December 2010 Archives

The Linux Mint Debian Edition — built from Debian Testing, unlike "regular" Mint editions that start with an Ubuntu base — just released a new image that pushes the project forward much more quickly that I expected.

With no fancy code name, just Linux Mint Debian (201012), the biggest thing in this new release is the availability of a 64-bit image to go with the original 32-bit offering.

There's some debate about whether or not 32-bit or 64-bit is better on the desktop, and I'm not terribly qualified to definitively state which is better, but on my 64-bit AMD Athlon II dual-core laptop I've been using 64-bit systems exclusively (both Linux and Windows 7, which ships on the Lenovo G555 as 32-bit but which I wiped and reinstalled from the 64-bit Home Premium image).

So for me a 64-bit Linux Mint Debian Edition is welcome.

Other changes/improvements for the 201012 build include (quoting from the Mint Debian 201012 release notes):

• Performance boost (using cgroup, the notorious "4 lines of code better than 200″ in user-space)
  
• Installer improvements (multiple HDDs, grub install on partitions, swap allocation, btrfs support)
  
• Better fonts (Using Ubuntu's libcairo, fontconfig and Ubuntu Font Family) and language support (ttf-wqy-microhei, ttf-sazanami-mincho, ttf-sazanami-gothic installed by default)
  
• Better connectivity and hardware support (pppoe, pppoeconf, gnome-ppp, pppconfig, libgl1-mesa-dri, libgl1-mesa-glx, libgl1-mesa-dev, mesa-utils installed by default)
  
• Better sound support (addressing conflicts between Pulse Audio and Flash)
  
• Updated software and packages

I still haven't seen my No. 1 missing feature from Linux Mint (Debian or otherwise), which is the ability, in the installer, to create either encryted LVM or individual encrypted volumes and/or partitions.

That's how I do it in Debian (I'm running Squeeze, which is still the project's Testing distribution as of this writing). Ubuntu also offers fully encrypted LVM (like Debian) in its alternate installer, and you can encrypt /home in the graphical installer. This is a feature that Mint really needs, in my opinion.

Just because 99.99 percent of Windows and Mac systems aren't encrypted doesn't mean that encryption isn't a good idea (or a great/essential idea for laptops, which are all too easily lost or stolen).

The entries in this blog flow through my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and once in awhile a friend of mine who has nothing to do with the open-source software world wonders what the hell I'm talking about.

Just this weekend, somebody asked me, "What's this 'DEEE-bee-en' you write about?" Would the question be any different with the word "Ubuntu" in there?

I don't think so. When it comes to desktop Linux (not to mention BSD, which is even further in the geek ghetto), nobody knows what we're talking about.

I'm as guilty as the next "journalist/blogger/fanboy" of preaching to the pulpit and writing about Linux and BSD geekery for Linux and BSD geeks.

I don't see a whole lot of writing out there, even about Ubuntu (which in my view is the highest-profile Linux distribution by far), that aims at the unconverted, the Windows or Mac user who doesn't even know there's a third (through 300th) way.

I tend to write about what I'm doing with free, open-source software and my particular stable of hardware. Writing this blog isn't exactly in my job description. I do it because I'm compelled to do it.

Like the great majority of writers I've encountered over the years through sites like LXer, I use this stuff every day to get actual work done. As some put it, I eat my own dog food.

And even though every year since 2000 has been declared "The year of the Linux desktop," it's just not happening.

I wrote yesterday about the "whimsical spaceship" (that's a good name, don't you think?) theme coming to the Debian Squeeze desktop and Grub screen and wondering why the login screen still was so Lennyish.

Today a new gdm3 package rolled into Squeeze, and once it installed (I've been using Aptitude on the command line to do the updates) I logged out and saw yet more spaceship whimsy.

There have been a few comments on how whimsical spaceship isn't the sophisticated kind of design one wants on one's desktop. I understand that feeling, but I'm OK enough with the new theme to keep it. I like spaceships. I'm OK with whimsy. I guess I'm a sentimental, whimsical type myself (ah ... processors in the MHz era ... those were the days ... adm3a terminals that looked right out of "2001: A Space Odyssey" ....).

It turns out that Debian calls this theme "SpaceFun," and there just happens to be a page dedicated to it and its images on the Debian Wiki.

Submitted for your approval is the image used for the login/GDM screen. Click it to see a full 1024x768 image.

I just saw the Linux Devices article about the new Google Chrome notebooks, of which I've been anticipating the arrival for about a year. (Google announced Chrome OS in November 2009, according to the Linux Devices story.)

I'd love to get my hands on one of these devices, and through Google's pilot program maybe it'll actually happen.

While much of what I do is interact with a variety of CMS applications via web interfaces — perfect for a cloud- and browser- based OS, I also need FTP client access (should be doable).

I need to edit images and subsequently upload them either via web interface or FTP. Will Chrome OS allow me to work with JPEGs in that manner?

Will I be able to record audio in Chrome OS? That's not a deal-breaker, but I'd like the option.

Also not in the deal-breaking corner but something I'd love to do in Chrome OS is editing video. My requirements for this are few. I just need to trim the clips, put in credits and pump out a resulting video. I don't expect Chrome OS to do this (and I have trouble getting Linux apps to do it now), but it would be nice if it did.

I wondered why my formerly favorite open-source-focused blogger Matt Asay has been so ... silent lately. He became Canonical's COO not so long ago, his Cnet blog went into hibernation, his personal blog not so much (but not exactly bursting with activity, either), and he didn't exactly cut a large profile media-attention-wise at Canonical.

Now I hear from Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols (and via Matt's own blog and Canonical's blog) that Matt is leaving the comparatively huge (400-or-so-employee) Canonical — the company behind the wildly popular Ubuntu Linux distribution and associated services — for HTML5-web-app startup Strobe.

Before I get into this post, have you noticed that real geeks don't use pre-cooked software like WordPress to run their blogs. They generally code a thing up and use that. Debian Developer Joey Hess is just such a person (I see his posts via Planet Debian).

And now back to our previously announced blog entry. Through Joey's post I learned that YouTube is running an HTML5 trial that will allow those with compatible browsers to enjoy the site's millions of videos without the Flash Player/plugin.

The fact that maybe 99 percent (I don't know the exact figure, but it's huge) of web-delivered video comes wrapped in Flash, a protocol controlled by one company — and only available on platforms that company deems worthy — is a major disturbance in the Force.

Could you imaging a Web markup language that only worked in a single proprietary browser? Fortunately we have open standards like HTML and CSS, and no single company or group of company owns the majority of the protocols that rule the web.

The desktop-base package just updated on my Debian Squeeze desktop, and it brought with it the new wallpaper for the distribution's soon-to-be-stable release. What do you think? (Click the image for the full 1366x768 view).

Now it really feels like Squeeze is ... not Lenny.

I burned and booted the Salix 13.1.2 live CD so I could test its video compatibility with my Lenovo G555's ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD video chip, and my second boot — passing nomodeset — succeeded in giving my perfect video with the open-source ati driver.

That this is something eluding me in Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 14 is extremely significant. It makes Salix (and perhaps by extension Zenwalk and Slackware itself) viable distributions for this laptop. I can already run Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu 10.04 with no modifications to boot line or packages, and I'm hoping for the same thing with the Red Hat-derived CentOS 6 and its 2.6.32 kernel.

Back to Salix 13.1.2. Modifying the boot line to pass nomodeset as the live CD started up was a bit different than I'm used to, but I was able to do it. The "cheat codes" for the boot line aren't as apparent as they are in the Ubuntu live CD, for instance, but a little research on the Web reveals many ways to tweak the boot line to get things running right.

Once I did pass nomodeset and got a login screen, I wasn't logged in automatically. for Salix Live, the user login name is one with no password required. I entered one in the login box and hit Enter. I was soon in the Xfce desktop in Salix. If/when you need root access, the password is live.

In the case of my current network, I get an IP via DHCP but don't get nameservers that way. While the Wicd network-management application is touted as a lighter, better alternative to the GNOME-based NetworkManager, I've always had trouble getting Wicd to work.

This time was no different. I tried to establish a DHCP connection with manually entered nameservers. I just couldn't make Wicd actually make the "new" configuration live.

I even tried manually entering my nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf.tail. I used to do this all the time in OpenBSD, and I'm glad to see this feature in Salix (and perhaps in Slackware as well; does anybody know?). This didn't work either.

Eventually I entered a fully static IP in Wicd, opened a root shell, used ifconfig eth0 down to shut down the network and then cd /etc/rc.d followed by ./rc.inet1 restart, after which my static IP with nameservers was working.

If I were to use Salix and by extension Wicd full time, I imagine I'd have to figure out a better way to make this (dhcp with manual nameservers) happen. It's supposed to work.

Anyhow, I'm a huge fan of Xfce after using it for many months in Fedora and in Xubuntu/Ubuntu before that (and Wolvix and Debian Etch and Lenny before that). The environment is very familiar to me (albeit without Wicd; I used NetworkManager in Fedora, the great utility Wolvix provides in that system and manual configuration via text files in Debian).

Thus far Salix seems like an excellent way to get a fast Xfce desktop, and I find that any distribution generally works better on its "favored" desktop environment (GNOME for Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora, KDE for Slackware, etc.).

Ogg audio files played out of the box, and I used the Gslapt package manager to add the gst-fluendo-mp3 package, after which MP3 files played just as well. The system defaults to the Xfce-based Parole Media Player for both. I grew to like Parole very well in Fedora. Parole uses the Gstreamer plugins, and while it's not as "quick" to do the various operations it does as is GNOME's Totem, Parole definitely uses fewer resources and works extremely well.

Flash was installed and enabled in Firefox 3.6.12, and a check of YouTube revealed that it was working fine.

The one problem I had was with volume control. The Xfce Mixer app is included in Salix Live, but you have to go to Accessories-Multimedia in the menu to get to it. I quickly put a Mixer link in the panel, but this isn't as easy to use as a dedicated volume control, which is generally available in most Xfce desktops.

My keyboard's volume controls also didn't work. I added the xfce4-volumed package, which didn't immediately work. I hope that a reboot in an installation (or using the Persistence feature) would make the keyboard volume controls work.

In fact, figuring out how the Persistence feature works is probably an excellent idea, as it would allow for configuration and rebooting to test changes in the system before committing to a full installation.

I like Salix. Anything that makes Slackware easier to install and use — and more complete without KDE (my biggest complaint about Slackware) with more packages to choose from is OK by me.

I don't think Salix allows users to easily encrypt volumes or the whole installation, and that's something I generally require, especially in laptop installations. I'm pretty sure that I could figure out Wicd and the volume-control situation.

I'm not sure how long the Salix community intends to support its various releases. Slackware is famous for keeping updates flowing to releases for years. I still see updates to Slackware 8 every once in a while. Maybe Salix intends to do the same. Or they could stick with the 13.x series and move over to 14.x when Slackware does the same. It's one of those things about many small projects — you don't know exactly what their plans are (and they might not know, either). But it's easy enough to reinstall a new system (something I've done more than a couple of times these last two months), so I'm not as hung up on "long term support" as I have been in the past.

Sure there are a few things that need setup after the fact, but Salix seems very flexible, offers KDE and LXDE ISOs for those who want them — and did I mention that it's very fast?

I would do a full installation of Salix and a fuller review after that, but I'm still getting my Debian Squeeze desktop together, and I plan on sticking with it for the foreseeable future while testing other distributions via live images, just like I did this one. I really need a working system that keeps doing what it does, and for now that means Debian. But Salix is definitely an attractive alternative for anybody who wants to leverage the formidable Slackware base while adding many more packages and a system that puts quickness and efficiency at the top of its feature list.

What nearly killed me in Fedora 13 and 14, wounded me grievously in Ubuntu 10.10 and not bothered me at all in Debian Squeeze is entirely manageable in the Slackware-based Salix 13.1.2. What the hell am I talking about? I have a working display in Salix 13.1.2 on my Lenovo G555 laptop, which features an ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD video chip that kernel mode setting has left behind.

I downloaded, burned and booted from the Salix 13.1.2 live CD, added nomodeset to the boot line and soon found myself in the Xfce-based Salix desktop with perfectly working video. I'm not 100 percent confident in the process as this is my first time doing this in Salix, and things are a bit different than in Fedora and Ubuntu, both in how it's done and the fact that it actually works.

This is how it's supposed to work. Either nomodeset or, in my case, radeon.modeset=0 in the boot line (entered during boot time or in the GRUB configuration) should allow this particular video card to not be blurry and wavy in the framebuffer and graphical (Xorg) display.

Since this doesn't work in the most recent Ubuntu release and Fedora 13 and 14 with 2.6.34+ kernels, there is more afoot. It could be the boot sequence, i.e. when and how kernel mode setting and initialization of the display happens during startup.

Another way to "solve" this problem is by using the proprietary video driver, which in the case of ATI video cards/chips is the fglrx/Catalyst driver available directly from AMD/ATI, packaged up by such distributions as Ubuntu and kept in a non-free repository, or in the case of Fedora, and very recently and only for Fedora 13 at this point, offered in the RPM Fusion repository (a must-have for Fedora users who like multimedia).

This often works because the fglrx/Catalyst driver cannot use kernel mode setting (aka KMS), so this should theoretically work with video chips such as mine. This is true in Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 13 but not in Fedora 14. And I'd rather stick with the open-source driver anyway. It's faster (in my case anyway), more reliable and always updated with the rest of the distribution through the built-in package-management tools.

What this successful test of Salix 13.1.2 means is that in all likelihood Zenwalk and Slackware itself will also work on my machine with nomodeset in the boot line. When I was having this same problem with the Intel video driver, eventually Ubuntu could figure out that my Intel chip (82830 CGC) couldn't do KMS and automatically turned it off — a great thing for potential Linux users who haven't been through as much $#%^ as many of us have.

So here's the Lenovo G555 / ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD scorecard thus far:

Ubuntu 10.04 (2.6.32)
standard boot: works

Ubuntu 10.10 (2.6.35)
standard boot: wavy, blurry
nomodeset: wavy, blurry
radeon.modeset=0: wavy, blurry
Ubuntu's fglrx package: works

Fedora 13 (2.6.33 kernel)
standard boot: works

Fedora 13 (2.6.34 kernel)
standard boot: wavy, blurry
nomodeset: wavy, blurry
radeon.modeset=0: wavy blurry
RPM Fusion fglrx: Finally updated for latest 2.6.34 kernel, not tested
ATI/AMD's fglrx/Catalyst script: works

Fedora 14
standard boot: wavy, blurry
nomodeset: wavy, blurry
radeon.modeset=0: wavy, blurry except VERY occasionally (randomly 1 out of 20 boots)
RPM Fusion fglrx: unavailable
ATI/AMD's fglrx/Catalyst script: no video at all

Debian Squeeze (2.6.32 kernel)
standard boot: works

Salix 13.1.2 (2.6.33.4 kernel)
standard boot: wavy, blurry
nomodeset: works

The Empathy instant-messaging client is in the default GNOME desktop of Debian Squeeze, and I figured I'd give it a try and fall back to Pidgin if I didn't like it.

When I first launched Empathy, it appeared that I could only add Facebook, Jabber and Google Talk accounts. I needed to get AOL's AIM in there, and while I don't generally set up stand-alone IM clients with Yahoo Messenger, I wondered why it wasn't among the choices.

A little Googling, then a search in the Synaptic Package Manager led me to the telepathy-haze package.

Once I installed telepathy-haze, I suddenly was able to add accounts for a whole mess of other protocols, including AIM, Yahoo, IRC, MSN, ICQ, MySpace, and a whole bunch of other services I've never heard of.

And yes, I think it would be a very good idea to make telepathy-haze a dependency of Empathy in Debian.

I'm not sure yet whether or not I'll stick with Empathy. Unlike in Pidgin, it seems that Empathy is unable to order groups of contacts in any way other than alphabetically. I like being able to arrange the groups any way I want in Pidgin. That way my most-used groups can be at the top of the list without having to resort to alphabetical tricks to make one or another rise to the top.

I do like Empathy's ability to archive conversations, although I believe that Gmail does this automatically for Google-based IM exchanges.

Right now I have both clients (Empathy and Pidgin) installed, but I'm still spending most time in Empathy to give it a full test.

I was able to do a file transfer via Empathy (using Google Talk) yesterday. That's something I've done with Pidgin in the past, and it's nice to see that feature in Empathy as well. I believe that Empathy's file transfer is limited to the XMPP protocol that Google uses while Pidgin also allows file transfer over the AIM network. I'll have to test that one out later.

From the Empathy web page, here's the short-list of features:

• Multi-protocol: Google Talk (Jabber/XMPP), MSN, IRC, Salut, AIM, Facebook, Yahoo!, Gadu Gadu, Groupwise, ICQ and QQ. (Supported protocols depend on installed Telepathy Connection Manager components.) Supports all protocols supported by Pidgin.
• File transfer for XMPP, and local networks.
• Voice and video call using SIP, XMPP and Google Talk.
• Some IRC support.
• Conversation theming.
• Sharing and viewing location information.
• Private and group chat (with smileys and spell checking).
• Conversation logging.
• Automatic away and extended away presence.
• Automatic reconnection using Network Manager.
• Python bindings for libempathy and libempathy-gtk
• Support for collaborative applications ("tubes").

Fedora is great if you want the latest in everything packaged up for you. But with the latest comes the often not-so-greatest in the form of breakage and regressions.

From the gThumb mailing list:

Hi all,

just a warning: exiv2-0.21 is going into the Fedora development version next week -

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-December/146512.html

and the API changes break gThumb -

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636227

Users of Linux can save themselves a lot of time, trouble, heartache and pain by taking the path of least resistance and using a distribution that works with their hardware out of the box.

That's been increasingly difficult for my relatively new Lenovo G555 laptop (AMD Athlon II dual-core 2.1 GHz, ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD graphics and Conexant 5069 sound). Starting with many recent releases (Fedora 13 with 2.6.34, Fedora 14, Ubuntu 10.10, Salix 13.1), roughly coinciding with the advent of kernel mode setting for ATI (or so I've been led to believe), the open-source ati/radeon graphics driver has pretty much stopped working.