Ad Terras Per Aspera

I’ve finally decided to switch back to Debian. In fact, I did so about a week ago. Both my workstation and laptop now run Debian; and I’m much happier with Debian than I ever was with Ubuntu.

Way back when, I was one of the first people to switch to Ubuntu, under the promise of both Mark Shuttleworth and his people, and all of the Debian developers switching sides (apparently, since then, many of those developers either develop for both Debian and Ubuntu now, or switched back to Debian only), that Ubuntu would be what Debian was supposed to be: an easy to maintain, perfectly stable, often updated, desktop distro.

I believe, now, that Ubuntu is none of those things. Ubuntu, instead, is nothing but an attempt to turn Debian into something like Fedora: a desktop distro that puts user friendlyness over sane software development.

I deleted my /bin, /sbin, and /usr/* directories, and appended .old to /etc, /home, and /var, and used the 20060829 daily built Etch Debian-Install netinst CD to install in my already existing parition. I can say the new installer is way better than the one I used back in the Potato days (which was the last time I actually installed Linux on my workstation, I only dist-upgraded to Ubuntu instead of reinstalling).

I’m actually surprised how modern this installer is. For one, which surprised me, is that it automatically detects and sets up my Firewire port to be able to network on, the only flaw here is that it gives me an option of using eth1 as my default network adapter but doesn’t actually tell me eth1 is my Firewire port.

Second, it can automatically retrieve my computer’s hostname and domain because I statically assign IP and FQDN based on MAC with dnsmasq (which provides both dhcpd and dnsd) on my router. It saves me a few keystrokes, sure, but it is still a neat feature.

The only missing features I’d like to see is a mention of console output on F5, and a terminal on F2, which I only knew were there from previous experience with Debian installers. Plus, I’d also like to see the ability to add a pre-existing directory to use debs from, so I don’t have to re-download things if I already have downloaded them once.

After install, I quickly ugraded to Sid.

A few other things I noticed Debian has and Ubuntu doesn’t, is that Debian’s apt-get now has the abilty to download just the updated parts of a package index instead of the whole index (on supported mirrors, anyways). Even on DSL, downloading 5+ megs of package indexes takes a good 30 to 45 seconds, now it just takes less than 5.

In addition, and I’m not sure what caused this, I no longer have very sluggish apt-get performance when installing or removing packages. I think this may be because my Debian install was ancient and had eventually gotten dpkg’s various state files gummed up, but where a simple apt-get install of a small package would take a few minutes, it now takes a few seconds.

All in all, Debian is still the distro I remember it: clean, lean, well designed, a dream to administer, and not bloated to hell and back with lots of defaultly installed packages no one uses. Also, is it me, or does Debian also boot a good ten seconds faster than Ubuntu?

I’ve just found a pretty neat website: KLive, the Linux kernel live usage monitor. It shows many stats, from what file systems people use, to what modules they use, to what hardware they run.

However, the stats are very lopsided and show many Gentoo users and many ReiserFS users, which gives a very inaccurate impression that Gentoo and ReiserFS are popular, or even recommended for usage.

I encourage Linux users (especially Debian and Ubuntu users) to run the KLive client to give a more accurate picture of the machines that run Linux.

After hours of hard labor, Ubuntu Dapper has been released. Congradulations, everybody!

Update: (July 13th 2006) These debs are out of date and are no longer available for download. I have no interest on packaging these anymore.

I’ve recompiled Paul Wise’s Synfig Debian debs for Ubuntu, until Ubuntu Universe inherits them from Debian SID. Just add…

deb http://mjr.iki.fi/ubuntu/synfig/ ./
deb-src http://mjr.iki.fi/ubuntu/synfig/ ./

…to your /etc/apt/sources.list and run apt-get update and you’ll be able to use them. Please note, the binary packages are for x86 only; you’ll have to build from source to get these to work on other platforms. Also note, this version of etl is broken on x86-64, but has been fixed in CVS.

Thanks mjr, for hosting them!

Damnit, I know the R300 DRI driver is alpha code and all, but it doesn’t work on my card at all! I’ve been slowly working with the dri-devel mailing list on how to get it working, but no one has been able to figure out whats wrong.

• Windows works fine.
• The ATI binary driver, fglrx, works fine.
• Removing Load "DRI" from Xorg.conf and then starting Xorg with R300 DRI works fine.
• Xorg.0.log doesn’t give me any hints as to whats wrong.
• dmesg gives me no hints as to whats wrong.
• Running DRI, libDRM, and the DRM kernel modules from CVS doesn’t fix it.
• It isn’t the agpart driver, because fglrx uses the agpart driver instead of it’s internal one due to how Ubuntu Dapper works
• Fast write is not on.
• AGP speed is set to default, which seems to be 4x.
• I use GDM, and the Ubuntu GDM drum sound doesn’t play.
• It does, however, play if I manually go to a text console, but trying to go back to X leaves me with a scrambled screen with a working mouse curosr, and input doesn’t work; sysreq, however, does.
• Starting X by itself without GDM doesn’t fix it.

Anyone out there have an idea of how this can be fixed?

Update: In October of 2005, I bought this card, under the impression that ATI would support it under Linux, and they have failed. They did not give any help to the DRI R300 project, nor did they improve their fglrx drivers. On October 11th of 2006, I have replaced this card with a Geforce 6800XT.

However, I wish the best of luck to the DRI team. Not everyone is willing to shell out $120 to get rid of problematic drivers.