Category Archives: Linux

Hi Lenny

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0, codenamed Lenny, was recently released. Here’s a round of of articles about the release and why you might want to consider Debian for your infrastructure.

Techworld sums up what this means for companies and highlights new features and security enhancements:

http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=110898

Debian 5.0, known as Lenny, will offer users improved security handling. For example, as an added protection measure, Debian Installer will now apply any security updates before the first boot.
In addition, several security-critical packages have been built with GCC hardening features, and the standard system contains fewer setuid root binaries and fewer open ports. Other new features include support for IPv6, NFS 4, PostgreSQL 8.3.5, MySQL 5.1.30 and 5.0.51a, Samba 3.2.5, PHP 5.2.6, Asterisk 1.4.21.2, Nagios 3.06 and the Xen Hypervisor 3.2.1.

Debian was proving to be particularly attractive, claiming that Debian was now the Linux distribution with the lowest total cost of ownership.

And Russell Coker mentions that Debian has full Xen support, which will make Xen users happy!

http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/02/16/xen-and-lenny/

One of the features that is particularly noteworthy is that Xen has been updated and now works fully and correctly on the 2.6.26 kern

Sami Haatinen suggests that administrators utilize the apt-listchanges command:

http://ressukka.net/blog/posts/20090215_apt-listchanges/

It lists changes made to packages since the currently installed version. Sure that information will be overwhelming on major upgrades, but what is useful even on major upgrades is the capability to parse News files in the same way.

Debian 5.0 release notes are available at:

http://debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/

Me? I’m being running a mixture of Debian Stable, Testing, Sid, and Experimental on my Desktop and it runs stable 99% of time. A configuration like that isn’t recommended, as serious breakage can occur. But, this rarely happens, and I’ve Debian enough to know when not to let the package manager remove important packages! On my laptop, a Lenovo T400, I run Ubuntu Linux, see here for why.

Why use Lenny as a codename? All versions of Debian have been named after characters from the film Toy Story. The unstable version is codenamed Sid, and Sid will never be released as Sid breaks things. For a list of the previous names used see Section 6.2 here:

http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-ftparchives

Lenny is named after a pair of wind-up binoculars.

Enable mod_perl on Debian, Ubuntu, & Other Linuxes.

To enable mod_perl with Apache2 on Debian & Ubuntu for all directories served up by Apache2, including user directories such as ~/public_html, add the following lines to /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

# enable mod_perl
    <Files ~ ".(pl|cgi)$">
           SetHandler perl-script
           PerlResponseHandler ModPerl::Registry
           Options +ExecCGI
           PerlSendHeader On
    </Files>

In a real production environment you probably don’t want to enable this for all directories that Apache2 serves up, but only from those directories you expect to run perl in.

Thanks to this thread on the Ubuntu Forums for the info.

Titled updated as per Ozkar’s suggestion.

Got a T400

I recently got an Lenovo T400 and this thing works great with the latest version of Ubuntu (Intrepid).

To install Ubuntu, you have to make sure you edit the BIOS settings and change the graphics to use one of the 2 build in graphics cards. If you want to save the Vista bootloader and access to Lenovo’s restore partition, you must not install grub on the MBR (Master Boot Record). Instead, install grub on the same partition as where the kernel resides. (This will be either /boot or / ) Then install EasyBCD¹ on Vista and add Ubuntu to Vista’s bootloader.

I was going to install Debian on the laptop, but I went w/ Ubuntu Intrepid instead as it has a 2.6.27 kernel which (supposedly) has better support for some the hardware on the T400 (and for my new Sony MP3 Walkman). I could have installed Debian and compiled my own 2.6.27 kernel, but these days I couldn’t be bothered spending ages compiling, testing, and debugging my own kernel.

¹For instructions on how to use EasyBCD see: http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Ubuntu

http://timony.com/mickzblog/2009/01/22/got-a-t400

Adobe Flash Sound not working with Iceweasel on Debian?

After upgrading to Flash 10 sound stopped working. Installing the flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound package solved that problem for me:

aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound

If your using pulse audio, install the flashplugin-nonfree-pulse package. It doesn’t look like the Debian flash plug-in suggests either package:

apt-cache show flashplugin-nonfree|more
Package: flashplugin-nonfree
Priority: optional
Section: contrib/web

Suggests: iceweasel, konqueror-nsplugins, x-ttcidfont-conf, msttcorefonts, ttf-dejavu, ttf-xfree86-nonfree, xfs (>= 1:1.0.1-5)

Netbeans 6.5 on Debian

Doesn’t perform badly, I’ve been using it recently with Ruby code, and I like how it colourises the code to make editing code easier, and performs it auto-completion and method lookup (basically all the features you’d expect with a modern IDE).

It’s does’t startup as fast as using Emacs, or vi, but I find the features very handy and very convenient. It doesn’t look  bad either. It runs better on my PC at home running Debian Linux than it does on my PC at work running WinXP. This is probably because I’m using a 1.5 JVM on WinXP and a 1.6 JVM on Debian. Running on 1.6 JVM’s means that Netbeans will automatically use anti-aliased fonts if you have anti-aliased fonts enabled (much easier on the eyes if your using a LCD screen).

Dell Laptops & Ubuntu

I’d heard that Dell were offering Ubuntu Linux on some of their laptops and I hadn’t really looked into it. But I came across this page the other day and it’s pretty neat to get Ubuntu (or any Linux) preloaded on a laptop from a major vendor:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=d

It’s good to support coming from a major vendor, and Dell even offer’s a repo so you can get BIOS updates for support hardware:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/02/05/dell-bios-updates-using-linux/

However, I’m still partial to getting Lenovo’s T400 over a Dell.

KDE4 and Debian

I figured it’s time for me to try and install kde4 again! Previously I had to remove KDE4 due to package conflicts. There are installation instructions at:

http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/experimental.html

So following the instructions there on what changes to make to your sources.list, and then run:

aptitude update

I’ve had some dependency issues, and installing the kde4 package (a meta-package that will install all of KDE4) would not install due to dependency issues with the kdegraphics package. The way around this is to install the kde4-minimal package and whichever of the other packages you want. So I installed everything, minus the kdegraphics package via the following:

aptitude install -t experimental kde4-minimal kdeplasma-addons kdegames kdemultimedia kdenetwork kdepim kdeutils kdeedu kdeadmin kdeartwork kdetoy

Be prepared for a lot of packages to be installed, for others to be removed, and to possibly break your existing kde3 installation (if you have one). See the first comment to see what I had to install and remove.

Firstly, KDE4 does not import any of your KDE3 settings, which is pretty annoying, as all of the applications start with the default settings, and is really annoying with applications like kmail … however some has created a tool to import the settings:

http://silentcoder.co.za/silentcoder/?page_id=330

My only complaint about the tool, is that it requires root to install it. I’d also like the option to be able to run the tool without first having to install it. Anyways, it seems to work pretty well and imported all of my mail into kmail, the only thing it didn’t do was import account settings into kmail.

This post is a work in progress, I’ll update it over the next day or so with any further instructions as I install, configure, and test KDE4.

Debian’s e17 Packages

I thought I’d start looking at using Debian’s experimental E17 packages. I commented out all other E17 repo’s from my source.list and installed the debian e17 package. It installs a minimal amount of related packages, and there doesn’t seem to be lot of e17 packages available in the experimental repo

sudo aptitude install e17
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states… Done
Reading task descriptions… Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
e17 e17-data{a} libecore-con0{a} libecore-evas0{a} libecore-fb0{a} libecore-file0{a} libecore-imf0{a} libecore-ipc0{a} libecore-job0{a} libecore-txt0{a} libecore-x0{a} libecore0{a}
libedbus0{a} libedje0{a} libeet1{a} libefreet0{a} libembryo0{a} libevas-engines{a} libevas0{a}
0 packages upgraded, 19 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 8110kB of archives. After unpacking 15.5MB will be used.

This appears to provide a good basic E17 Desktop, but provides no additional themes, and I’m not sure how many modules it includes. Here’s a screenshot:
Default Debian E17 Install

If you want to use this add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental main non-free contrib

This also includes KDE4 packages. You’ll want to be careful with this repo, that you don’t pull in and install too many (possibly breaking) packages from it.

Look for my latest posting on E17 as this information could be out-of-date:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/category/e17/