Debian

I upgraded my desktop yesterday to Debian 'Jessie' 8.0. Can't say it went smoothly. First of all, lot of packages got deleted; no biggie there, easily reinstalled. However, the kernel didn't got upgraded, which caused quite some problems during first boot. The worst part however, was that I was using an incompatible Gnome theme. This did cause segfaults of many Gnome applications, such as gnome-terminal. Quite strange that Gnome cannot catch those kind of exceptions. I would expect that Gnome would revert to a default theme in those cases.

It took a while to find the cause of that (adding a new user and charging up a desktop succeeded fine, so I knew this was a user config error); in the end, the next couple of lines fixed all of my issues :

$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme Ambiance
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences theme Radiance

Shame that Gnome 3 is so ugly. Why all that grey-black,and those rounded message boxes ? I really miss the days of Gnome 2's default look and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface...

It's sad to see how the Debian project come to a complete halt every time a new release is imminent. I won't say much about the problems raging through the project, but I do want to remark this : I can't help to conclude that Debian

- regularly succeeds to drive away brilliant people, such as Manoj
- sometimes exhibits a behavior that mimics the worst bureaucratic institution.

So whether you're working in a community driven project, of in a large hierarchic enterprise, in the end, it all boils down to one point : everyone wants to be a manager.

So, Debian has finally decided to rename Firefox and Thinderbird to IceWeasel and IceDove. Why all the fuss was all about, I still don't know, but I do find the Iceweasel rename job stupid. Why Debian simply didn't shove Firefox and Thunderbird in non-free beats me.

Is it me or is every 'dist-upgrade' of unstable giving back dreadfull results ? There was a time I upgraded my Debian sid almost every week, while now I tend to wait 6 to 8 weeks to upgrade. Yesterday evening, I dist-upgraded with lots of trouble, and found myself without an X-server suddenly. The 'startx' command didn't reported an error, but didn't started an X session either. When looking at the process list, I found the X server process being replaced with the 'true' command, typical when you don't have an X server installed.

Luckily, there's the Debian Wiki page StatusOfUnstable which told me several people had problems with this. The fact that the amd64 repositories were outdated, and that they were integrated in the default repo was also an interesting read.

In the end, everything was sorted out, but it took me one hour and a half to straighten things up, not counting the dist-upgrade process.
So, it seems I have a dilemma :

* Debian sid has really become unstable, since sarge has been released, up to the fact that dist-upgrading is breaking things every time.
* I have become an other computer user, where I don't have the time and energy to dig into problems. And problems allways arise when you have something urgent to do. I just want a stable desktop, though I really like the quick update cycle of sid.

So, my decision has been made : once Ubuntu Dapper will be released, I will make the switch.

After Kai Hendry 'nuked' his Debian unstable system by a simple upgrade, he decided to put up a wiki page which lists the status of unstable. An interesting page you might consult before upgrading your system. I have had my share of unstable problems too, but after checking the Bug Tracking System I often quickly found a solution. Of course, you could install 'apt-listbugs' too, which will print a summary of all RC-bugs before each upgrade.
Oh yes, I've encountered 3l33t leenuks idiots on IRC too, on both camps (Fedora and Debian), but luckily there are still lots of people willing to help you out.

BJ Dierkes wrote a detailed description about the use of Debian as a base for several kernel-based virtual servers. This requires to build a custom kernel with a special vserver patch applied. When the virtual server is created a new distribution has to be bootstrapped inside.

Since Sun made the source code of Solaris available as OpenSolaris, it has come a long way. Some months ago, some OpenSolaris developpers talked to some of the Ubuntu people, and the consensus was that a Debian based system running on top of the OpenSolaris kernel would be one hell of a system, which is something I wholeheartly confirm.

So, in the next monts, Nexenta was born : a system which tried to glue Debian and OpenSolaris together. However, the Nexenta developers got off to a bit of a bad start by announcing its existence while putting its entire web site behind a password gate. Browsing the source code wasn't the easiest thing also, and there remains the fact of the two different licenses : the Debian code is licensed under the well-known GPL, whereas the OpenSolaris code (kernel and userland binaries linked to the Solaris libc libraries) was licensed under the CDDL. How these two licensed are to be united still remains a problem.

The licensing issues are real, and need to be worked out. But many of the people involved in the debate appear to have lost track of the fact that the Nexenta project, while perhaps being occasionally arrogant and ignorant of how Debian does things, is trying to make a contribution to the free software world. It is a free software project. Anthony Towns has been almost the lone voice in calling for a higher degree of cooperation with Nexenta.

Biella Coleman recently finished her dissertation in Anthropology after studying Free Software communities for most of a decade. It's quite a read and offers a unique insight from a Debian outsider how Open Source communities work and thrive. A very interesting conclusion that has been made is the idea that crises such as the one around the Vancouver prospectus are necessary if painful, but are for the merit of the community. It's a hefty read, difficult and full of antropological jargon, but a very interesting work.

My new firewall is in place at last : as I did not have much time last week, I used half an hour here and there to install and harden the server. I must say that I like the new Debian installer : it took some time to get used to, but the result is nice. I'm quite impressed by the partitioner in the installer : it's quite powerfull, but I'm afraid it will be a bitch for newbies, as it's not really the most user-friendly part of the installation.

The configuration of Shorewall took most time : for some reason, the box refused to masquerade large tcp packets. Browsing went fine, but initiating a ftp request or some nntp traffic would only let some packets drip in. But then I recalled a problem I encountered at work with a new Solaris8 machine and pppoe customers. Pppoe uses a MSS which is quite lower than the default 1500 MTU used on most networks, which can give problems with big packages. Luckily, the Shorewall CLAMPMSS configuration parameter takes care of that.

I noticed that Debian installs some more experimental modules with its default installed 2.4.27 kernel. For pppoe, it uses the pppoe kernel module, which moves pppoe back to kernel space. The performance is quite impressive : whereas my previous firewall CPU would hit the ceiling while downloading large files, the new box doesn't even sweat.

Since the release of Debian 3.1, support for AMD64 has -unofficially- been included. CD and DVD images will be made available on cdimage.debian.org. If you visit packages.debian.org and search for a package you will notice (since a few weeks ago) that it also lists the amd64 versions, including links to download the packages from one of the mirrors. This will continue to work for sarge, but may break for short times while amd64 gets integrated into the main Debian archive. More information can be found on the Debian AMD64 homepage.