Debian Lenny — things are happening

Things are happening in Debian Lenny, and not just in my installation.

OK, mostly in my installation.

For one thing, something — I have no idea what — made the GNOME Network Admin package disappear. I couldn’t change my network settings from the System–Preferences menu or the icon I have in the panel for that very purpose.

I went into Synaptic and reinstalled it. Now it works.

I’m still having the “work offline” problem with Iceweasel (aka Firefox) 3. Whenever I start the browser, I’m automatically in “work offline” mode, regardless of whether I’m actually online or not.

I also still have the “ghosting” on the upper GNOME panel.

Right now I’m doing a software update. Among the new packages is a kernel update. Will this solve my problems? And will I have to reinstall the ALSA sound modules for my ESS Allegro/Maestro3 chip in the $0 Laptop?

After the update: The Debian Lenny updates included a 2.6.25 Linux kernel, but boot code for the new kernel didn’t get written into the menu.lst that controls the Ubuntu-installed GRUB, which controls the master boot record for this dual-boot system.

It turns out that Debian only updated its own /boot/grub/menu.lst, so I copied the new entries over to Ubuntu’s /boot/grub/menu.lst to try the new kernel.

This appears to be the SECOND 2.6.25 kernel in Lenny, but it’s the first I’ve seen of it, and without Ubuntu’s menu.lst being updated automatically, a new Lenny kernel is easy to miss.

I understand that dual-booting can pose a problem, but I thought that Debian pretty much knew to look for multiple GRUB configurations and update them all. I guess not this time.

In Lenny with the 2.6.25-2 kernel: Sound still works in the new kernel. (After manually jump-starting sound in 2.6.24, I didn’t expect it, but thankfully it does.) Either the Debian developers decided to re-support my sound chip, or my manual installation of ALSA drivers stuck.

Iceweasel 3 still defaults to “work offline” status whenever it’s launched. The same problem still (again, thankfully) doesn’t affect Epiphany.

The upper panel in GNOME still suffers from the same “ghosting” problem.

Looking at the bug reports, which I did in a very recent post, tells me that the Iceweasel problem is not so much with Iceweasel as with NetworkManager. I can pretty much confirm this, since mousing over the NetworkManager icon in the upper GNOME panel says that there is “No network connection,” where there indeed there is. I probably should be looking at bug reports for NetworkManager and not Iceweasel.

I couldn’t find anything in Debian’s bug reports, and nothing leaped right out of this large page of GNOME bug reports.

A Debian Lenny status report for the $0 Laptop

I’ve been waiting … and waiting … for Debian to come to its senses and re-add the sound chip — the ESS 1988 Allegro — in my Gateway Solo 1450 back into the Lenny kernel.

Sound had been fine in Debian Etch (Stable) and in the first two kernels in Debian Lenny (Testing), but once the 2.6.24 kernel was added, I lost sound on the $0 Laptop.

Reverting back to the 2.6.22 kernel restored my sound, and I eventually hunted down the bug report, which — in grand Debian tradition — didn’t solve the bug but instead provided a work-around.

Presumably the Debian team didn’t like the fact that the ALSA sound module for this chip came in the form of a binary blob, which is non-source, undocumented code, and instead of providing any other way to use sound with these chips, elected to silence the PCs of those using Debian Lenny with this verboten sound chip.

Now if this were the only binary blob traveling in Debian’s wagon train, I’d understand. But I’m fairly sure it’s not. We’re not talking OpenBSD-style religion here.

At least the system could somehow tell me that Debian removed sound support for my chipset and perhaps ask me if I’m OK with using a non-open blob to get the sound working.

No such luck. I suppose I should be so offended at my laptop’s use of hardware for which the manufacturers decline to provide open-source drivers that I should soldier on without sound — and like it.

I don’t like it. But the reality is that many if not most hardware manufacturers haven’t seen the ever-lovin’ light and don’t know that open-source software in general, and Linux in particular just might take over the world, or at least the geeky portion of it.

Never mind that sound works on this laptop in any number of Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Puppy, Slackware, CentOS/Red Hat … as well as FreeBSD and NetBSD.

But Debian decided to get all high, mighty and just strip sound out of the kernel for what must be a whole lot of potential users who either don’t know, don’t want to know or don’t care to track down the instructions for restoring audio on their machines.

I imagine there are a lot of ESS/Allegro chips out there. In Linux, as in OpenBSD and any number of other projects, a lot of really smart developers are very busy writing open drivers for the proprietary hardware we’re stuck with. Sometimes they get cooperation from the manufacturers. Often times they reverse-engineer the whole damn thing. Still, there are a lot of “binary blobs” out there.

If the choice is between binary blob and open-source alternative, there’s no question — take the code you can see, modify and distribute freely.

But if the choice is between a blog and … nothing, it’s nice to have the opportunity to take the blob. A project can — and should — let the user have a say in what they’ll run on their machines.

I’ve stuck with Debian for awhile now on this laptop, even though I’ve been using Ubuntu more (blame it on Ubuntu’s working suspend/resume … and other stuff that just works better).

So far, here are the Debian Lenny problems I’ve had to solve to get things working:

• Change Gconf configuration so Epiphany browser doesn’t default to “working offline” mode
• Download and install driver from the Foo2zjs Project to use HP Laserjet 1020 printer (to be fair, this is also an issue with Ubuntu)
• Tweak xorg.conf so Alps Touchpad’s tap-to-click function can be managed (can’t quite remember how I did this …)
• Restore sound for ESS 1988 Allegro with firmware from the ALSA Project

It could’ve been worse, and in almost all of these instances I got the hacks from the Debian Bug Tracking System. But I’d prefer that at least some of these bugs actually get fixed rather that shuffled aside, with users left searching for the hackish fixes that will make their machines usable with a given distribution.

What most of us know is that users pretty much gravitate toward operating systems that work best with their hardware and the software they wish to use.

So if Ubuntu uses the same Linux kernel but supports my sound chip, properly configures my touchpad, doesn’t think I’m working offline when I’m not, properly suspends and resumes, and offers a bit more in terms of functionality and polish (like the GNOME menu editor actually, say, working), I’m inclined to use it.

I still have Debian Lenny on the Gateway, although I might devote its partition to CentOS 5.2 for testing purposes.

Debian is still faster than Ubuntu. Many of the packages I use are better put-together in Debian, especially the educational games my daughter uses.

And I like the setup that Debian defaults to when installed. The fact that I can and have fixed most of the problems I had is a plus.

In Lenny, I’m having a few graphical quirks with GNOME. The top of the screen gets a little funky at times — and I’d love to figure out the suspend/resume problem, but otherwise Debian runs quite well. And as far as compatibility with this specific pile of hardware goes, Lenny has quite an edge over Debian Etch, the project’s current stable distribution.

And since Lenny is still in the Testing stage, patches are coming through at a quick pace, and things are bound to improve on the distribution’s road to “Stable” status.

I only wish I could know for sure if the things I fixed manually are being fixed automatically for present and future Lenny users.

Next: How exactly to restore sound for ESS Allegro-equipped PCs in Debian Lenny

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS running very well

I don’t know why I’m compelled to continually report on how well Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is running on the $0 Laptop, but I keep doing it.

From the graphical polish to Suspend/Resume, Alps touchpad control and everything else I’ve done with it, this is the most impressive Linux distribution I’ve run thus far.

For use on this laptop — a Gateway Solo 1450 — it’s better than Debian Lenny, my other go-to OS.

Today I tried a live CD of Fedora 9, since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 supposedly has beefed up its support of Suspend/Resume on laptops, I figured that maybe, just maybe, that functionality was present in Fedora 9.

It very well might be, but in the Fedora 9 live environment, Suspend/Resume doesn’t work on this laptop.

Moving on to Debian, in the Lenny updates I installed today, there was a new kernel among them. I booted into it after the update, and the new 2.6.24 kernel still doesn’t support the ESS 1988 Allegro sound chip on the Gateway.

In order to have working sound, I’m still using the original Lenny 2.6.22 kernel, which does support the chip. I do understand that I can manually add the module I need to support sound in the new kernel, but I’m waiting to see if and when Debian decides that it would like a certain number of its users to enjoy sound. Until then, I’ll stick with 2.6.22.

In case you were wondering, and I know you were, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS supports sound just fine on the laptop, even with a 2.6.24 kernel. Score another one for Ubuntu. If the binary blob in the kernel for the ESS 1988 Allegro sound chip were the only such blob left in the kernel as configured by Debian, then I’d understand its sudden exclusion from the distribution, but I have a very good feeling that this is not the case.

I will consider adding the sound modules myself, as detailed in one of the relevant bug reports, but I’ll more than likely turn to Ubuntu for the simple reason that it just runs better. And this is coming from a person who has championed Debian quite a bit. (As an aside, I love bug reports that give you a fix for the problem that often works but leaves the bug intact to a) annoy some users and b) drive others away.)

I’ve thought about it quite a bit. If you’re running a standard desktop computer, it’s easy to make just about any Linux distribution work well, if it will work at all. You’re not often worrying about unsupported touchpads, uncontrolled CPU fans, flaky or nonexistant Suspend/Resume, other power-management issues and the like. I can run Debian Etch with carefree abandon on some of my desktop systems, but getting Etch to work well with an Alps Touchpad is just not in the cards … or maybe it is, since I found some new suggestions for configuring xorg.conf to make the Alps perform better. But since I’ve made the move to Lenny, I’m probably not going back to Etch on that system, even though the sound-chip issue continues to piss me off.