Andree's Debian & General Musings

I have finally bought an EeePC 901, mainly to use for travelling.

I had been holding off for some weeks because I had hoped (in vain) that the Linux version with 20GB SSD and without a Windows XP license would become available here in Australia.

Anyway, I decided to try putting brand new Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on it and I must say it worked really well. Here is what I did:

• Downloaded the standard Intrepid i386 Desktop CD and put it on a USB memory stick using UNetbootin.
• Installed with the following disk layout: / on 4GB SSD, 1GB swap and 7GB /home on 8GB SSD. (I setup a 1GB swap partition for hibernation and also used ext3 even though some sources say that the flash memory may die during the lifetime of the box.)
• One issue I noticed was that my static IP configuration did get lost between reboots. Eventually I created a new connection from scratch and that worked fine.
• After installation, I added the Ubuntu EeePC kernel and assorted tools which resolved the WLAN problem (even though I have not actually connected to any access points yet) and got all of the Hot Keys to work.
• I thought the screen was a bit dark, so I looked around and found that using the following command makes it much brighter: setpci -s 00:02.1 f4.b=ff. (This may fry the screen apparently, so use at own risk.)
  
• Also, the sound volume was very low. Appending the following to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base fixed this: options snd-hda-intel model=auto
  

Everything else is pretty much ok. Apart from smaller fonts and makingg windows go above the top panel (with: gconftool-2 --set /apps/compiz/plugins/move/allscreens/options/constrain_y --type bool 0), I have not really made any changes.

I am typing this on the little keyboard of the 901 and it is actually quite usable even though I would not want to type pages and pages on it. (Somehow the Blogger editor behaves a bit funny, but I guess this has nothing to do with the hardware but if anything with Firefox 3.)

So far, I think this is an excellent little machine - it even plays Big Buck Bunny in 720p without any problems. ;-)

I upgraded my little file & print server and firewall (in UML) VIA C3 box on the weekend.

Everything went perfectly smooth, it even worked to upgrade via the apt-proxy that's running on the box. Super cool!

The only issue I had was non-working HTTP connections via my Telstra Bigpond cable connection after the upgrade of the firewall UML. In the end I fixed it by forcing the same MTU on the cable-facing as on the LAN-facing interface. It may be related to NAT, but it worked with the same 2.6.18 kernel before the upgrade, so maybe it is an iptables thing.

New packages for amd64 and i386 are in unstable now. I did have to fix a few things here and there to get it to work. The biggest change is internal, however, I've finally moved to using upstream's install.sh script for the Debian package.

I've tested with kernels 2.6.18-4-amd64 (amd64) and 2.6.18-4-k7 (i386) and the usual assortment of nasties, i.e. NFS, AFS, LVM & RAID using NFS as restore media and amd64 and i386 as platforms.

Looks like 2.2.3 will be hot on its heels because of a bzip2-related issue with 2.2.2. (I normally use gzip, i.e. '-G' option, because it is heaps faster and compression rates are really only slightly worse.)

The first fruit of my work on Debian IA64 packages for Mondo Rescue are now on http://people.debian.org/~andree/packages/. It took a bit longer than I had anticipated and there was a bit of an interruption while I stayed on beautiful Norfolk Island for two weeks.

Everything should be fine and dandy apart from the fact that restores will currently miserably fail on IA64 because parted2fdisk expects an older version of parted than what Etch and Sid contain.

So, why publish IA64 packages at all if they don't even work, I hear you scream. Well, firstly I thought I give a bit of an update and show that things are actually moving forward. Secondly, maybe I'm lucky and someone is interested in helping out with getting parted2fdisk to work with newer versions of parted or (better) in getting mondo migrated to using parted natively on all platforms (pending Bruno's approval).

Other than that, the packages have a few user-visible improvements and fixes across all supported architectures and they bring the Debian packages a fair bit closer to upstream - see the changelogs for details.

As usual, check out the new packages, let me know if something doesn't (or does) work, get involved! ;-)

I was fortunate enough to attend lca2007 last week and to meet Bruno Cornec, the Mondo Rescue project leader, for the first time in the flesh.

The conference was pretty cool, and I found the quality of the program to be generally impressingly high: Excellent topics, superb presentation skills, humor and genuine passion for the topic at hand. The atmosphere and organisation were great, too - extremely well done, 7 Team!

My personal two highlights were:

• Andrew Tanenbaum's keynote because he really sticks to his guns and even after 20 years or so finds new aspects that could make microkernel architectures appealing. This time it is system self-healing and robustness. Even though I yet have to try out the Minix 3 CD I found in my conference bag, I guess he may have a point (and moving functionality into user space has been a happening thing for years now). I found the keynote to be both amusing and instructive and dealing with a pressing topic. Also, even though it probably is far from usable in real-world scenarios, at least with Minix 3 there is code and an actual system to demonstrate the ideas and concepts.
• Christopher Blizzard's keynote about OLPC, his participation in the Debian Miniconf distribution discussion and a conversation that we had over lunch after. (Admittedly, I was so excited during parts of the latter that I couldn't decide what topic to bring up, oh well.) My impression is that Chris is a person of integrity and real compassion for Free Software. He appears to have a very positive attitude and comes across as genuine. Chris may not have said that much new during his keynote, but I think he worked the subject of relevance for projects well. More importantly, Chris was the only one in the Debian Miniconf distribution discussion to make a firm stand for Open Source as an ideal and against binary drivers. (Not 100% true, AJ was as well, but really more appearing to report what Debian does. And a question for openSUSE: Do you really think a marketing guy on a discussion panel will appeal to people?)

Apart from the conference as such, it was super cool to meet Bruno. We had a number of good conversations and did some nice hacking, burning the midnight oil a couple of times. And HP gave me a (used) zx2000 (which Bruno carried all the way from France to Sydney!) to enable me to work on the (Debian) Itanium port of Mondo Rescue - thank you HP and Bruno! Bruno's talk was well received, and it was great to actually meet people that use the software that I spend quite a bit of time on. :-)

Finally, there is the Linus phenomenon (so you can tell this is my first
Linux conference) - he amazingly is basically left in peace: People who know him obviously talk to him and he participates vividly in discussions and so forth, but everyone else does the business as usual thing - no autographs, no photos, no nothing. I was (positively) impressed and refrained from asking him to sign my copy of Just for Fun (just kidding).

Finally, finally, I propose to find an alternative for the term 'awesome' next year. ;-)

mindi-2.21~r1021-2 and mondo-2.21~r1021-2 are now on http://people.debian.org/~andree/packages/ with the following changes:

• petris works again during restore (self-inflicted, oh well).
• Restore of ISO images and friends should now work when gzip (i.e. '-G') is used.
• The network interfaces should be fine now when booting into a restored system for the first time.

Other than that:

• The crash in mondorestore when nuking from tape has disappeared. I have no idea what caused it or why it went away again, though...
  
• Kernel 2.6.18-3-k7 hangs when 'acpi=off' is specified (which is the default as per mindi's ADDITIONAL_BOOT_PARAMS, so restore fails with this kernel). I have filed bug #406809 which may or may not be related to #389931.
• The issue with booting a (NTFS) Windows partition failing after a restore appears to be normal as per the ntfsclone manpage:

  Usually, Windows will not be able to boot, unless you copy, move or restore NTFS to the same partition which starts at the same sector on the same type of disk having the same BIOS legacy cylinder setting as the original partition and disk had.

• I have tried a few things playing with parted and ntfsresize, but so far the only thing that works reliably in order to get Windows to boot is resizing the partition using gparted. I still have to figure out what it is that gparted does differently. (If you know, please tell me!)
  

Off to bed now so that I'm fine and dandy when I pick up Bruno from the airport in the morning for lca2007. :-)

Preliminary Debian packages for Mondo Rescue 2.2.1 are available at the usual place: http://people.debian.org/~andree/packages/. (r1021 is the SVN revision of the actual 2.2.1 release.)

The new version comes with quite an impressive list of fixes and enhancements as can be seen on the Mondo Rescue website. The new '-G' option which allows for using gzip as the compressor is my personal favourite as it really speeds things up! Also, I've finally gotten around to fixing #222065 and there is no more unsolicited creation of directories in /var/cache anymore (neither submitted upstream yet).

Unfortunately, there are a few issues:

• Links in directories that actually are links themselves are not resolved correctly (fixed in the Debian package.).
• nuke restore from tape makes mondorestore crash (at least on amd64). The workaround is to use automatic or interactive mode.
• Windows 2000 does not boot after a restore (at least on amd64). The data is restored but there is something wrong with how fdisk creates the partition (I believe). This actually also happens with 2.2.0 as well, so it is not a regression. I have to look into this more. The workaround is to use gparted (or similar) and resize the windows partition/filesystem by a few MB.
  
• petris doesn't start when restoring (again at least on amd64). Surely the most minor issue I noticed so far...
  

Anyway, apart from the above, things seem to be ok. Give it a try if you like! If you do find more issues, let us know via the mailing list and - even better - send a patch. ;-)

Other than that, (belated) Happy New Year to everyone! :-)