Recently in Debian Category

The GNOME Web browser Epiphany — formerly based on Mozilla's Gecko engine and now based on Webkit — doesn't ship with Ubuntu (though it does with Debian and most GNOME-based distros/projects).

But if you're running GNOME, I recommend you add it via your favorite package manager.

What Epiphany offers is a streamlined, faster, less-resource-intensive browsing experience.

I have a few Web-delivered apps that absolutely require Firefox, but for as much else as possible, Epiphany does an excellent job and doesn't stress my less-than-new hardware as much as Firefox.

If you run top in a terminal and keep an eye on the running processes, you'll see that Firefox hogs a lot of CPU and tends to keep hogging it even if you're not "actively" browsing. Other browsers, including (in my experience) Epiphany, Opera, Chrome/Chromium, Konqueror, Midori, Kazehakaze (and really just about anything that isn't Firefox) is much more forgiving of system resources than Firefox.

So it pays to shop around for browsers that do what you want yet don't stress your system so much.

Though it's not open-source, I do use Opera on my super-old systems, where it's light footprint makes even my 233 MHz system usable.

I've been pretty happy with Chromium in Ubuntu, and Chrome in Windows runs better now that I have 1 GB of RAM on the XP box (it didn't do so well with 512 MB).

But in GNOME, I've relied on Epiphany as my browser of choice for some time. I didn't find it slow when it was based on the Gecko engine, and now on Webkit it remains fast and functional.

The more I use GNOME, the more I gravitate toward the "GNOME apps," incluiding Epiphany, Evolution (which I've just started using with a couple IMAP mail accounts), the Empathy IM client, Rhythmbox, etc.

While I think the even-tighter integration of GNOME apps in the Ubuntu panel is theoretically a step in the right direction, I find that things are broken enough that the benefits of that integration aren't terrible available at present (but I hope they will be in future).

Note: In the past month or so, I've run GNOME in Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7.3 and Ubuntus 8.04 and 10.04.

Every Linux release, from Ubuntu Dapper and Debian Etch, all the way through the present day and my testing of the Ubuntu Lucid beta, I look to see if suspend/resume will ever work on my old laptops.

It's kind of like the Holy Grail ... of geeky Linux/Unix laptop users like myself.

It always seems like it's going to work but never does.

But things are looking up. Right now I can use the power/logout/other-stuff-like-that button in the upper right corner of the screen to select "Suspend," and the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 (Intel Celeron 1.2 GHz, Intel 830m chipset) will go into suspend. After that I can press the power button, and a few seconds later the machine will resume (meaning awake from suspend and actually work).

I don't know if this wizardry is due to the efforts of the kernel developers, Xorg developers, Debian developers or even Ubuntu developers, but if I can set GNOME to automatically suspend the laptop at a predetermined time after it has been idle and then come back the next day, hit the power button and have the thing actually turn on, I will hardly be able to believe it.

Not only have I been able to crash FreeBSD 7.3-release with GNOME by trying to automount FAT partitions on USB-connected drives, but those crashes rendered both the FAT partitions and the ext3 partitions that otherwise could be mounted automatically on those drives, for lack of a better word, unmountable.

I was able to mount the ext3 partitions once again in FreeBSD after a lengthy fsck courtesy of gParted on the Parted Magic live CD.

Then I did it all over again. I'm running fsck on the drives now. They could always be mounted in Parted Magic 4.9, by the way, just not in FreeBSD.

Once the fsck finishes, I'll boot into FreeBSD, make sure the ext3 partitions are mountable, make a backup of my FreeBSD user and relevant configuration files, and then I'll be moving on.

If this was a true test machine, I'd be able to run FreeBSD longer and perhaps figure out some of these issues (many of which are HAL-related, and if not HAL-specific, at least GNOME-specific).

When I ran OpenBSD 4.4 as my desktop OS, I didn't run into these problems. But I also didn't run GNOME, so it's not apples-to-apples between these two BSDs. In OpenBSD, I began with the default Fvwm2 window manager and eventually added Xfce. And I didn't automount anything.

I imaging that getting FreeBSD to work like any Linux distribution that ships with GNOME is doable, but I just don't have the time and expertise to do it.

I got a lot further a lot faster in FreeBSD than I did with OpenBSD in terms of getting my system set up. But if attempting to mount FAT filesystems is enough to crash the system and lead to endless fsck operations, I really can't stay with FreeBSD for my personal production workflow.

I did manage to get Java installed. The binary package didn't work because the dependencies in FreeBSD 7.3-release are too new. For one reason or other, I was unable to get the diablo-jre port to build, but the diablo-jdk port did successfully install the Java development kit — including the runtime, which is all I really needed.

I even got Flash to work in both Firefox and GNOME's Epiphany browser. I followed the instructions in the FreeBSD Handbook, and when they didn't work in Firefox 3.6.1, I replaced that Firefox package with version 3.5.8 and soon had Flash working.

The problem is that the Flash processes — which run as npviewer.bin, I believe — hog up a whole lot of CPU and aren't terribly good about reducing that load when I leave a page that includes Flash.

I could do without Flash — or maybe install a Linux browser (an option that's certainly available) and just have Flash there, like I did with Opera in OpenBSD.

I was able to mount FAT drives with the -o large switch in mount_msdosfs, but I wasn't able to umount them. I suppose HAL could have played a role, and perhaps running GNOME without hald enabled is the way to go.

But as I said, I need to get this laptop back into a regular production role, and I'll probably return to Debian Lenny just to get things back to where they were. If you'll recall, my Lenny-to-Squeeze dist-upgrade debacle is what led me here in the first place.

One thing I will be doing in the very near future is figuring out how to image a hard drive with either Ghost 4 Linux in Parted Magic, or using the Clonezilla live CD. If I can image the entire drive and be assured that I could completely restore an installation after any upgrade, I'll feel a whole lot better about doing things like this.

What I really need are a couple/few more test machines on which to run things such as FreeBSD until I can figure out just how far my skill level can take me with them.

We could argue the whole Linux distro-vs.-BSD project thing all day, but I'll say two things:

• There's something to be said for a distribution (or project) that ships with a certain desktop environment as far as more things working than not out of the box.
• The PC-BSD project - a desktop-ready system built on FreeBSD - is the best way for anybody from the Linux world wishing to get the most out of FreeBSD. The importance of PC-BSD at this point cannot be overstated (it helps if you like KDE and PC-BSD's PBI packaging). I'd love to see a FreeBSD desktop project based on GNOME.

In conclusion: My skill level and the time I have available to mess around with stuff just isn't where it needs to be for me to run FreeBSD with GNOME. If I had a bigger hard drive, I'd dual-boot Linux and one or more BSDs (now I'm working with 20 GB, which isn't enough for a credible dual-boot). But for a single-boot system, I need to be back in an environment that is a bit more ready out of the box. And this week, that's Linux.

Saw this on Distrowatch Weekly: The Debian Live project has released live DVD images for Squeeze Alpha 1.

The images are all 1 GB + (except for the Rescue and Standard versions), so that's a bit of a change from the Lenny era. You'll need to use a DVD. Due to my Toshiba's hatred of CD-R but surprising love of DVD+R, I've been burning everything, including CD images, onto DVD, and it's worked quite well.

There are ISOs for GNOME, KDE, LXDE and Xfce, as well as the aforementioned Rescue and Standard (no GUI for both) spins.

One thing that's very notable: There are PowerPC images this time. I remember there most decidedly NOT being PowerPC live Debian CDs for Lenny, and a check of the download area for live Lenny confirms this.

I've written many times about how well Debian Etch runs on my Mac G4/466, and to see more of a commitment to PowerPC rather than less (or none) is a very good thing indeed. I never had much luck with Ubuntu on PowerPC back when it was an official port (the 6.06-7.04 era, if I recall correctly; there are community ports to PowerPC still active, but I've never tried them - Debian is just too good on this hardware to think about using anything else).

Getting back to the live Squeeze images, I downloaded one yesterday and have yet to burn a DVD and give it a spin. For me, live images are practically a must. I need to explore as much hardware compatibility as I can before I commit to a new distribution/project for my operating system. Until now, I've been relying on the excellent Sidux 2009-04 as my main Debian live test environment. But I'm always glad to have alternatives, especially ones that are pure Debian.

I can also report that the current builds of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid are running well on my Toshiba and Gateway laptops (both Intel 830m chipsets) if you turn off kernel mode setting with nomodeset in the bootline.

And now that I know you can pause the invisible Grub2 menu in an installed Ubuntu Lucid desktop by holding down the Shift key during the beginning of the boot, I know that I can boot into the new installation and fix Grub2 permanently to keep nomodeset in the boot line.

I remain addicted to speed - desktop speed, if you need clarification on what I mean. And Debian is all about that, a bit moreso than Ubuntu. And it's something you can definitely feel on older hardware.

I'm pretty sure Ubuntu can be made as fast as Debian, but some tweaking is involved. Not to say Ubuntu is a dog or anything, because it most assuredly is not, but Debian and Slackware especially tend to maximize the power you have in your hardware.

Coincidentally, the system I'm running right now - FreeBSD 7.3-release - is extremely quick as well. More on that later.

Can you install Debian with the live image? I'm not sure you can. There is some talk about modifying the running live system to invoke the installer, but it looks like you're better off grabbing a Squeeze image and creating a real Debian install disc, whether it be the first full CD, a DVD or even Blu-ray image, or a much-smaller network-install or business-card install image (the latter two which I favor, since the newest packages are pulled from the repository and you don't need to do a massive update right out of the box).

As I've reported in too much detail, my Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade didn't go too well. I'm hoping migration issues are fixed by the time Squeeze goes Stable, but at the moment I'm recommending such an in-place upgrade unless you've done a lot of homework as to exactly how to do it. Clearly I haven't done said homework, and that's why I'm not running Debian at this moment.

I needed to find the kernel version used in Sidux 2009-04 and came across this interesting yet negative review.

I guess what I can say is that all projects are not built to please all people. I've admired Sidux for some time and used its live environment to test my systems' compatibility with the future of Debian, and even though my desire to run Debian Sid isn't exactly burning, nor am I a huge fan of KDE (although I do like Xfce quite a bit, and there's a Sidux spin on that), but Sidux tends to run so well — just like Debian, in fact — that I would absolutely consider (and am considering) running it as my main operating system. Once I get FreeBSD out of my system, at any rate.

I put a lot of stock on the ability to do an in-place upgrade of my Linux/Unix desktops. And regarding upgrades from one distribution to another, Debian is supposedly one of the best.

You always hear about those hard-core geeks who have been running the same box since Potato, dist-upgrading all the way to whatever the current stable or testing distribution is at any given moment.

I've upgraded a stable Debian system to testing maybe once or twice, usually in short order (i.e. installing stable and immediately upgrading to testing).

Yesterday I decided to upgrade my "production" Debian laptop, which I've been using heavily since late last year, from Lenny (stable) to Squeeze (testing). I thought it would be smooth and easy.

Not so much.

I've finally got most things working. I'm still having the kind of sound problems that plagued me in the Ubuntu 8.04 era (Flash and the rest of the system fighting for dominance), but I've overcome quite a bit.

I did have backups of my user data, so if things went totally south, I was covered.

I guess I've had more elaborate setups than this, particularly in OpenBSD, where there's a whole lot of configuration needed.

In reality, I've kept my Lenny install fairly vanilla. I only have GNOME. Never added Xfce, Fluxbox or KDE. I pretty much stick with the GNOME apps. The Epiphany browser is one of my favorite apps. I use Rhythmbox. I have gFTP, but lately I've been using Nautilus' FTP capability more and more.

I do use Thunderbird instead of Evolution, and I have a ton of POP mail on the box.

Recently I added Wine via Bordeaux and have been running the free-as-in-beer Windows image viewer/editor IrfanView (although I'm about to cease needing it for the very specific IPTC-manipulating feature for which I cling to it).

But otherwise it's pretty standard. And I did have that backup.

I had what I thought was enough disk space (1 GB +) in my root partition (I have / and /home in encrypted LVM).

First I made sure Lenny was up to date. Then I changed my /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Squeeze repos instead of Lenny.

Then I did a dist-upgrade with apt. Everything seemed to be going OK. Until the udev problem cropped up. Had I seen the page in this link before I started, I might've saved myself a whole lot of trouble.

I didn't know what udev was. The Debian package page has a nice description:

udev is a daemon which dynamically creates and removes device nodes from /dev/, handles hotplug events and loads drivers at boot time.

It seems that the udev in Squeeze requires a newer kernel than the one in Lenny, yet that kernel either doesn't install before udev, or you have to be actually running that new kernel before doing the full upgrade. There's even a fairly uhelpful bug report.

At any rate, I couldn't quite figure out what to do. I ran a few more dist-upgrades and eventually did reboot into the new kernel for Squeeze and redid the dist-upgrade.

In case you were wondering (and I knew you were), I did run out of disk space. I managed to clear apt's cache and get a bit further on the upgrade.

For some reason, X was gone. I used apt to reinstall xorg, which brought the GUI back.

X performance was terrible for awhile. Not sure why, but xorg was eating most of the CPU for quite some time. I tried a few xorg.conf files, but nothing really helped.

At one point, in the flurry of error messages, it was suggested in the terminal that I run apt-get autoclean.

I did that, and that removed a whole lot of packages, a few of which I still needed.

Eventually I added back the bits of GNOME that were missing. I had sound problems, so (cue horrific scream) I actually installed PulseAudio in an attempt to restore some order to the system. I think the GNOME bits did more, but I do have most of my sound capability back.

I was able to get sound in Flash video in the browser, but then Totem kept crashing, so I pulled that and tweaked my account a bit.

I would get specific here with what I did, but truthfully none of it is working well enough for me to do that.

So I have sound in applications, I don't have sound in the Flash plugin, but I do have sound in .flv files on the local drive, as well as in other video and audio.

And from what I understand, "system sounds" in GNOME are broken for all of Squeeze until some package or other is released into the distribution.

I was more troubled than anything by X eating all that CPU. Again, I think adding some GNOME bits (I even had to reinstall GDM) solved that problem.

Right now Pidgin is refusing to connect to my AIM account, saying I've logged in and out too many times in succession.

BEFORE YOU SAY, 'THIS IS TESTING; DON'T RUN IT IF YOU DON'T WANT TROUBLE,' LET ME SAY THAT I HEAR YOU. I've had trouble in Testing before, and I didn't expect not to have it again. I'm just reporting what happened.

Otherwise, everything seems to be working fine. I did have to tweak the config file to get my Ethernet interface managed under NetworkManager (just like I did in Ubuntu Jaunty/Karmic). Now that works great.

If I decide to stick with Squeeze, and I'm not saying I will, I probably will do a fresh install. I know I'm missing some GNOME bits that I might want or need. I've been adding stuff back as I run into trouble (I reinstalled gedit, the gnome screensaver app, which I needed to keep X from crashing when the gnome power management app tried to turn that feature on by itself).

I hope this upgrade process goes a whole lot more smoothly at such time as Squeeze gets its official Stable release. I'm somewhat confident about that happening.

So if you were smart and skipped to the end, my Squeeze system is running fairly well at present, and I could very well stick with it. The biggest problem I'm having is with sound (and my USB Headphone Set sound module).

One thing I discovered was the YouTube plugin for Totem. All you do is activate it, and you can search for YouTube videos by keyword and then play the h.264 version in Totem. With sound. That's really cool.

I've got enough things working that I'm going to stick with Squeeze at least until Ubuntu Lucid is released late next month. As I wrote recently, I did try a daily build of Lucid in the live environment, and everything appeared to be working. The purple-Mac theme didn't really bother me. I'll have to do some multimedia tests: I never could get my 3gp cellphone videos to play with sound in Ubuntu (and they still work in Debian).

I could also do a clean install of Debian Lenny. I'm not ruling that out at all. I kept this laptop fairly stock (and tried to keep good notes on what I did) so I could re-create Debian Lenny on it if necessary. One way or the other, I will be reinstalling something on this laptop, be it Lenny, Squeeze or "other."

I can't say that I expected the dist-upgrade to Squeeze to go smoothly. I guess I hoped it would.

I thought to myself, "You should've used a detailed Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade guide on the Web before doing this." I still haven't found one. If you have, please let me know.

I've been waiting. And while I don't generally recommend an in-place upgrade of a production machine, especially one with problematic hardware (in my case that "problematic" bit being the Intel 830m chipset and its 82830 CGC graphics controller) and a fully encrypted hard drive, I do have unencrypted backups, and I'm ready to leave Debian Lenny behind and see how well Squeeze does on my machine and for my tasks.

So I did the prep, did an update/upgrade in Lenny, changed my sources.list, did another update in Squeeze, and I'm running the dist-upgrade now, pulling in some 900+ packages and hoping the thing will boot when its all done.

Yes, I have the day off. Thus I have the machine free for just such an upgrade.

And yes, this is the sort of thing I do on my day off. Take it up with my therapist.

I thought Linux in general and Xorg in particular were throwing those of us with "older" Intel video chips under the virtual bus. I couldn't even get Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) Alpha 3 to boot on my Intel 830m (aka i830m and in my case Intel 82830 CGC)-equipped laptops, where my old standby of dropping i915.modeset=0 or nomodeset on the boot line would clear things up.

Today I decided to download and burn the daily build ISO of Lucid for March 15.

I booted it, hit Escape as soon as the first screen came up (that's a new one, having to do that), then hit F6 for Modes, arrowed down to nomodeset, hit Enter to select it, then Escape, then Enter again to boot ...

And a short time later I was in the less-brown-more-purple world of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid!

Never mind that it's ... purple.

It works! Video is perfect on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with the Intel 830m chipset.

Whatever wasn't working for me in Alpha 3 has been fixed at the time of this daily build.

I'd like to thank any and all developers who were able to make this happen, and I'd also like to let the rest of the Intel 830m-using community know that the following WILL work if you turn off kernel mode setting with nomodeset in the boot line:

Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 (as of this 3/15/10 daily build)
Fedora 12
Sidux 2009-04

I have an alpha image of Fedora 13 but haven't yet burned it, and I have heard that Slackware 13 runs with no problem.

So the future for the older-Intel-video-using world is looking a whole lot brighter than it did a few short weeks again.

At this point I have no comment on purple or the window buttons moving from the right side of the window to the left. I have no comment because I DON'T CARE. I HAVE WORKING VIDEO AND THAT IS ALL THAT MATTERS AT PRESENT.

I'll address purple and window buttons at a later time. One thing I can say for sure is that this ain't the usual orange/brown.

Before I go, I've been testing Firefox 3.6 on the Mac OS X and Windows XP platforms, and this instance of Ubuntu Lucid is the first time I'm seeing FF 3.6 in Linux.

My first impressions are that not much is different in the PowerPC build for OS X, but I'm seeing huge improvements in the browsing experience in terms of speed in both Windows and Linux.

I can't say for sure, but I think it all boils down to a faster Javascript engine in 3.6 vs. 3.0 (and also 3.5 perhaps).

Getting back to Intel 830m for the moment, this means I'm upgrading my Debian Lenny laptop to Squeeze as soon as possible.

I cleared the enormous 22-inch CRT monitor, then the smaller 15-inch LCD monitor and the accompanying keyboards and mice off the desk and plopped the $15 Laptop — the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt down, booted into my built-from-standard Debian Lenny install with minimal Xfce (with / under 1 GB), updated for the first time in a long time and opened the Opera Web browser (about the only one that will run acceptably well on this aged 233 MHz CPU).

I turned on Opera Turbo browsing — I'm using Netgear power-line networking to my converted-garage office — and aside from some fuzzy graphics, all is looking and working fine.

In contrast with my converted thin client and its somewhat botched Xfce/GNOME hybrid, here I only have a 3 GB hard drive (yep, the original from 11 years ago), so I've kept it Debian and minimal to save space.

I noticed that I didn't have an image editor. My go-to app gThumb was going to bring in a boatload of dependencies, so I opted for MtPaint instead.

Did I mention how great Opera is on these ancient computers? I just got an e-mail from the company that version 10.50 is out. I'll give it a run on my Toshiba before I upgrade here from 10.10. Opera isn't open source, but it's the best graphical browser I've ever found for old hardware that usually chokes the life out of Firefox. Or is it the other way around?

I've kept the Debian Lenny installation on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop as standard as it could be in some respects — I kept GNOME as the desktop environment and didn't add Xfce or anything else (that I can remember anyway).

That's because I want it to work as well as it can since it's my many "production" machine.

Not that I haven't added things like Audacity, gPodder, Inkscape, Icedove (aka Thunderbird), Iceowl (aka Thunderbird calendar plugin Lightning), the Geany text editor (which I don't use all that often) plus a whole lot of codecs and other bits from Debian Multimedia.

On the dark side, I used the Bordeaux .deb package to add Wine and my favorite Windows app, the IrfanView photo viewer/image editor. I also added Skype (with its Debian-aimed repository) but haven't used it yet.

To print out a list of every package on your system if it uses apt for package management (like Debian and its derivatives, including Ubuntu), run the following in a terminal (which in this case pipes the output to a text file you can peruse at your leisure):

$ dpkg --get-selections > my_packages

Now you'll have a file called my_packages with a list of every package installed on your system.

If you want to see a list of all 1,115 packages on my Debian Lenny install, click through to the rest of this entry (and if you don't want to see a 1,115-file list, DON'T CLICK THROUGH).