Recently in Debian GNU/Linux Category

Today I found a website encouraging using GNU/Linux instead of non-free operating systems (not exactly true, but not more incorrect than the popular use of ‘Linux’). It presents Ubuntu, Fedora and gNewSense as appropriate distributions for new users. I used the first two of these distributions some years ago (before the gNewSense project began), so I decided to write how my attitude towards the user-friendliness of them changed.

Initially I used a GNU/Linux distribution made by RedHat (I don’t remember if I called it like that, but probably I knew the reasons for this). Then I used one made by Mandriva, it had better support for some hardware. Some time later I used Fedora, since the previous distribution was difficult to update.

Then I discovered the reason for which now I don’t use Fedora or similar distributions – it was new twice per year, later only small changes were made. I did not like frequent reinstalling of operating systems.

Later a failing hard disk encouraged me to try a different operating system. I installed FreeBSD (then version 5.4; it was the only operating system for which I paid). It did not require reinstalling for a CD, but still the core system had to be completely rebuilt for any change. FreeBSD also has a source-based package manager which makes software installation slower, but leading to more optimal software for the machine on which it was used. I previously wrote about an advantage of source-based systems, but then I didn’t use these features (I did not have a DVD player and I knew much less about fonts).

Later I used Kubuntu. It had better support for hardware which I used. It also had many patches to popular software which probably were not used in FreeBSD. Maybe it was easy to use for a user of Microsoft Windows, but for me it was difficult. I wrote about some problems which apply to it just like to Debian Sid which I now use on my laptop.

Since 2007 I use Gentoo, although in that year I used also Ubuntu and now I use Debian on one of my three computers. Gentoo has several advantages for which I still use it:

• it is a continuous distribution – a release is only for installing (and for news sites), then all of them may be updated to the newest system
• USE flags allow simple selection of needed features of installed software
• it is so fast that Firefox is usable
• newer than officially released software may be used easily, necessary for kernel and graphics drivers on some hardware
• it is simple to improve, writing ebuilds is easy after reading some
• it had no working GUI installer when I installed it for first time, so no data was lost and I knew exactly what was done
• it may be easily administered remotely (clear structure of /etc, no GUI configuration tools are necessary)
• only necessary software is installed by default, nearly all services enabled are necessary

Gentoo is useful for learning how GNU/Linux works. Of course, this is the main reason against using it, and the time needed to compile KDE or GCC is the second one.

For some days I use much more tabs in IceWeasel than before, so it uses about a gigabyte of RAM and so slow that I’m not sure if its tab list has data here or on distant servers. When scrolling a page, keeping an arrow key pressed led to very slow scrolling of much larger areas than expected. Fortunately, it was not due to large amount of information needed, but due to misconfigured graphics driver for the X server.

There are two useful, popular and free drivers for AMD RS690 chipset which my laptop has. Debian by default uses xf86-video-ati which stopped working a month ago (maybe now it works, but I have no reasons to change the driver again), so I replaced it by xf86-video-radeonhd which does exactly the same but with different code and configuration (if something doesn’t work, it is independent of these drivers). Then the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf consisted of this:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
        Driver          "radeonhd"
EndSection

(Useless comments skipped. Everything else is automatically configured by modern versions of X.Org X11 server.) This worked with nice 3D acceleration (automatically enabled in newer releases of the driver), but I haven’t noticed that 2D rendering was slow.

There are many 2D acceleration architectures for the X server – XAA and EXA are the important ones. XAA is slow for modern hardware and software, while EXA is newer and less tested (ten months ago I couldn’t use both it and 3D acceleration without having to reboot the machine just after starting any OpenGL-based program). Unlike Radeon (xf86-video-ati) the RadeonHD driver supports both XAA and EXA for this hardware and uses XAA by default. Therefore, (after reading about it in the man page of this driver) I had to add this additional line to the X server configuration file (before EndSection):

        Option          "AccelMethod" "exa"

After restarting the X server even IceWeasel is interactive and can be used to read long Web pages.

(3D acceleration with Radeon hardware in Debian requires also the firmware-linux package from the non-free repository; although the firmware has MIT/X11 license it is not allowed in main, probably since there only fonts do not have to include source.)

Today I tried to compile another flyer typeset with LaTeX, but it resulted in the following error:

! pdfTeX error (font expansion): auto expansion is only possible with scalable
fonts.
<to be read again>
                   \endgroup \set@typeset@protect

The reason for this was lack of scalable TeX Gyre Pagella fonts in my TeX installation (TeXLive 2007 from Debian Sid). When I disabled font expansion (by removing \usepackage[expansion]{microtype} from the document preamble), it tried to make bitmap fonts and failed. So I recalled that the TeX Gyre fonts (much better derivatives of the URW’s 35 standard PostScript fonts, with correct diacritics for many languages) were not available in TeXLive 2007. (With the previous flyer I hadn’t had such problems, since the Concrete Roman fonts are much older and CM-Super scalable fonts are included in Debian.)

Therefore I’ve downloaded them from the GUST site and unpacked the TDS archive into the $HOME/texmf directory. Then I run the mktexlsr $HOME/texmf command for programs in TeXLive to know that new files are available there.

This would be enough for LaTeX packages or METAFONT fonts, but for scalable ones more work is needed. This is since there are many different scalable fonts for one metric one and sometimes bitmap ones are also available and preferred. The files also have many different names, specified in special map files.

Since I do not have any experience with map files in Debian, I used a search engine to find a manual with complete instructions for installing fonts in Debian’s TeXLive. Using this and the next section of this manual I run the following commands to enable TeX Gyre Pagella scalable fonts:

updmap --enable Map qpl.map
update-updmap
mktexlsr
updmap

Then I successfully compiled the flyer with these Palatino-like fonts with correct support for my native language.

I bought a film on a DVD (legally, at least where I live). The film, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, is about freedom of speech and politics limiting it. I won’t write about it now, since the technology controlling such things is interesting enough for a blog post (or more).

When using a Gentoo GNU/Linux workstation, with nearly only free software (but a non-free graphics card driver did not affect this situation in a visible way), there was no problem with this technology. Although in the US it would be possibly illegal to watch an encrypted DVD with free software, it is legal to use such software in Poland. Gentoo is an American GNU/Linux distribution, but being a source-based distribution, it does not provide software violating US patents or the DMCA (known for prohibiting circumventing DRMs like the one based on DVD encryption). The user may compile it themselves.

Several days later I wanted to watch the movie again. For this I used my laptop which has Debian GNU/Linux installed. Since Debian is a binary distribution, all compiled code is shared by it. Therefore US law (also allowing software patents) limits software available in such distributions everywhere.

Clearly this did not work in the intended way. After installing necessary software from a repository outside US, it also did not work. I do not remember if on this laptop DVD movies could be watched with Gentoo (Update: now I know that with Gentoo it also does not work, next time I will buy DVD hardware not made by Matshita). The messages from the kernel log suggest that the drive’s firmware prohibits using DVD from this region (a DVD from EU used in EU in a laptop bought in EU).

There are two solutions. Use a different computer with software which cannot be used in the US, or avoid DVDs. Or (unless the Spanish Inquisition will do it sooner), tell others how DVDs are designed to limit freedom of their users.

I have mostly three computers – one stable Gentoo server, one ~amd64 Gentoo workstation, and one laptop. Since I rarely use the laptop at home, I decided to install a binary distribution on it.

I do not like to frequently reinstall operating systems. I like also having very new software, deciding to install new versions in the week of upstream release. The distribution also should be user-friendly, i.e. help them control it instead of controlling them by unneeded packages and hidden configurations.

The first criterion limits my choice to very few GNU/Linux distributions (I did not try to use any other, better, kernel due to bad experiences with hardware support in the past). After reading an entry on Caleb Cushing’s blog I decided to try using Debian. Previously I knew about some of its important advantages – very stable releases (not appropriate on my laptop), large number of available packages (like on Gentoo or FreeBSD) and support for some forks encouraging free software (cdrkit, IceWeasel).

I though that there are Debian Sid installation discs. Since I could not find them, I used testing discs. During installation the only problem was lack of wireless network support (after some updates it worked with the ath5k driver). The only one, before I noticed that it installed KDE 3.

Unlike Gentoo with its several slots per package name, Debian names each library differently for each ABI. For non-library packages the same name is used. Confusingly, kwin was changed into a more descriptive name, but the package manager did nothing with this. The library situation led to using three versions of GCC, but this is not a problem when my laptop does not compile them.

After removing many unneeded packages (mostly from KDE 3) and installing needed ones, I noticed that TeXLive is available still in version 2007. It is caused by different packaging in version 2008. For Gentoo this was not a problem, they just keep it without updates. Maybe this will improve before TeXLive 2011.

In Gentoo the rc system is simple and easy to configure. In Debian removing hundreds of unnecessary packages did the job, but I still do not understand why so many runlevels are used there. I also do not know how to avoid having NetworkManager put useless domain name in /etc/resolv.conf, in Gentoo I just edited some configuration files instead of using NetworkManager.

Still, I believe that these problems may take less time than updating a source-based distribution.