they will fix Debian Lenny's Epiphany bug (which I already fixed on my own, but again, it's something that would send a sane user running into the arms of Ubuntu, or even Windows). That bug appears "closed," but I hope that future users of Lenny don't have to suffer through it.

Even though I've had to do a bit of tweaking, this Gateway laptop responds very well to Debian Lenny. My daughter uses the laptop all the time for her games (Childsplay, gCompris, Potato Guy, Tuxpaint), and it's doing pretty well.

I did another Lenny install today on my test box, on which I did the "standard" install, added X and Fvwm (the window manager that comes standard with OpenBSD and is growing on me) and a few apps -- Geany, Ted, Dillo, Lynx, Iceweasel, sudo and xterm (yep, a "standard" install doesn't include sudo and xterm).

So far the box is performing very well. And yes, Ted did work. I tried Ted on an Etch install yesterday, and it still hasn't been fixed there, but the RTF word processing program works great in Lenny. Thanks, Debian!

Hint: I hadn't built up a Debian box from the "standard" install to include X in awhile. One thing that ensures success when doing this in Debian: use aptitude instead of apt.

I just run aptitude at the command line; I still can't figure it out when you run it as an application and it actually opens up with menus and stuff.

The reason I say to use aptitude instead of apt-get, is that aptitude seems to pick up more packages that you need for stuff to look right and work right.

For instance:

# aptitude install abiword

picks up lots more packages than:

# apt-get install abiword

After using aptitude to install Abiword, you get all the "common" files, plus all the plugins, including the spell checker.

And as far as installing X on the system, which installed with the command line only:

# aptitude install xserver-xorg-core fvwm

was enough to get me going. There was a strange menu that came up in Fvwm that asked me about configuration. I just checked every box, and after that I had my own .fvwm2rc file in my home directory. Fvwm can also use a common configuration file for all users. Read the man page for fvwm to find out more. I was surprised at how good the man page in Debian was. I'll have to compare it with OpenBSD's man page for Fvwm.

So the takeaway is:

• Debian sends you to the Web for help every once in awhile, and you usually get the help you need ... but the Debian team needs to fix stuff that's broken in order to attract and keep as many users as possible.
• Once Debian is working on a machine, it tends to keep working great (barring issues like the sound-less kernel). Debian is fast, has just about everything you could ever want ... and did I forget to say that even Testing is pretty darn stable (they're not lying about that).
• Aptitude is better than apt (yes, I know that Aptitude is based on apt, as is Synaptic, but using Aptitude just works better than either Synaptic or apt).
• I've been running Lenny (Testing) for a few months now, and I plan to stick with it on this laptop when it goes stable. That should mean a long, long run of good computing. Again -- thanks, Debian!

Debian Lenny gets OpenOffice 2.4: Among my updates today were the latest version of OpenOffice. I don't use OO much these days, but it's nice to see Lenny get it so relatively quickly. I don't think it's more than a week or two behind the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS beta in this regard.