Category Archives: Debian

Finally, a new Intel Xorg driver in Debian Sid!

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As most Intel video card users on Linux will know, the Xorg drivers have regressed significantly during the last year or so. From a reasonably stable driver with (mostly) expected performance and functionality, we’ve become accustomed to, well, a mess. For every bug fix, something new seems to break and I for one have become increasingly reluctant to upgrade unless I have to.

This time I really had to.

The new driver does seem to take care of the disappearing mouse pointer bug where any resolution higher than 1024×768 would make the pointer vanish. I had hopes it would also be able to recognise the correct resolution for my laptop when it is docked to an external screen (which the stable driver does without a problem) but no such luck.

Performance is still slow, too. The extra bells and whistles on KDE 4.3 just aren’t possible if you want a desktop you can work with. I don’t think they are that heavy on the system, it’s just that the Intel driver sucks.

Still, for the first time in months, the new driver means an actual improvement.

KDE 4.2

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Some time ago, I made the upgrade to KDE 4.2 from 3.5. It was made available in Debian’s Unstable branch so I figured “why not?”

Why not, indeed?

Well, for starters, I can’t figure out how to make it react to audio CDs in the CD drive. KDE 3.5 offered a dialog where I could choose what to do with the damned thing. With this one, it’s beyond me; nothing happens. I’ve toyed around in the Settings, but to no avail. I’ve googled around. I can’t make it work.

Just now, I received an email with a MS word attachment, a .doc file. KMail offered Kate as the default choice, a bloody text editor, but the thing is that not too long ago, KMail knew that OpenOffice works for anything with that suffix, and furthermore, KDE knows, from what I can see in the File Associations settings, that OpenOffice is the right application to use. But it doesn’t. It won’t.

The refurbished Kicker menu gets stuck on the desktop after I click it, until I click on it somewhere near the Search edit box. On my laptop, the task bar (or whatever they want to call it, these days, never remembers how wide it should be if I use the laptop on an external screen (with a different resolution) in addition to the built-in one. For some reason, something switched the sound settings on the Audigy card to the Digital output after I upgraded to a 2.6.29 kernel, without telling me, so I went through hell to get my sound back, before I discovered the switch (that, by the way, is not available on every mixer there is) that needed a click.

Or all those settings that used to require a root password, to change how KDM behaves. Or whatever. Lots of things have gone wrong with the KDE upgrade and I don’t know how to fix them, not without some surfing on the net, and I can’t be bothered. I think of myself as a power user, I have used computers in various forms since the late seventies and Unix in a number of incarnations through the years, but surely it shouldn’t be like this?

And no, I don’t want to switch to Gnome because I hate it, I think it treats me lika an idiot, but maybe I need to? What say you? I don’t want to spend all my free time on the bloody Internets, trying to find the answers to each and every little problem there is.

Slow Keys

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The KDE 4.2 desktop on my Debian/GNU Linux laptop install (Sid, the unstable flavour) practically died the other day, after a dist-upgrade. Well, actually, the keyboard stopped responding while the touchpad continued working perfectly. A first Google search (sloppily performed, I’ll admit) hinted at changes done in Xorg 1.6 but while I found a few hints, nothing I did with the xorg.conf file could revive the keyboard.

After a few hours of experimenting and general panic, I stumbled on an older post on a KDE message board. The author had managed to turn on the Slow Keys feature in KDE 4, a set of functions designed for the disabled, which resulted in a very slow keyboard. I checked my settings and yes, the feature had somehow been turned on.

Now, relieved as I was, I’m also pretty sure that I have not been anywhere near that checkbox. How is this possible?

Anticlimax

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My persistent Debian-related WiFi problems finally got solved. The other day, I sat at a restaurant, working away, and decided to try the WiFi. The laptop connected, immediately, with no problems whatsoever.

This got me thinking.

Apparently, Debian and the Intel drivers couldn’t be to blame. It had to be a router issue. So I upgraded my Netgear router firmware (I have both a gateway and a repeater, so there were two machines to consider), and voilá! I had a working WiFi connection at home.

Not That Easy – WiFi Woes, Part Two

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Turns out I was too optimistic. wicd and the little adjusting I did does not deliver a working Internet, not every time. Today, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t connect (beyond the router, to which I can always connect) until I changed the laptop IP from dynamic to static, and the DHCP client from automatic to dhclient. All of a sudden, I was back surfing!

Only, just now, when I booted up the laptop again, I couldn’t connect beyond the router (which connected fast enough), not until I changed the IP back to dynamic… This is seriously weird and I can’t explain it. I wonder if it’s got something to do with my router, an instruction that is lost on the way, DNS services that aren’t updates… something?!?

WiFi on Linux is NOT easy.

WiFi Woes

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Just a little note for posterity:

My Lenovo T61 laptop that now runs Debian has an Intel 3945 ABG wireless network adapter. While the Debian (Lenny) installation and the subsequent upgrade to Sid went flawlessly, with the WiFi card discovered and listed, it wouldn’t connect wirelessly to my Netgear router (actually a repeater, fed from a Netgear ADSL modem/gateway). It connected to the router itself, I was able to ping the router and connect to it using a browser, but everything beyond that was inaccessible. I tried various interfaces stanzas, reconfigured TCP/IP, and tested all kinds of tricks, without any success.

Then I did some serious googling. A lot of people have had this problem and many probably still do. Also, the problem was pretty much the same, regardless of your Linx flavour. Finally, a Ubuntu forum suggested removing the network-manager package and installing wicd in its place. Said and done (luckily I had upgraded to Debian Sid; the package is not available in Lenny). I had to reboot but could still not connect.

As a last resort I tried explicitly pointing out my ISP’s DNS server IP addresses in the wicd configuration. That did it and I’m now writing this blog on a WiFi connection.

Sometimes it’s important to document these things. Maybe, just maybe, it will help someone else.

Linux on the Laptop

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Following the unfortunate events surrounding my presentation at XML Prague (a fabulous event, by the way; you should have been there), I now run Debian GNU/Linux as my primary OS on my work laptop. There is a Windows XP partition, so far, but my plan is to use Xen and virtualisation, and run the Windows operating systems as Xen domains.

The laptop installation that failed contained my first attempts at virtualisation, by the way. Microsoft’s Virtual PC ran Windows 2003 Server and Cassis, the Document Management System that I’m part of developing at Condesign Operations Support, and was connected to my XP installation through a loopback adapter. In theory, this is a very nice setup since it is possible to simply run a complete image of an OS and the server setup as part of a demonstration and then reset it to its pre-demo state for the next show. In practice, however, Virtual PC does not deliver. The hardware it emulates is very limited and everything it does is rather slow. It was enough to wet my appetite, however (together with my friend Niklas’ obsession with Xen), so I decided to do it right, now that I had to wipe the old drive anyway.

My Debian installation does not yet run a Xen kernel, but I’ll keep you posted.

TomTom 730T and Linux

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Bought a TomTom 730T GPS device today. Very cool. Lots of well-considered features, great design, just what I wanted. I’m really looking forward to driving around for a bit tomorrow.

But then, I tried to install the TomTom Home 2 software on my Debian (Sid) Linux box, using wine. Didn’t work. I spent an hour trying to get around the error message (a rather crypic message involving some file from Visual C++) but couldn’t make it work.

Yes, TomTom, I do use a Windows box, too, at work, but I was hoping for you to return the favour (I bought your product, after all, didn’t I?) by supplying me with software for the operating system of my choice. It shouldn’t be that hard to do; after all, you did come around to recompile your software for the Mac.

Aren’t more people using Linux these days than Mac?

XMetaL and wine 1.0

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I’ve been trying to make XMetaL 3.1 work on wine 1.0, and have to say that I miss the days before the wine team replaced Internet Explorer with a wine-specific solution. Specifically, it appears that ActiveX handling has been changed to the worse.

I don’t know what’s wrong but I can no longer make XMetaL to run on my Debian/GNU Linux box.

64-Bit “Free”Applications

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Recently, I bought a new computer. It’s the modern kind, with a dual-core, 64-bit, processor, an Nvidia graphics card, a huge SATA drive, and everything else I could think of when placing the order. And of course, I installed the amd64 Debian GNU/Linux distribution, envisioning fast and trouble-free computing using my favourite Linux distribution.

Well, so I thought. Then I started putting all those small support programs in place, from Flash to Skype, and realised that none of them would install. See, they are 32-bit, made for 32-bit operating systems, and there are no 64-bit versions for Linux available.

Why is this?

Mind you, it is possible to run most of these in “32-bit mode”, using 32-bit libraries, but you also need a steady supply of Aspirins and such, because it takes a lot of extra work, tinkering, and cursing.

If a piece of software was truly open source and free, as in “free speech” (as opposed to “free beer”), someone would immediately rectify this by compiling a 64-bit binary for others to use. And if that binary had problems, someone else would come along and fix that, often in a matter of days, not to mention adding features and fixing bugs in the original.

As many Linux users will testify, this works extremely well. Me, I’ve been using open source for years now, professionally and privately, and have experienced significantly less downtime than many of my colleagues and friends stuck with commercial software, often from that large Redmond manufacturer, in spite of the fact that my Linux variant is Debian’s development branch, codenamed Sid (named after the kid from Toy Story who liked to break toys).

Yet the makers of those small bits and pieces of software that many of us rely on, software that some insist are “free”, will not provide the large 64-bit Linux user base with 64-bit binaries, or make available the source code so others can provide us with that service.

Why? And what’s free about these programs, anyway, when you can’t do what you want to with them?