I’ve been using the Liquorix kernels on my Debian Squeeze laptop almost since I installed Squeeze in its late-testing phase, and while the GNOME Update Manager doesn’t seem to want to update those kernels from Liquorix, I run Aptitude in a terminal and am able to keep up with the latest kernels.

I’m not exactly sure why Synaptic won’t perform this upgrade. Whenever there’s a new Liquorix kernel in its repository, I get an update icon in my upper GNOME panel (most things on this installation are vanilla Debian). When I run the Update Manager, I get a dialog box asking me whether or not I wish to perform a “safe upgrade.” It seems that whether I answer yes or no, I don’t get the new kernel.

I prefer to update with aptitude anyway, so I run it in the terminal:

$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude upgrade

That brings in the new kernels and updates the GRUB bootloader.

Here is the output of sudo aptitude upgrade:

steven@lenovo:~$ sudo aptitude upgrade
Resolving dependencies...                
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64{a} 
  linux-image-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64{a} 
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64{u} 
The following packages will be upgraded:
  linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64 linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64 
2 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 38.6 MB of archives. After unpacking 128 MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y
Get:1 http://liquorix.net/debian/ sid/main linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 amd64 2.6.37-10 [5,215 kB]
Get:2 http://liquorix.net/debian/ sid/main linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64 amd64 2.6.37-10 [129 kB]
Get:3 http://liquorix.net/debian/ sid/main linux-image-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 amd64 2.6.37-10 [33.1 MB]
Get:4 http://liquorix.net/debian/ sid/main linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64 amd64 2.6.37-10 [129 kB]
Fetched 38.6 MB in 56s (687 kB/s)                                               
Reading changelogs... Done
Preconfiguring packages ...
Selecting previously deselected package linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64.
(Reading database ... 157978 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 (from .../linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64_2.6.37-10_amd64.deb) ...
Preparing to replace linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64 2.6.37-9 (using .../linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64_2.6.37-10_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64 ...
(Reading database ... 169099 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64 ...
Selecting previously deselected package linux-image-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64.
(Reading database ... 157981 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking linux-image-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 (from .../linux-image-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64_2.6.37-10_amd64.deb) ...
Preparing to replace linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64 2.6.37-9 (using .../linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64_2.6.37-10_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64 ...
Setting up linux-headers-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 (2.6.37-10) ...
Setting up linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64 (2.6.37-10) ...
Setting up linux-image-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 (2.6.37-10) ...
Running depmod.
Running update-initramfs.
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
Examining /etc/kernel/postinst.d.
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools 2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/pm-utils 2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/update-notifier 2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-grub 2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64 /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found background image: /usr/share/images/desktop-base/desktop-grub.png
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.37-1.dmz.2-liquorix-amd64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-1.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.37-1.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-0.dmz.7-liquorix-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.37-0.dmz.7-liquorix-amd64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-0.dmz.6-liquorix-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.37-0.dmz.6-liquorix-amd64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64
Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda1
done
Setting up linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64 (2.6.37-10) ...

Current status: 0 updates [-2], 906 new [-1].
steven@lenovo:~$

I’m not the type to run off-distro kernels. While it’s generally not something I’m comfortable with, Liquorix packages these kernels specifically for Debian and optimizes them for desktop use. I have never had a problem.

The reason I’m using Liquorix kernels is that my hardware runs better on the 2.6.37 Linux kernel than it does on the stock 2.6.32 kernel that ships with Debian.

The big difference (and the only one that matters to me) is that the weak sound module (Conexant 5069) in my Lenovo G555 laptop. With the ALSA 1.0.23 driver (many distros ship 1.0.23 ALSA with the 1.0.21 driver in the kernel), I’ve been able to plug in headphones, get audio through them and have the speakers mute. Sounds like a given, but on some distros with the 1.0.23 ALSA driver I can do this with a configuration-file change. In Debian with 2.6.37, this works out of the box.

I’m not crazy about new kernels every few days (or even every few weeks if it’s not absolutely necessary), and I hope to try the Debian Sid kernel when it finally goes past 2.6.32.

But the whole idea of running Debian Stable, in which the apps aren’t yet completely ancient with selected newer bits like the kernel and maybe a few packages from Debian Backports (web browsers and such) is very appealing to me due to the fact that Squeeze is working well on my hardware and for my workflow.

It’s by no means a production system, but I still maintain and occasionally use a 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop that I purchased as quasi-surplus when I was just starting to explore Linux and BSD in 2007 or ‘08.

I paid , and hence the machine became known as The Laptop. I spent an additional for a CD drive (and I’d like to spend on an extra hard-drive caddy — the thing’s built like a tank; a plastic tank, but a tank nonetheless).

The Compaq still has its original 3 GB hard drive (I think it’s an IBM drive, but it’s been so long since I’ve had it out of the case, I can’t remember).

The machine came to me with 64 GB of RAM. I boosted it to the maximum, which is a whopping 144 MB. The Pentium II MMX processor running at 233 MHz isn’t as bad as you’d think.

The machine has provided fodder for at least 50 blog entries, including a long series on which OS to run on it. I can’t remember if OpenBSD or Debian won at that time, but over the years it’s spent considerable time running Puppy Linux as well.

For at least a year I’ve had Debian Lenny on it. Since it’s a slow, memory- and disk-space-limited machine, I didn’t install the default GNOME desktop and all that comes along with it. I instead began with the “standard” install, then added X, the Xfce desktop (I could’ve gone with Xfce or Fvwm2, but I prefer Xfce …) and a very few (and select) applications: MtPaint for image editing, Geany for text editing, Opera for web browsing (although I added the much-slower Iceweasel/Firefox at some point), gFTP as the FTP client, and not much else.

I’ve actually installed the “full” Xfce desktop set of packages on it before, and there was enough room for OpenOffice. OO actually ran passably well on this old “kit,” as they say across the Atlantic. Not tolerably enough for regular use, but OK in a pinch as we say over here (and probably over there).

But it’s been a minimal Debian Lenny for a long time. Aside from a relative lightness that enables you to do more with the hardware than many systems (Ubuntu and Xubuntu wouldn’t even boot, let alone install), the length of support that Debian releases enjoy — lately two years as Stable and an additional year as Old Stable — makes it easy to “set it and forget it.”

And that’s what I’ve done.

But now that Squeeze is Stable, I felt it was time to give an in-place upgrade a try. And I wanted it to work, unlike my hasty and non-successful Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade attempt last year, well before the Release Notes I used earlier this week were there to save me.

(This entry continues months later … June 28, 2011 to be exact)

I meant to finish this entry at the time, and since then I’ve done the upgrade, fiddled with the machine a bit, but have no idea where my notes went (or if I made any). Notes are a great idea when doing upgrades. My Linux guru Carla Schroder swears by them.

The reason this was a (mostly) successful upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze was that I used the Release Notes and did all the required preparation that resulted in apt-get dist-upgrade actually working.

The only problem I’m having with the upgraded laptop is that Grub2 isn’t working. Luckily the way Debian does the upgrade, Grub1 (aka Grub Legacy) chainloads to Grub2, and if Grub2 doesn’t work, you don’t have a dead system.

In the intervening time, I haven’t been able to get Grub2 to find the kernel. I’m not sure what’s wrong, but since I still have Grub1, the system continues to run.

If I haven’t misplaced it in recent weeks, I have a 20 GB hard drive floating around here somewhere that I could swap into the Compaq Armada 7770dmt to do a clean Debian Squeeze install to see if Grub2 works when it’s not an upgrade.

Debian Squeeze includes OpenOffice 3.2.1, which runs pretty well, I might add. But the buzz in the open-source world is all about LibreOffice, the fork of OO by developers less than happy with Oracle’s treatment of the open-source community.

But Squeeze is now Stable, and it offers OO 3.2.1. What if you want to try LibreOffice 3.3.x?

Well, according to this bug report, it looks like plans are in the works to bring LibreOffice to Debian Backports, where it will be packaged for Squeeze.

When you run Debian Stable, you get used to updates to the system being few and far between.

While there is certainly some truth to the open-source OS adage that bugs related to functionality (and not security) at release tend to stay unpatched, the emphasis in Debian on releasing when ready means there are theoretically (and practically) fewer broken pieces in the system and not as much need to push updates for non-security-related issues.

So a Stable installation of Debian doesn’t have the Update Manager (or apt or Aptitude) working all that hard.

While it might be boring (and make many geeks itchy for the kind of constant updates that many systems push to users), it’s also efficient. If you’ve set up the system the way you want it, then tested everything and are satisfied that things work the way you expect, a stable, boring Stable release can really boost your productivity.

Chances are, what’s not broken won’t break — and certainly won’t be broken with an update from Debian.

It’s not the cutting edge, the bleeding edge, the leading edge, but a comfortable, conservative build with nothing broken — for the most part.

Key to choosing any distro/project release of an operating system is whether or not it runs well on your hardware and performs your tasks the way you like and expect. If you have a favorite OS/environment in a general sense, I’d say be flexible — a different hunk of hardware might not respond so well, and the version of a particular software package in a given release might not work as well as a newer (or even an older) version.

Many, if not most application developers tend to fix bugs and then release a new version. They don’t backport those fixes to the versions in a given Debian or Ubuntu release. That’s where things like Backports (in Debian) PPAs (in Ubuntu) and what I remember being called “development” builds in Fedora can come in handy. If you really rely on a particular application, finding a newer (or older) version in a different repository, or with a .deb or .rpm package, or even building it yourself from source (or a port in BSD) can make a given OS installation work better for you.

In my case, that “holy grail” app is gThumb, the image organizer/editor. Fedora was a great place to run gThumb because the newest versions were always being pushed via the package manager if the “development” version was installed.

In my case, the gThumb version in vanilla Debian Squeeze does everything I need it to do. Same for OpenOffice and the dozen or so other applications that I rely on day to day.

But I’m not above using Debian Backports, pulling from Sid, or grabbing a .deb or the source to keep my workflow, uh, flowing.

As I’ve written way too many times, while I do have the stock 2.6.32 Linux kernel installed on my Squeeze laptop, I’ve been running the Liquorix 2.6.37 kernel for about a month, and I expect I’ll soon be seeing the 2.6.38 kernel (with the much-heralded 200-line patch that’s supposed to make everything faster and better).

I also plan to follow the newer kernels in Debian Backports; while Liquorix has been great, I feel better running as much out of the Debian repositories as possible (and I consider Debian Multimedia, which I use heavily, to be “official” enough).

I remember writing about the novelty of the Debian Live Project’s inclusion of PowerPC among the architectures for which it was producing Squeeze alpha images.

If you look at the Debian Live releases page and click through the links. You’ll see that live images for the PowerPC architecture were made for 6.0 Alpha 1 and Alpha 2. But the betas, the release candidates and the final release are i386 and amd64 only.

What happened? I praised Debian Live for taking care of PowerPC users in a way that most other distributions do not. These days you can’t even get an “official” Ubuntu ISO for PowerPC. Fedora dropped PowerPC, too. In my tests, Debian was always the best distribution for older PowerPC machines anyway, and the project still supports the architecture with installers.

But the live images were something else. It’s great to be able to “audition” a live image before committing to a full installation.

At this point, it looks like PowerPC users can’t do that anymore.

Comments from the original FlatPress post

Jeroen Diederen Wednesday, February 9, 2011 - 16:35:16

I have tried several times to get support for powerpc Debian live. I always got the answer that he (Daniel Baumann) was on holidays. Never heard of it ever since. I guess you cannot stay in your holidays forever… This project is as dead as dead can be. In Debian Squeeze you cannot even get the easiest live cd made for PPC using the scripts. That’s the reason you don’t see those images. It’s sad, but there is no active support anymore.

steven Wednesday, February 9, 2011 - 19:07:01

The fact that they had PowerPC support for the live images was so novel, I hardly could believe that they did it in the first place. At least with the Alpha images you can see how your PowerPC system responds to Debian Squeeze before deciding whether or not to install from the non-live (but up-to-date) PowerPC ISOs. I’ve written many times - I ran a G4 on Debian Etch for awhile, and it was a very nice OS for the hardware.

Kyle Reynolds Conway Thursday, February 10, 2011 - 19:06:23

So is Etch the thing to run on an ailing PPC Mac Mini? Live images really do ease the nerves though.

klhrevolution Thursday, February 10, 2011 - 19:32:25

While it would be nice I’m grateful for what we’ve got as this release is going well on the old eMac. Hopefully powerpc can be supported for years to come and if a live-image is spit out every now and again then even better.

steven Thursday, February 10, 2011 - 20:05:56

Don’t worry so much about the live image. I would just do an installation of Squeeze. Debian itself still supports PowerPC - and very well, too. It’s just the live images that aren’t available for the final release. The reason I’ve been keeping an eye on the Debian Live project is that I thought it novel that they were introducing a PowerPC live image just as everybody else was dropping PowerPC entirely (Ubuntu, Fedora).

I definitely encourage all PowerPC users to try the Alpha 2 image for Squeeze, or just jump right in and do an installation from the regular ISO.

Etch was great on my G4, and I think Squeeze should be just as good. I let the G4 go months ago, so I don’t have anything at the moment on which I’d run a Linux distro. I’m pretty much sticking to i386/amd64 these days.

zoobab Tuesday, February 15, 2011 - 13:50:11

Debian developers still do not understand that users wants livecds, not debian-installer where you have to click 200 times to get your installation done. Kyle Reynolds Conway

Thursday, March 10, 2011 - 14:01:36

Sort of an update — I installed squeeze onto my ppc macmini to great success. The only two problems I’ve noticed is that wireless doesn’t work out of the box (any suggestions there?) and that bluetooth acts very strange indeed (recognizing devices and even setting them up… but then they don’t work at all). Can’t say I’m displeased though. Much happier than I was with the sluggish, no longer upgradable and increasingly obsolete mac os on that machine. Thanks for the help!

steven Thursday, March 10, 2011 - 20:45:05

Here’s my suggestion for wireless: Add the non-free repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list.

Try to figure out what kind of wireless card the computer is using. Add the firmware for that. It could be Broadcom http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/broadcom-sta-common …

You could also add the firmware-linux-nonfree package http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/firmware-linux-nonfree, which enabled my ATI video chip to use DRI and hence make suspend/resume work.

If you do a little bit of searching, I’m pretty sure you can get the proper firmware or driver to make wireless work.

Suspend/resume. Or in words that non-geeks can understand, sleeping/waking up. It’s one of those things that not just Linux but also BSD and even Windows have been trying to get right for years.

It’s all about standards and drivers, which tend to be non-standard and poorly functioning in a given software environment.

I’ve never had a machine that I’ve used for my day-to-day computing that suspended and resumed properly in Linux. The Lenovo G555 (purchased early 2010) seems to do well with suspend/resume in Windows 7.

And our aging iBook G4 (2003-ish) does suspend/resume like a champ. That’s how it is with Apple’s OS X and their tight control over the hardware on which their software runs. That’s the holy grail for me; suspend/resume is fast, it always works, the network is back up within a couple of seconds.

Even OpenBSD is working on suspend/resume via the ACPI system in most computers these days. I have yet to try OpenBSD 4.8, in which this feature has received a whole lot of work.

But Linux? I haven’t had a whole lot of luck. Not with my Gateway Solo 1450 (now the 7-year-old’s laptop), the Toshiba 1100-S101, or the Lenovo G555. One reason I bought the Lenovo (the main reason being a nexus of “cheap” and “Lenovo”) was that I hoped it would benefit from the connection to Thinkpads of yore, which are traditionally well-supported by free, open-source operating systems.

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Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier writes a timely and thoughtful article on “Why Debian Matters More Than Ever” to coincide with the release of Squeeze as the Debian Project’s stable release.

It is well worth reading.

A couple of tidbits:

Yes, Ubuntu has appealed to a wider audience than Debian ever did — but it was Debian that inspired Mark Shuttleworth in the first place to create Ubuntu. As Brian Eno once said of The Velvet Underground’s debut album, “Only five thousand people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every single one of them started a band.” Likewise, Debian may enjoy a small percentage of the Linux market, but it’s inspired one hell of a lot of people to start their own distribution. … Debian’s most important contribution to the Linux community may be simply that it’s not controlled by a corporate entity. If 2010 taught us anything, it’s that having a single corporate sponsor can lead to a lot of uncertainty at best and total disruption at worst.

If your idea of microblogging isn’t limited to Facebook and Twitter, Identi.ca includes a “group” membership mechanism through which you can more easily follow the kinds of notices that interest you than is possible on Twitter.

Once you join a group, all of the Identi.ca posts that include that group’s identifying tag, a word with an exclamation point before it — as in !Debian, will be included in your regular Identi.ca stream. It’s a great way to both read posts that interest you and to discover other people to follow who you might not have otherwise known about.

By the way, I have Identi.ca feeding Twitter (you can’t do it the other way around), so I’m on both services. It’s complicated enough that I have one source of news feeding Ping.fm, which in turn feeds Twitter, and then Identi.ca and Facebook.

But I use Identi.ca more than any of the others: It’s full of open-source-friendly people.

To see what Debian people are talking about on identi.ca, look at http://identi.ca/group/debian.

All you need to do, once you’re on identi.ca, is put a “bang” (or exclamation point, if you will) in front of the word that names your group.

Like this: !Debian

Word that the copyright/trademark issues that have had Debian renaming Firefox as Iceweasel might be resolved means that some day new users won’t be confused by a lack of Firefox and Thunderbird and the substitution of Iceweasel and Icedove (not to mention Iceape, Iceowl and whatever others I can’t remember).

I distinctly remember being puzzled when I ran my first Linux live CD, Knoppix, in late 2006. It took me a while before I figured out that Iceweasel looked and acted just like Firefox ...

Now that this blog is running on Universal Time, I’m pretty sure that while it’s still Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011 in my particular time zone (Pacific), Monday has already been reached in UTC, and Debian Squeeze is now in its second day of being the Debian Project’s stable release.

And along with a “new” release, which many of us have been enjoying as Debian’s Testing distribution over the past months, there is also a brand new Debian web site. Even Planet Debian looks “refreshed.”

The best way to keep up with Debian news is via the project’s many mailing lists, a bunch of which I’ve been following of late. When that information is meant for the widest possible audience, it generally appears as part of the latest official news from the Debian Project.

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