January 2011 Archives

I was reading the Splitbrain.org blog, which I quite like by the way, and when I see a blog that I like, both content-wise and design/execution-wise, I try to figure out whether or not the software behind it is WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, etc.

Well, it turns out that Splitbrain.org is done with DokuWiki, which is a wiki platform that doesn't rely on a database, with all the data stored in regular files on the server.

I like simplicity.

DokuWiki isn't exactly a blogging platform, but you can turn it into one with plugins.

I did a bit of searching around and found this interesting post from Rafael Minuesa that lists a number of CMS platforms that don't use databases. Rafael's post also lists a few CMS platforms that use the simpler SQlite database.

The point of this isn't so much that a blogging platform shouldn't use a database but that when you're using a blogging platform such as WordPress, or a more full-fledged CMS like Drupal not so much to build a complicated web site or full-featured blog but to create a relatively simple web site, sometimes a relatively simple tool is a better fit.

In other words, in web design, don't make WordPress (or Movable Type, Drupal or Joomla) the proverbial hammer in your toolbox that you're whacking at every nail you find.

Constantly evaluating all of the potential tools out there with which you can get a particular job done is something all web designers, developers and sysadmins should be doing. Me too.

I only recently discovered the Lenovo forums for what the company calls its "value line" laptops, which include the G555 as well as the G430, G460, G550, G560 and others.

I didn't know before I purchased the G555 for the bargain-basement price of $329 that the Alps touchpad in the laptop doesn't work all that well.

Maybe that's why Fn-F8 turns off the touchpad — if you're having too many problems and are using an external USB mouse, you can eliminate touchpad issues by turning the entire thing off.

The problems are more pronounced when tap-to-click is enabled. The funny/tragic thing is that it doesn't look as if tap-to-click can be turned off in Windows 7, but it generally is in Linux (including the GNOME desktop in Debian Squeeze, which I'm running now). Yes, you can turn off the touchpad entirely but can't turn off tap-to-click.

I hadn't noticed this glaring omission from Windows 7 because I rarely boot into it. The way the story usually goes, hardware always works perfectly in Windows but is hard to get working right in Linux. This time, not so much.

I use a wireless Logitech mouse (the cheap M305) most of the time, and yes, I do turn off the touchpad with Fn-F8 occasionally.

It would be fair to say that many, many Lenovo G5xx owners are unhappy with their touchpad performance. One of the longest threads is for the G550.

A new driver for the Alps touchpad in the G550 (yes, I know I have the G555) is available for 32- and 64-bit Windows 7. Even though I don't have this exact model, a touchpad is a touchpad generally, so I downloaded the version 7.7.1602.501 driver and tried it.

It installed fine, but after a reboot I noticed that my cursor-jumpiness (it just randomly moves around a window and selects characters which are often erased with the next keystroke).

Not being a Windows 7 expert, I decided to do this the "recommended" way. I opened the Control Panel, clicked Hardware and Sound, then clicked Mouse (even though I'm not interested in the Mouse, but the Touchpad, and Windows 7 should know this), then clicked Hardware, then clicked Alps Pointing Device, then clicked Change Settings, then clicked Update Driver, then clicked Search Automatically for Updated Driver Software.

The dialog informed me that my 7.107.1602.320 Alps driver from 4/22/2010 is the latest driver. It isn't using the G550 driver I installed minutes earlier (although the system let me install it). A check on the Lenovo driver page for the G555 cites this same driver (7.107.1602.320) as being the latest but gives a date of 2010-08-26.

And bizarre as it still sounds, there seems to be no way to turn off tap-to-click in Windows 7.

Allow me to present the following dialog:

World: Hey Lenovo, it's 2010. Turning tap-to-click on and off is so ... 2003. So get with it.

Lenovo: I know you bought this laptop because even though it's extremely inexpensive, you though that some of the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad vibe would rub off on it.

That didn't happen.

What you got wasn't just inexpensive. It's also cheap.

This isn't a $329 Thinkpad. That animal doesn't exist.

So live with it and realize that as we enter the lower end of the market by exploiting the Lenovo name's association with the higher-end, better-built Thinkpad line, hundreds of blog posts, forum posts and other expressions of exasperation will brand us as a maker of cheap, faulty hardware that's best avoided, and it will probably hurt our Thinkpad line and drag our entire business downward.

World: Thanks for the warning, Lenovo.

Lenovo: No problem, hapless laptop buyer. Now please move along.

Did you enjoy that? I know I did.

Other than this touchpad business, the Lenovo G555 performs rather well, especially because I wiped the crapware-rich Windows 7 32-bit default operating system and replaced it with a crapware-free Windows 7 64-bit installation.

And 95 percent of the time I'm running Linux, in which I can turn off tap-to-click and get better touchpad performance, even though the rest of my 8-years-older laptops — the ones that still have working touchpads anyway (and yes, they ALL have Alps touchpads, which aren't as good as Synaptics but not as bad as the one in this Lenovo) — invoke tap-to-click just fine.

I generally turn off the touchpad entirely since I prefer using an external USB mouse (and really don't like the cursor jumping around, randomly selecting text that is deleted with my next keystroke).

At least this laptop only cost $329. I'd be really pissed off if I had dropped $500-$800 for it. But any reader of this blog knows that I don't do that sort of thing.

Parting hacky note: I just might deinstall the touchpad driver entirely, then install the G550 driver and see if it works. If any other G555 users see any kind of success in this endeavor, please let me know.

I'm still going to look into hacks that might take care of the jumpy touchpad issue in Linux. I'm somewhat confident that I can figure it out that way.

Later: Here is a thread from the Lenovo forum on the touchpad in the G555 that recommends a 2007 driver from Acer.

Supposedly after installing this driver the system under Windows will allow tap-to-click to be turned off.

The next thing I'll be trying in Windows 7 is deinstalling the "normal" touchpad driver, then installing the G550 driver again. Then I'll try this older driver. I'm unsure whether or not this will work in Windows 7, the driver being so old and all of that (along with the forum posters not being extremely specific about whether or not they're running Win 7 or XP).

All I can tell Windows 7 users of the Lenovo G555 is that you can easily turn off tap-to-click in most Linux distributions. In others it's not so easy, I imagine, but still doable.

It was certainly easy for me in Debian Squeeze with the GNOME desktop, and it should be just as easy in popular distros such as Ubuntu and Mint.

Back when I was running Fedora 13, the default for this touchpad on the Lenovo G555 was tap-to-click turned off, so there was no problem at all. I was only able to turn it back on by modifying a text file (which also enabled me to replicate a right-click on the touchpad). I eventually turned it off because of the jumpiness, and now that I'm running Debian, I don't know how Fedora 14 runs on the Lenovo mostly because of the video issues that are plaguing the G555 in many newer Linux releases (and one of the main reasons I'm continuing to enjoy the still-perfect-video of Debian Squeeze).

Again, the bottom line is that turning off tap-to-click makes the touchpad issue bearable, though it doesn't turn the touchpad into something it's not (i.e. as responsive and accurate as most other touchpads). It remains jumpy, and the cursor wanders. Any kind of dirt or moisture only makes things worse. And it seems like the longer the laptop is running and the hotter the touchpad gets, the worse it performs.

I do hope to clear things up AND have tap-to-click in Linux, but it could take a lot of experimentation, and since things work well enough with tap-to-click shut off (and even better with an external mouse), that's not likely to happen.

ZDNet ran Happy Birthday, Macintosh yesterday, and I clicked, somehow thinking it would be a significant birthday.

Nope. It's No. 27. Not 30, which we'll all be enjoying in three years' time. But any time's a good time to trot out Steve Jobs circa 1984 and what Apple brought to the personal-computing universe that year.

Today's Macintosh bears only a little resemblance to what Steve Jobs unleashed 27 years ago in the video above.

Sure it couldn't do much out of the stylized box, but a few years and a few iterations (more memory, faster CPUs, hard disk drives, PageMaker, the Apple LaserWriter) turned the Macintosh into a machine on which you could get things done, especially if you were a graphically artistic type.

Call it irony or coincidence, while I've used my share of Macs over the years, it was a mid-1980s UC Santa Cruz computer lab filled with Macintosh Plus boxes and creaky dot-matrix ImageWriter printers that sent me running into the arms of Unix, which ran on over a dozen (mostly PDP) machines on campus (only one — the infamous Unix B as it was called — accessible to every student brave enough to face the % prompt) with terminals of various vintages (older adm3a screens that looked like something straight out of 1968, newer DEC VT100s and Wyse models) scattered around campus (and, unlike the Macs, available 24/7 in most cases). The pièce de résistance — a genuine laser printer, out of which a computer-center worker would place your clean, neat printouts in alphabetical cubbies. (We used vi to write, nroff to format our college papers).

Remember, this was the mid-1980s, before Windows (which would have never happened without Macintosh mocking everything MS-DOS stood for), when the rare "home computer" was usually an Apple II. In those days, an IBM-PC or Macintosh cost many thousands of dollars.

Who uses AOL Mail, you say? It turns out a lot of people, and many of them are more than a little angry that they can't log in today, as the Wall Street Journal, among others. A spokeswoman reportedly said that only 4 percent of users were affected.

Here's what the AOL Mail Blog is saying:

We're very sorry for the inconvenience,

We're in the midst of doing some scheduled maintenance on AOL Mail, and it's taking us a little longer than expected.

While we complete this maintenance, you may experience some inconsistencies with seeing older messages in your inbox or you may see a "Scheduled Maintenance" message when you attempt to login.

We'll update you here once the issue has been resolved. Until then, should you have any questions, please head over to our support forums.

I learned about the outage from an AOL Mail-using co-worker, and even though I don't use AOL Mail myself, I do keep an AOL AIM account active (while following most of the world into using Google Talk for most of my IM needs).

When I started up the Empathy instant-message client (the default IM application for the GNOME desktop environment I'm running in Debian Squeeze), AOL/AIM wouldn't log me in. (Note: I also have the cross-platform Pidgin IM client installed, but these days I'm using Empathy much more often — though for no good reason.)

A few minutes later I was able to log into AIM with no trouble. I also checked the e-mail account associated with it; I was able to log in just fine, though my AOL-loving (for the moment anyway) co-worker hasn't been so lucky thus far.

P.S. Notice how the title of this blog post doesn't read, "You (haven't) got mail"? That's because I'm trying to "stay classy," Ron Burgundy-style.

I think we can all agree that "Anchorman" is the best movie ever. Even in a world without AOL Mail:

Debian Developer Raphaël Hertzog has been doing a great thing in his apt-get install debian-wizard blog: Writing about the people and features of Debian GNU/Linux in a way that mortals such as myself can understand.

Today he has this entry: Debian is eating its own dog food more than ever

He points to this list of the Debian development machines (which run Debian, of course), as well as a page for the Debian System Administration Team

I'd like to thank Raphaël both for his work on Debian as well as the blogging he's doing that helps explain who and what's behind the project in a way that both current and future users of Debian can relate to.

I generally find Raphaël's blog posts on Planet Debian, but I'm also subscribed to an e-mail alert he sends out whenever he has new entries in the blog. I recommend it.

Raphaël also has written a book about Debian, which happens to be in French. He wants to translate it into English, and he is also planning to update the book for Squeeze. While the translation isn't happening yet (the Squeeze update in French isn't yet completed/available), he has translated the table of contents.

I've been good. I've been running the 2.6.32 kernel that powers Debian Squeeze since I did the installation in November.

That kernel has been good to me. Video works, sound works (but not perfectly).

I've been saying to myself, "When Debian Backports adds a squeeze-backports repo and puts newer kernels in there, I'm going to try them out and see whether or not my sound issues (no muting with Lenovo G555 powered by Conexant 5069 sound chip) are solved and video holds (it's been bad in Ubuntu 10.04+ and Fedora 13 with 2.6.34+, and just about everything else).

Let's back up a bit. The problem with this Conexant sound chip (avoid these if you can) is that the speaker doesn't mute when headphones are plugged in. You can see that this poses a problem both when recording via the mic jack as well as to my long-suffering co-workers, who must hear what should only be coming through the headphones. When the headphones are plugged in, sound comes through both speakers and headphones.

Previously I've been able to mute the speakers when using 2.6.34 kernels by modifying /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf.

But not in Debian Squeeze. That hack doesn't work with Squeeze's 2.6.32 kernel.

Today I went to the Linuxant page and attempted to install a new ALSA driver. That only bricked ALSA entirely. The process rebuilt my kernel, but modules were missing (snd_hda_intel and snd_seq, if I remember correctly), and ALSA would not load.

I reinstalled Squeeze's 2.6.32 kernel, and that fixed ALSA.

Follow my twisted logic here: Since I bricked ALSA and was able to bring it back, since I modified the kernel and didn't brick the entire system, I was feeling in an experimentally saucy mood and was ready to mess with my stable-as-Stable Debian system.

I've been thinking about the Liquorix kernels for some time. They've been mentioned to me in the comments. I've read about them. They are built for Debian.

So I used the five whole lines of instruction on the Liquorix page (it's simple, trust me) added the Liquorix repositories to my system, did an update with Aptitude, installed the keyring packages and then ...

I installed the Liquorix kernel, which is at 2.6.37.

I rebooted the laptop and did a sound test.

Sound works. What's better, the speakers mute with headphones plugged in, and no modification of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf is required.

What's even better is that video isn't at all broken. It's just as perfect as it was in "stock" Debian Squeeze.

I don't know a whole lot about how these newer kernels are built, and there are supposed to be optimizations for the desktop. Thus far Debian was super-fast with 2.6.32, and I haven't been in 2.6.37 long enough to notice any differences (other than the ALSA improvements).

I don't know how the Liquorix repository works. Will I be able to stay with 2.6.37, or will this continually upgrade to newer kernels as Liquorix builds them?

What I do know is that 2.6.37 doesn't mess with my video, at least in Debian Squeeze, and that gives me a whole lot of peace of mind.

I'll be keeping an eye on these kernels, and I'll be looking at what eventually appears in Debian Backports as a way of "extending" Debian Stable while keeping that Stable base that in my case is working so very, very well.

The next thing I'll be looking at is suspend/resume, which was broken for this particular machine in 2.6.32. I'll report back on that.

Have you used Liquorix kernels? Do you bring in newer kernels from Debian Backports, or elsewhere upstream? Has it worked out for you? Let me know.

Later: Suspend/resume still broken on this particular laptop (Lenovo G555) with 2.6.37 in Debian Squeeze.

From the debian-devel-announce mailing list comes word that since the Release Candidate 2 version of the debian-installer is imminent, that means it looks like Feb. 5 or 6 as the date for Debian Squeeze, the project's current Testing distribution, to be officially released, at which time Squeeze will be Debian's Stable distribution.

Once Squeeze is declared Stable (capital "S"), Debian Lenny officially becomes Old Stable and will receive an additional year of security patches before it reaches its end of life.

As I've observed more than a few times, while Debian adheres to no fixed schedule on releases per its "release when ready" philosophy, observation over the past few releases (Sarge, Etch, Lenny and now Squeeze) reveals a roughly two-year gap between Stable releases.

Not bad, I think. While Debian, by the nature of the way its put together, is generally older than, say, a Ubuntu (and especially a Fedora) release right out of the gate, I find the two-year window to be a very good one. For one thing, you can really see differences in the distribution between releases, yet there's almost nothing in a stable Debian release that hasn't been torture-tested in one form or another by thousands of users who prefer more bleeding-edge environments.

This is great on the server, but not so bad on the desktop either. Squeeze, for instance, with its 2.6.32 kernel, treats my ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD video chip with the "respect" it deserves (and so unceremoniously lost in 2.6.34+ kernels in other distributions) by allowing it to actually display working video with the open-source ati/radeon driver.

Alas, that kernel doesn't include a new-enough ALSA driver to solve my woeful Conexant sound chip's headphone-jack-muting issue, but either a newer kernel (2.6.34+) or a newer ALSA driver built from source (I need 1.0.23, Squeeze's kernel includes 1.0.21 even though ALSA itself is at 1.0.23) should solve this issue when I get around to hacking on it again.

I've been running Squeeze since late November, and in those nearly two months it's been a relatively wonderful experience.

And given the way Debian is maintained (i.e. nothing new to break ... or fix ... what's in the Stable distribution, security updates notwithstanding), the goodness my Lenovo G555 laptop enjoys under Squeeze will continue — if I so wish — until the next Debian Testing release is declared Stable plus one year.

It's like a frozen-in-time Linux insurance policy.

I'd like to think I've been "doing" open source long enough (starting roughly in early 2007) that I won't be as tempted to bolt back to the extreme bleeding edge of Fedora or the still alpha-tagged Ubuntu's six-month releases. I very well might.

But since I've spent all of 2009 and 2010 running BSD and Linux desktops most of the time, and I'm using these OSes to get "real" work done (to the best of my ability), and given the trouble I've had with these systems between oceans of sanity/usability, the fact that Debian Squeeze runs so very well on this particular laptop (as well as on so many other machines I've had and have), the temptation to stick with it for the next six to 12 months is very strong.

Just about all of my environment, software/application-wise is doing well. I don't have suspend/resume working (again ...), but a newer kernel could change that, or I could live without it, as I do.

Debian is fast, as stable as Stable is, relatively conservative in terms of the technologies it relies on (again, in Stable, not so much in Sid and Experimental), complete (25,000+ packages), not tied to a commercial entity yet as enterprise-ready as anything, as universal as its tagline promises (I've run it on PowerPC, not so successfully on 32-bit SPARC with Sarge, but on all manner of x86 hardware always successfully).

Debian is reliable. Did I say fast? I did. And it's ready now (and has been extremely stable for the past many, many months even though the project itself will only call it as such sometime in the next two weeks, give or take).

Not that I'm giving up on everything else. I still have Ubuntu running on one machine (10.04, on which I fixed the Annoying ScreenSaver Bug), Debian Lenny on another, with my Thinkpad R32 ready for whatever I feel like throwing at it (and that might br "selling it to the high bidder").

Looking over this blog for the past three years, Debian has saved my personal bacon more than once, as it has in the post-Fedora-13/14/Ubuntu 9.10+ graphics debacle of 2010. If you've never run Debian, you owe it to yourself (and to the rest of us) to drop it on a box or two and experience Linux in an albeit slightly different but profound way.

Announced in Debian News: The new Squeeze installer is now out of beta and into Release Candidate 1 status. It's another milestone on the march to Stable for Debian's current Testing distribution.

Users are reminded in the post that Debian Squeeze will ship with a totally free kernel and that nonfree repositories must be enabled manually. That's the way things have always been, but I suppose there were enough binary blobs in the kernel to get most people going.

One of the main reasons I'm running Debian Squeeze now and will most likely be continuing to do so on my Lenovo G555 laptop is that in its current incarnation (which will for the most part remain due to Debian policies for stable releases) my particular ATI video chip, which has been more than a little problematic in newer Linux kernels, runs flawlessly in Squeeze's 2.6.32 kernel using the open-source ati/radeon driver.

Though I love Debian, I'm not the type to move heaven, earth and what have you to stick with a distribution or project on hardware where's it's an uphill battle (if only to pile up the highest number of pithy cliches in a single sentence).

By that I mean if Ubuntu, Slackware, Fedora, FreeBSD or other ran better, configured easier and did the myriad things I want an OS to do, I'd be using them instead.

I've been chuckling. Inside. Silently. OK, not so silently.

Never mind that little show called CES. The big tech news today is Qualcomm's $3.2 billion (with a b) acquisition of WiFi chip maker Atheros.

Ostensibly Qualcomm couldn't develop its own WiFi business and thus threw a few billion at the problem.

So what does this matter to me?

Well, I happen to have a laptop with not one but TWO Atheros networking chips. Yes, my Lenovo G555 (an el-cheapo choice at $329 new, out the door from Fry's) has Atheros chips for both 802.11g WiFi and 10/100 Mbps wired Ethernet.

For the record, here's the output of lspci in Linux for the G555 relevant to networking chips:

08:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications AR8132 Fast Ethernet (rev c0)

I guess it's better than having Broadcom wireless, and truthfully it's not the Atheros wireless chip that's my problem. That pretty much "just works" in Windows 7, Linux, OpenBSD and FreeBSD.

No, it's the Atheros Ethernet module that's flaky. Never mind that Lenovo really cheaped out (OK, it's a cheap laptop, but come on already) by using the 10/100 Mbps Atheros instead of the probably not-that-much-more-expensive 10/100/1000 Mbps version, but this thing just isn't ready for prime time.

Some "older" Linux distributions don't even recognize it. And it's not that new, I understand. In both OpenBSD and FreeBSD I have to "conjure" it to life by setting the media type. Otherwise it stays dark.

And in any OS, every once in awhile the Ethernet simply stops working entirely. Windows, Linux — it doesn't matter. It just dies. I pull the battery from the laptop, open up the HUGE memory door, which exposes about half the laptop's bottom to the world, then put everything back together, and the whole thing works again.

Annoying.

If you care to read every mention I've made about Atheros chips, this handy Google search will take you there.

If you read any of the insidesocal.com blogs from the Los Angeles Daily News and other Los Angeles Newspaper Group members, you might have noticed that the blogs are once again publishing new entries, but those entries don't have a link to click for comments, and the existing links on old entries allow you to type a comment but won't ultimately save that comment.

I apologize for the inconvenience, but we're getting ready to switch commenting back on and just need to get all of our technological ducks in a row before we do it.

If all goes well, commenting should return to the blogs sometime this week. If you have any questions, please e-mail me at steven.rosenberg@dailynews.com.

Anybody running Debian Squeeze whose desktop-base package has updated in recent days might notice a change in the wallpaper on their Grub 2 screen as they boot up. Previously the Debian logo in the lower right side of the Grub screen tended to obscure the portion of the boot message that tells you how many seconds are left until the machine boots automatically.

The new image in Grub doesn't have a Debian logo rendering invisible this sometimes (but not usually) vital bit of information. It's just one of many small tweaks I've seen in Squeeze in the run-up to it receiving the Stable designation and replacing Lenny as Debian's official Stable distribution.

Of course, many of us have been running Squeeze for months anyway, because for the most part Debian Testing is mighty stable (small "s"), if not officially Stable (capital "S").

I'm not sure where the Debian Project is with upgrades from Lenny to Squeeze, but I have a post from many months ago in which I tried this and failed miserably. The takeaway from this, for me anyway, is that upgrading an installation stands a good chance of not working when going from stable to testing, but it should work going from stable/old-stable to stable. At least that's what the Debian developers are aiming for when they certify Squeeze as Stable. What I mean to say is that many months ago, a Lenny-to-Squeeze dist-upgrade isn't anywhere near as foolproof as it is today (or will be when Squeeze is officially Stable).

I didn't do the upgrade without full backups, so it was a calculated risk on my part. But once Squeeze is official Stable, an upgrade from Lenny should work if the proper instructions are followed.

Back to desktop-base. Want to know what's included in desktop-base? All of this.

Over the past few days, we've had some technical issues with the Daily News blogs under the insidesocal.com domain (also accessible via URLs that begin with blogs.dailynews.com) that slow the building of new entries.

The server finally caught up overnight, and new entries are publishing today. There may still be periods of time during which things will slow down again, so check back periodically for new entries on your favorite blogs.

Thank you, readers of our blogs, for sticking with us throughout 2010 as well as through the past few, not-trouble-free days.