Debian is my favourite distribution of GNU/Linux. It's a well respected and well known brand, although I was almost stunned while on business in London last Friday to meet someone who knew about Suse, and Red Hat but wasn't even aware of the existence of Debian. I like Debian's astonishing infrastructure, and its community led approach. It has been on the verge of releasing its next stable version, Lenny, for some time. I've been waiting for that freeze to end to have my debian packages of OPUS uploaded, since there is currently no real rush and I wanted to do more "upstream" work on them. At that point I wanted to start the long path to DD status (via maintainer).

Noodles, who is a DD, has recently commented on his frustration that Debian procrastinates at the end of every release cycle. This seems to be true, and internecine war always seems to erupt over issues that should have been solved long before (or alternatively after) the release. I'm also sympathetic to his suggestion that Debian's voting procedures could be improved.

Reading through Planet Debian today, I am more depressed than ever. Debian's secretary has resigned over voting issues and the vitriol unleashed by them. I'm not making any comment on that. There is already a constitutional pathway for an interim secretary, but now, the project can begin to rip new wounds in itself over the resignation, rumours of expulsion procedures and what to do next. What to do next is damn important, but so is the release.

I was in Plymouth in September with Lenny installer beta 2 CDs with Lenny images that wouldn't even install on the new hardware in a problem frustrating similar to one I found months before (Ubuntu, derived from Debian, embarrassingly did so without problems). I dare say that issue has been fixed (I can no longer test it), but it's a horrible reminder of how a prolonged freeze can lead to an OS that can be born obsolete in the sense that it can't install on newer hardware.

Consider two identical cars, each travelling at a constant velocity v towards each other. Suppose that they crash, and to simplify things, let's not consider any rebound. Then the energy of each is kinetic in nature and so the energy of the crash is given by



Ok. That's a nice way to show the energy of the collision goes up with the square of velocity. Now, according to the principle of relativity this should be an identical situation if you consider it from the reference frame of one of the cars. In that case, the car you are looking at has a velocity of 0, while the other car has a velocity of 2v. Now the total energy of the crash looks like



So. Why the discrepancy?

I use Icedove for mail mainly (the Debian variant of Thunderbird - a long and not very interesting story). I generally like it. I've used pine and mutt, but generally get too much stuff to view to make a text mode editor much fun. I've used evolution, but it was for a long time very slow, so now I tend to use Icedove. It locks up rather frequently on imladris (my main machine) running Debian unstable, and while I've now downloaded some debugging symbols I haven't devoted the time to finding out why yet.

Anyway, there are three things about it that really, really peeve me:

• Why don't the damn tags in version 2+ actually stick (in my imap folders, in dovecot) so that I reliably see them using the same flaming program in work?
• The feature to show a newly received mail is great, but it would be one thousand times more useful if I could tell the program to only feature mail in certain folders and/or not others. I don't really need to be told about how many thousands of new messages I have in my spam filtering folders all the time.
• Why does the exact same program view emails on my laptop in such a way that I frequently see all the "Your editor does not support graphical content" stuff on such emails?

Yes, I've tried google, yes, I've tried FAQs. Can't find the answers. I'm sure I've looked right past them. Anybody?

BTW... Two posts in one day? Not an excess of free time, trying desperately to take my mind of one of my cats who is very ill atm.

On Saturday night, quite by accident, I sat down to watch "Einstein and Eddington" on the BBC. Einstein has been an inspiration to me from an early age, and I'd known a lot about his life and work, and for many years a picture of him has adorned my room or office, though not at the moment as it happens. I suppose in compensation einstein is the hostname of my work computer at the moment.

Anyway I was also for this reason aware of Arthur Eddington, and his famous experiment to verify that gravity bent starlight. I was also aware of his famous quote regarding being one of three men who understood General Relativity. Nevertheless, it was fascinating to see the historical context of the interaction between these men, and a bit more of Eddington's life. I would recommend the programme highly, so if you're in the UK you have a few more days to catch it on iPlayer.

Great performances from Tennant and Serkis.

Previously, I wrote about installing Debian GNU/Linux on the Toshiba Portege R500. Most of the information is still current, but I'm writing a follow up to address other things I got working and questions people have posed me.

Bluetooth Support

I still need to patch the kernel to get bluetooth support working. At the moment I am patching toshiba_acpi which then allows the various commands (see the previous article) such as the one for enabling bluetooth. Glibly talking about patching the kernel is of very little help for those that don't know how, so for Pere who requested that, here's a set of commands, executed as root which should make that simpler. Note, you might want to edit the file mentioned below for SD support too if you need it before doing this.


Headphones

Headphones can work with the main sound muted. If you double click on the mixer icon in Gnome, and go to edit -> preferences you will see a number of controls that can be turned on. You will see a switch for "Headphones". Enable that. This switch now appears in a tab, and you can select it. When you mute the "Front" you should still get sound in the headphones, and indeed, the rotary control on the side still works. If you're a command line kind of person, alsamixer will be your friend.

SD Card Support

SD card support didn't work out of the box for me. I had to patch yet another file. I say patch, but I just directly edited a file as per instructions I found elsewhere. Essentially I just edited drivers/mmc/core/core.c



Suspend to RAM

Pere, who comments on the previous article, wrote that changing the contents (in my case creating) /etc/pm/config.d/config and entering
SUSPEND_MODULES="ehci_hcd"
makes it all work. I agree! Thanks Pere.

Fingerprint Reader

These packages are still experimental, so if you don't know how to install them, well you probably shouldn't. I have installed them, but found their enclosed documentation to be inaccurate. I have tried various ways to configure PAM to support it, but none of them work really as I want them to. I might play with this again sometime.

That's it. My initial good feelings have been more than confirmed. It's a great laptop, and great with Debian. I did have to poke with some BIOS settings with toshset to solve the problems of the grub screen not appearing and xrandr working with a second display. Unfortunately I can't remember what I changed.

I recently reinstalled one of the boxes here, Lorien, from scratch. It was a brand new SATA disk and I used the Debian Lenny beta 2 installer. I'd never tried LVM before, I'd always used "normal" partitioning, but for some reason I figured I'd give this a shot. It all worked ok, but it left one problem. The amount of space Debian allocated to the root partition was pitifully small (less than 300 megabytes), and I hit a snag when a kernel upgrade came through, and wanted to install lots of stuff in that partition. So, first of all a warning, the guided partitioning is, and always has been in my opinion, not too optimal in the way it picks spaces for partitions. Secondly, here is how I fixed it, which is a slight pain since you can't have the root partition mounted.

Since I was going to have to resize my root partition, I used my Debian install CD again, but this time in rescue mode (just type rescue at the prompt). Then you can get a terminal up. I had inadvertently mounted my root partition as /target, so I began by unmounting it.


Next we need to reduce a partition. I chose to resize my home partition, original 200G to 199G, since I reckoned an extra gigabyte would be more than enough on the root partition.


Finally, increase the size of the root partition.

Today my sister-in-law, Siobhan, asked me to help her debug her brand new Sky ADSL set-up. She told me her PC, with a wireless adapter, was connecting OK, but she couldn't get onto the internet at large. I was relieved I had decided to throw my laptop in my bag when I came down to visit as that would make the whole thing a lot easier. I went up to the house, opened my laptop and in a few seconds it was ready from hibernation (into Debian). Very quickly we identified the wireless network, put in the passphrase, and got connected straight away.

So the wireless was working OK as it appeared, and all attempts to surf elsewhere failed. I surfed to 192.168.0.1 and was rewarded by the router login screen, I recognised it as a Netgear device, but the usual netgear "admin" and "password" didn't cut it. Google, via my N95 supplied that "admin" and "sky" was the answer. Result, I was in and could see that there was an IP allocated to the router. I did some pings from my laptop, and found that the packet loss was almost, but not always, complete, and that sometimes DNS worked, sometimes it didn't. All my nice tools in Debian made the diagnosis easier. At this point I was assuming a line problem and that the speed would need to be restrained.

So, I hooked the laptop to the router directly with a cable, just to rule anything else out, and because I knew the tech people would fret about it needlessly, and I saw the router kept losing it's connection periodically - it would stay up for minutes, but nothing useful could be done with it then. So, it was time to ring the dreaded helpline. Siobhan had to go through the usual Q&A, including some quizzing about how her name was spelt, and then I was placed on the phone to speak to the tech-girl as it happened to be in this case. I tried, politely but fairly deperately to short-cut the endless questions by outlining what I had already discovered. She asked me if I was using Vista, I said "No, Linux", so she asked again if it was Vista or XP, and I said it was neither, it was Linux, but that the problem was between the router and their operation somewhere. So we got put on hold for about 5 minutes, and already I had the feeling of dread - I should have just lied. She came back on the phone and told me that her colleagues said Linux wasn't supported and I'd have to use another OS so she could talk me through settings.

With now rapidly mounting exasperation I explained I was already connected to the router, both on the network and with a browser, could clearly see the outbound connection going up and down like a yoyo, and that rebooting into another OS would make absolutely no difference to the problem, but of course, she was adamant, so with great irritation and reluctance I rebooted into Vista, waited for it to finally sort itself out, logged in and ... the phone line went dead.

So now, punching the floor with irritation, I ask Siobhan to phone back, get through the maze of keypresses and introductions and we get the second person. She wants to start at the beginning, but we try hard to get her to understand what we have already found. She at least seems to understand it's not an OS problem. She tells me to try another microfilter, I say fine, but I obviously can't do it just as we're on the phone, she says "That's correct, you would be disconnected". Well... yes, I got that. Anyway, we go through a few other gems and I anticipate her asking me to unscrew the BT master faceplate and plug things in there.

So we do that, with little hope, it doesn't work. I curse Vista as I try to navigate IE (I don't even dare use firefox in case they moan about that). Again, we call, the same procedure, the third person, who talks to Siobhan only, and is happy without further technobabble, to finally redirect us to the "Solution Centre" or some such. Siobhan begins to talk to operative number four, and passes me over.

Joy... She understands the problem is at their end, she limits the speed on the connection, just like that it all starts to work. I thank her profusely and say it's a pleasure to finally get to someone who doesn't ask me to check if I have an electricity supply. She comes from Northern Ireland too, we share a quick laugh about it all, she helpfully suggests that she'll leave the ticket open while we check over the weekend the new "fix" is stable. Yes, I know I can be a grumpy old [whatever] about it, and that the tech people often have to speak to people who don't have a clue what they are doing, but it is exasperating when they can't go a little beyond the script to realise you might actually know how to help them fix your problem.

Way back in the early days of ISPs in Northern Ireland I found some problem, carefully excluded local causes and called the ISP to report it to them. Foolishly I told them at the time I was using WAN and LAN at the same time (Netware), to which they promptly told me that was impossible and refused to discuss the problem further. I pointed out that not only was it possible, it was all working nicely in the morning. So I called back and just lied that time.

The moral of the story seems to be, when someone asks if you are running Vista, just say "yes".