Ever since I got my Acer Aspire One a few months ago, I have stuck with the default Linpus Linux operating system, since it worked fine and allowed me to do the three things I most commonly do on this netbook: surf the web, check email, and use a terminal. However, the tinkerer in me has been itching to try some other operating systems on this machine and so I've done just that.
After experimenting with OpenBSD on the Aspire One (which worked very well indeed) I now have a (mostly) working Debian Lenny install. For the most part, I followed the instructions on the Debian wiki with a few minor modifications. I basically did a minimal Debian install and built it up from there to where it now runs Xfce with a few extra applications. I will post more details soon, with some explanations of the additional tweaks I had to do to get things working pretty well. In the end, the Acer Aspire One is one great netbook, very hackable with a very active community at the AspireOneUser.com website. There are excellent forums, howto's, modifications, and hacks for the Aspire One at that site.
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So, I finally got my blog back up and running again after taking a year-long hiatus. I must admit, part of what got me motivated to get the blog rolling again was the cool LinuxPlanet blogs site organized by Dave Yates and Linc Fessenden. Great idea, guys and Linc, thanks for adding in my blog, cobwebs and all. Hiya, LinuxPlanet. :-)
Anyway, it's been a busy year, to say the least, and I have a lot of catching up to do:
Over the past few months, I have begun learning the ins and outs of Debian packaging, and have started adopting a few orphaned Debian packages. One of these packages, openbox-themes (1.0.2), was just accepted into the Unstable archive, where it will eventually propogate down to Testing. There is one other orphaned package that I have adopted and am working on, and am considering adopting a third. I met a couple of Debian developers at Ohio Linux Fest, and they said they would sign my GPG key, which is a good thing to have when maintaining Debian packages. Anyway, whether it's working on Debian packages, FreeBSD documentation or ports, or Slackware Slackbuild scripts, I have discovered that I really like working with operating system projects on software packaging and the like.
I am going to post another entry shortly with some good resources on Debian packaging.
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Just a quick post to say that, once again, I am amazed at what the little Linksys NSLU2 can do with Linux on it. I installed Debian Etch on this sucker, and, thanks to some Linux Reality listeners, have it doing DNS and DHCP with DNSMasq, and also acting as a local IMAP server for my personal email accounts using Dovecot, Getmail, and, here and there, Procmail. I had to manually hack the NSLU2 to double the clock speed, but it was easy and made a big difference.
This thing rocks! I may have to get a second one ...
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In my previous post, I mentioned I was having problems setting up a CUPS server in Debian Etch. I posted here on my blog about it, I posted a thread in the Debian forums, I posted to a currently-existing Debian bug report, I posted to the CUPS mailing lists, and I Googled continuously for two days, trying every single cupsd.conf file I could find. Nothing changed and nobody had any answers.
Then, I happened to stumble upon Debian Etch Bug #418974, in which the original bug filer reported that the gnome-cups-manager in Debian Etch did not print test pages to a Debian CUPS print server, but other applications printed fine. After reading this bug report, something dawned on me: all this time, my only client-side tests of the CUPS set up was with the gnome-cups-manager. Could that be problem? Sure enough, I fired up a web browser, printed a web page, and voila -- everything worked. I cannot believe I did not think to try printing from something other than the gnome-cups-manager. *smacks forehead*
Granted, this is still a Debian bug, but I feel much better knowing that it's a Debian client-side bug in the gnome-cups-manager instead of a server side bug in CUPS itself. Geez, I have been pulling my hair out for two days when it turned out to be something so simple! Now, I just have to figure out what my penance should be for such a dumb mistake.
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I am having a heck of time getting CUPS working on a newly-minted Debian Etch netinstall installation. Here is the problem: CUPS installs fine, and I can set up my HP 1300 LaserJet USB printer without problems. I can print a test page from the CUPS web-based admin interface without problems. I have edited my /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file to allow browsing the printers and the printers show up fine on other computers on the network. I can add the ipp CUPS printers with the GNOME cups gui tool on another Debian box. This is exactly what I have done with other CUPS servers and they have worked fine. In this case, everything seems to work equally well up to this point.
However, when I send a print job from a client computer, the job is accepted by CUPS but then the job stops and nothing prints. Looking through my /var/log/cups/error_log file I see lots of this:
D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] cupsdReadClient: 8 POST / HTTP/1.1 D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] cupsdAuthorize: No authentication data provided. D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] CUPS-Get-Default D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] CUPS-Get-Default client-error-not-found: No default printer D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] cupsdProcessIPPRequest: 8 status_code=406 (client-error-not-found) D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] cupsdReadClient: 8 POST / HTTP/1.1 D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] cupsdAuthorize: No authentication data provided. D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] CUPS-Get-Printers D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] cupsdProcessIPPRequest: 8 status_code=0 (successful-ok) D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] cupsdReadClient: 8 POST / HTTP/1.1 D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] cupsdAuthorize: No authentication data provided. D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] Get-Printer-Attributes ipp://localhost/printers/hp1300 D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] cupsdProcessIPPRequest: 8 status_code=0 (successful-ok) D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] cupsdReadClient: 8 POST / HTTP/1.1 D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] cupsdAuthorize: No authentication data provided. D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] Get-Printer-Attributes ipp://localhost/printers/hp132 D [17/Apr/2007:21:17:02 -0400] cupsdProcessIPPRequest: 8 status_code=0 (successful-ok)
Googling for this error turns up lots of error reports all over the place, such as this, this, this, this, and this.
I found a bug report in the Debian bug system and sent in my two cents' worth. There are similar bug reports in the Ubuntu Launchpad. It seems that maybe this is a problem upstream in CUPS, but it's hard to tell. Either way, it is a real problem and I hope it gets fixed really soon.
Update: I just did another Etch netinstall and this time chose "print server" during the package set selection of the installation process, thinking that maybe this would install some packages I had not installed manually. No dice. The printers are set up and working fine within the CUPS web interface, but printing from a client results in the "cupsdAuthorize: No authentication data provided" error messages in /var/log/cups/error_log. This is a real PITA.
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According to this post in the Debian Forums, Etch is basically done. If this is to be believed, the release docs have been completed and they are building the ISOs now. Additionally, there is to be a final release of Sarge (3.1r6). Here's hoping!
Update: Seems that forum post was right. Etch was released about twelve hours after I posted that entry.
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I have been continuing to test out Debian Etch (c'mon Debian, release Etch!) and I have found it to be almost perfect. The only annoyance is that, after waking up from suspend, the GNOME Network Manager seems to have difficulty reassociating with my wireless network. If I click on the Network Manager applet and select my network, then it sort of restarts and connects. Not a big deal, but an annoyance. And yes, I did say "after waking up from suspend." Suspend on my Thinkpad T42 works perfectly. I guess I should not complain about Network Manager. :-)
Speaking of Thinkpads, I decided to pick up another used Thinkpad. I love these Thinkpads! This time I got an X40 with the Ultrabase CDRW/DVD. The X40 is one of those super-light ones (less than 3 pounds) and has excellent Linux and BSD support. New toys are always fun. It did not come with a miniPCI wifi card, so I picked up a nice Ralink miniPCI card from Newegg. I decided on the Ralink because of the completely open source drivers/firmware. However, the one issue this poses is that IBM prevents certain Thinkpads (including both models I now own) from using unauthorized miniPCI cards. Is that not ridiculous? I swear, if it's not one thing preventing you from using your software and hardware exactly how you like, it's another. Anyway, there are various workarounds, including a BIOS hack (dangerous) and a CMOS hack (less dangerous). The Thinkwiki site included a link to someone who has created a bootable CD and floppy image to do the CMOS hack. I guess I'll be crossing my fingers and hoping it works.
I mentioned in this week's Linux Reality that my wife has been enjoying spending some time with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn lately. She generally uses our iMac running OS X, but that machine has been acting up and she's also started to get annoyed with some of the OS X tendencies. Like the tendency to give you the spinning beach ball of death when loading a web page. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. The last time she gave Linux a serious go (circa 2002 with KDE 2.2) it was pretty disastrous. I think the Linux desktop has come a long way since then.
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I decided to get a hardware RAID card for a new server I am putting together on a P3 750mhz, and went with the 3ware 8006-2LP PCI SATA Raid Controller which you can read about on Newegg. This card is really great -- you just stick it in a free slot and boot the box. There is a BIOS on the card so when you first boot the machine, you go into the card's BIOS and select your settings. I went with good old Raid 1 mirroring. After a reboot, you are done. The OS sees the two drives as just a single drive and your Raid is all set up. Plus, 3ware has great Linux support -- the drivers for this card are already part of the Linux kernel.
Very slick.
So, anyway, I decided to put Debian Stable on this server since I am pretty used to running Debian on my servers and there have been no issues. However, I have recently been spending some time with OpenBSD and FreeBSD, trying to learn some of the nuances of those operating systems and how they differ from Linux. I really like how clean these OS's are -- I was shocked at how elegant both /etc directories were in the two BSD's as compared to some Linux distros really clutter up the /etc directory. Since I have not spent much time migrating stuff over to this new server, I am sorely tempted to replace Debian with one of the BSD's and see how it goes. I really like how secure OpenBSD is, and running so many services in a chroot seems like a good idea.
There are so many great options to consider. Isn't that what the free and open source community is all about? Choice? Damn, I love it.
I know I do not normally post screenshots or images on this site, but I thought this was a good one. It is the default GNOME desktop of Debian Etch, Release Candidate. Looks pretty good, IMHO.
I did a netinstall of Debian Etch using one of the daily netinstall builds and everything installed flawlessly. The GNOME desktop is version 2.14, which is one release behind the current 2.16. It also includes the newfangled "Network Manager" applet (seen in the upper right corner) that allows one to switch between wired and wireless networks. I tested out a few things here and there and everything appears to work well. The speed is no better or worse than other distributions as far as I can tell, but the added spit and polish are very noticeable. The Debian artwork looks great.
Although Etch has been delayed a bit, it looks like things are shaping up nicely. Hats off to the Debian developers on what looks like will be another solid release.
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