Could Iceweasel be the source of my X woes in Debian Lenny? (Answer: no)

Like most of you, I use Web browsers a lot. A whole lot. And my problems with screen refresh seem most acute when using the Iceweasel/Firefox browser.

I thought the problem with “ghosting” images on the screen only occurred in GNOME, but now I’ve seen problems in Xfce, too.

To test my theory, I started using Epiphany, the GNOME Web browser based on Mozilla’s Gecko engine.

So far things are looking pretty good. I’ll have to do this for a few more days before I determine whether or not Iceweasel hates my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.

I’ll leave the jury out on this for the moment and render a verdict in a day or so.

10 minutes later: Nope, it’s not Iceweasel. I’m seeing funky stuff in Epiphany, too. And running xrefresh doesn’t clear it up, nor does dragging the window off the screen and back again.

Fat lady sings, and Opera is officially my new favorite browser (this week anyway)

I know that the Opera Web browser is not a free, open-source application — which I almost always prefer — but the browser itself is a free download for Windows, Mac and in precompiled packages for many flavors of Linux as well as FreeBSD.

Question: Why another Web browser? While Windows and Mac users overwhelmingly use Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smattering using Apple’s Safari, there’s plenty of room for other entries in the browser space.

I don’t know about you, but I’m in a Web browser about 80 percent to 90 percent of the time, both for the traditional task of looking at Web pages but increasingly to use Web-based software.

And for something so important, choice is key.

Users of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems are used to having lots of browsers to choose from, among them Firefox (and its non-copyrighted Iceweasel offshoot in Debian), Epiphany (the GNOME browser created from Mozilla’s Gecko engine), Konqueror (the KDE browser/file manager from which Apple took code to create Safari), Seamonkey (the Mozilla-created Web suite that’s modeled after the now-dead Netscape Communicator, offering browsing, e-mail and Web design in one application), Dillo (a very lightweight browser), Netsurf (also lightweight), a few more that I’m probably forgetting, plus text-only browsers that include Elinks, Links, Lynx and W3m.

I’d never used Opera before, mostly because of its closed-source status, although I have been “forced” to use Internet Explorer — also closed source (hey, it’s Microsoft — what do any of us expect?), and besides, IE runs only in Windows and not in Linux (without difficulty, meaning use of WINE or a virtual machine) or Apple’s OS X.

And our main Web application insists on IE not for all, but for the most “advanced” operation.

Imagine my surprise a few weeks back when I saw staff artist and Flash guru Jon Gerung using the Opera browser for the very task that usually demands IE.

Since then, I’ve downloaded Opera and have begun using it to work on Dailynews.com — and for everything else, too.

There are a few instances where the CSS drops out, one situation where a link won’t open, but for 99 percent of my work on this task, Opera does it as good as IE, often times better — and always much, much faster.

That’s the best thing about the Opera Web browser — it’s very fast. And that matters a great deal when doing Web-intensive work. You want to wait as little as possible for the software to do its thing so you can … do your thing.

The company that makes Opera — called Opera Software — provides versions for many platforms. It’s a pity you can’t get the source and compile it yourself for Linux/Unix, but the speed and functionality of Opera is too good for me to pass up at the moment.

I’ll still use Firefox — probably a lot — since it’s the go-to browser for just about everybody out there, and I need to use the Web Developer add-on, but there’s no denying that Opera is simply one of the best applications I’ve seen lately.

Debian Lenny update: so far, much better, and we also have ‘Etch and a half’

Now that Debian’s current testing release, code name Lenny, has been frozen, we’re this much closer to seeing Lenny become a Stable release, a milestone that is projected for September of this year. That would make it a year and four months after the current Stable release, Etch, was so designated in April 2007.

For those using Etch now, keep in mind that once Lenny becomes a Stable release, Etch will receive the designation Old Stable and continue to receive security patches for another year.

While on the subject of Etch, it’s interesting to know that the install images have been updated, and along with that update comes a 2.6.24 kernel as an alternative to the 2.6.18 kernel that shipped with the initial release.

This new Etch, dubbed “Etch and a half” by the Debian team. With the new kernel comes additional hardware support. For details on the new packages and bug fixes, go to the release announcement.

I don’t think that the decision to add hardware support to Etch at this stage has anything to do with Red Hat’s similar move with its Enterprise Linux product, but it’s interesting to see both distros going in this direction.

Back to Lenny: I still have 84 updates to do with Lenny, but I’m holding off for the moment because I’m at home, and when I start a big download, I tend to dominate our home DSL connection. My Netgear router tends to dedicate almost all of the bandwidth to the huge download, and my wife, Ilene, who is using the iBook G4 on this same router, can barely use Firefox.

I don’t know if there’s some kind of setting in the router I can tweak to more equitably share the bandwidth, and if there is, I’d sure like to know about it.

No, really … back to Lenny: One of today’s updates, which I will install later, is a new Abiword, which will go from version 2.4.6 to 2.6.4. I noticed considerable lengthening of the load times for Abiword in Puppy Linux 4, which uses an Abiword from the 2.5 series, over the 2.4.5 version in previous Puppy builds.

The $0 Laptop — a Gateway Solo 1450 with 1.3 GHZ Celeron processor and 1 GB of RAM — loads Abiword almost instantly, and I’ll be anxious to see if that changes with this new version.

Since my last Lenny update, Firefox/Iceweasel 3.01 has been performing well. The “work offline” issue has been fixed, and I don’t have to uncheck the box every time I start the browser.

One thing about Iceweasel 3 that I like is that the fonts have been cleaned up. Debian has been using what appear to be bitmapped fonts, as opposed to smoother varieties, for quite some time. These look better on LCD displays, but I’ve grown so used to them that I just leave them on the lone CRT monitor I still use.

But now that the fonts are looking so much better right out of the box, I’m just happy to see the screen looking better in Firefox.

OpenOffice 2.4 has been running very well, and I’ve been using it quite a bit more in Debian, Ubuntu and Windows, the latter of which needs an update from what I think is version 2.2. Since I don’t get prompted for an upgrade on the Windows box, I get very lazy about doing them at all.

Going to Windows for a moment, my main Windows text editor, Notepad++, just pushed an update to me yesterday, and I did download and install it. I really am not good about checking Web sites for updated applications, and I do appreciate when the program itself tells me about a new version. Filezilla also does this in Windows, and of course Firefox and Thunderbird always notify me about updates.

Back to Lenny, again: When I wanted to test the KDE photo editor Krita and camera-interface digiKam, a ton of KDE apps and libraries came along for the ride. Since then I’ve also added Xfce, and as a result this Debian Lenny installation is quite large. I might want to redo it at some point with just the default GNOME desktop and Xfce added, just to keep it a little more manageable. But to the Debian Project’s credit, things are working quite well, and many issues have been resolved on Lenny’s road to Stable.

I’m still getting the “ghosting” in the upper panel in GNOME, but it does seem to go away at various times in the computing session. The same thing doesn’t happen in Ubuntu, so that makes it a bit of a mystery.

And if I could figure out why and how Ubuntu is able to suspend/resume this Gateway laptop and make Lenny do the same thing, I’d probably use Lenny a whole lot more.

I’m pretty much a “Stable release” kind of person. I would’ve been content to use Etch all the way through up until Lenny goes Stable, but since Lenny ran so much better on this laptop, most importantly supporting the touchpad better, I decided to follow it through on the road to it becoming a stable Debian 5.0.

Since then, I’ve also tried Sidux, which takes the unstable Debian Sid and makes it easier to use as a desktop system. My time with Sidux was brief, but it pretty much flew on this system as a live CD loaded entirely into RAM.

I had planned to write a full Sidux review, and I still might, but since I’m more inclined to run a Stable release over Testing, I can’t see any reason to run Unstable, even with the Sidux team smoothing the way. I just don’t need the latest packages that quickly to get my work done.

Quick Ubuntu note: Being so “Stable,” in my own mind at least, I had planned to continue running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for at least a year if not two, but the upcoming Ubuntu 8.10 release promises something I really want: encrypted folders. Instead of encrypting whole drives or partitions, which Debian (and Ubuntu with the alternate installer) has done since Etch, the ability to only encrypt what is really “sensitive” is something that I could really use. Such an ability would speed up the system, since there will be much less to unencrypt, and it would also make it easier to choose to use or not use encryption.

So will I upgrade when October arrives? I’m not sure yet. 8.04 runs so well on this laptop that I’m loathe to mess with it.

Related:
Debian mailing list announcement of Lenny freeze
Sidux 2008-2 release notes
“Etch and a half” announcement

Iceweasel (aka Firefox) 3 FIXED in Debian Lenny

My personal relationship with Debian is up and down. A recent “down” moment was when Iceweasel (aka noncopyrighted Firefox) 3 replaced version 2 and promptly broke just a little bit.

The nature of my break (and yes, I know it didn’t happen to you; that doesn’t mean my petty problems don’t matter) was that every time I started Iceweasel 3, I was in “Work Offline” mode. It didn’t matter that I was, in fact, online. Every restart of Iceweasel began that way. I had to uncheck the box to use the browser. Every time.

A look at the Firefox bug reports indicated that this was a problem with the NetworkManager package and not Firefox, per se, but that the Firefox people were working on it nonetheless.

Whoever (or however) the problem got resolved, I’m damn glad that it did, and now I can use Iceweasel in Lenny without problems.

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.

Slightly broken Iceweasel 3.0 comes into Debian Lenny

I’d read the teeth-gnashing about Iceweasel/Firefox 3.0 among developers at Planet Debian, and while I wasn’t eagerly awaiting the move from 2.x to 3.0 for Iceweasel — Debian’s copyright-free version of Firefox — I didn’t expect the thing to move from Sid to Testing with huge bugs.

First of all, and I don’t call this a bug so much as a total oddity. Instead of using the standard Iceweasel file as the home page, it now defaults to Mozilla’s “Gran Paradiso” page. I’ve seen other names for Firefox (besides Iceweasel, there’s Bon Echo), but this one I can’t figure out.

And like Epiphany did a while back (and which I since fixed), now Iceweasel defaults to “working offline” mode, even though I’m definitely online.

When Epiphany “broke” in this same way, I began using Iceweasel more and more just to see how long it would take Debian to fix the problem. When I saw they weren’t going to do that (since the bug report included ways users could hack it back to health), I did the fix myself in gconf and moved on.

But having this problem in Iceweasel is bigger, since presumably more people use it than Epiphany.

Again, these problems just don’t present themselves in Ubuntu. … and I had smooth sailing with Iceweasel 3.0 in Sidux this morning, so Lenny is definitely hurting.

Update: I found possibly relevant bug reports from Debian and Mozilla. It appears that the problem is due to Network Manager.

What isn’t clear is whether or not the fix is forthcoming. Firefox 3 is working just fine in Ubuntu 8.04, so perhaps when a more mature Iceweasel works its way into Debian Lenny, my problem will be solved. I hope.