Linux

There was a small firestorm last year when people realized that Asus was not releasing source code to GPL'd components of the EeePC. At the time, they eventually did post source code on their website.

Recently I bought an Eee 901. Asus has modified the kernel's ACPI driver. They released the source code to that on an 8G surf model, but the 901 has additional hardware features in the ACPI space (bluetooth radio power toggle, for instance) that are not in the source they released back then. There are no sources released at all under the 901 section of their website.

Anyone know whom to contact at Asus about this?

I've had a problem with recent kernels. (I think it's the kernel that's doing this.) When my workstation is doing heavy I/O, it repeats keystrokes. For instance, while I was typing this paragraph, audacity was writing audio to disk, and I got this word:

heavvvvvvvvvvvy

It seems as if it thinks I haven't let up on the keys.

I've seen this on two different machines and it seems to have started with 2.6.24 or 2.6.25.

Has anyone else seen this? Any ideas where I'd go to fix it? Incidentally, I'm in X when this happens. I don't use the console much when there would be a chance for it to happen.

This is such a weird problem I've struck out googling, and I'm not even sure which mailing list to take it to.

Later this month, I will be giving a talk at OSCon about Linux on the corporate desktop -- something we have done where I work. I've been alloted a 45-minute timeslot. I will, of course, be posting my slides online and I think OSCon also posts videos of these things.

I'm wondering if readers of my blog would like to leave me some comments on what you'd like to see. What would you like to know about Linux on the corporate desktop? Is there anything that you'd like to make sure I discuss?

Every so often, I come across some utility that need. I think it must have been written before, but I can't find it.

Today I needed a tool to take a set of files and split them up into directories in a size that will fit on DVDs. I wanted a tool that could either produce the minimum number of DVDs, or keep the files in order. I couldn't find one. So I wrote datapacker.

datapacker is a tool to group files by size. It is perhaps most often used to fit a set of files onto the minimum number of CDs or DVDs.

datapacker is designed to group files such that they fill fixed-size containers (called "bins") using the minimum number of containers. This is useful, for instance, if you want to archive a number of files to CD or DVD, and want to organize them such that you use the minimum possible number of CDs or DVDs.

In many cases, datapacker executes almost instantaneously. Of particular note, the hardlink action can be used to effectively copy data into bins without having to actually copy the data at all.

datapacker is a tool in the traditional Unix style; it can be used in pipes and call other tools.

I have, of course, uploaded it to sid. But while it sits in NEW, you can download the source tarball (with debian/ directory) from the project homepage at http://software.complete.org/datapacker. I've also got an HTML version of the manpage online, so you can see all the cool features of datapacker. It works nicely with find, xargs, mkisofs, and any other Unixy pipe-friendly program.

Those of you that know me will not be surprised that I wrote datapacker in Haskell. For this project, I added a bin-packing module and support for parsing inputs like 1.5g to MissingH. So everyone else that needs to do that sort of thing can now use library functions for it.

Update... I should have mentioned the really cool thing about this. After datapacker compiled and ran, I had only one mistake that was not caught by the Haskell compiler: I said < where I should have said <= one place. This is one of the very nice things about Haskell: the language lends itself to compilers that can catch so much. It's not that I'm a perfect programmer, just that my compiler is pretty crafty.

I had been intending to write an entire series of posts about our corporate switch to Linux on the Desktop. To date, I wrote only one introducing the project and our reasons for switching from Windows. That was back in April.

Today I'd like to start talking about it all some more.

We have standardized on Gnome for our desktops. Given the Windows background of our user base, it was pretty much a given that we would have to use either Gnome or KDE. Something like fvwm or a non-integrated environment just wouldn't be a good option.

We evaluated both Gnome and KDE. The very "clean" appearance of Gnome was a nice thing for us. KDE seemed to be to "chatty", talked about entering in audiocd:/ when it shouldn't have needed to, and generally violated the KISS and principle of least surprise too often. That said, I continue to run KDE for my personal desktop because Gnome just doesn't have the flexibility that KDE does. It is too bad that Gnome has gone on this remove functionality kick, and KDE hasn't gotten the KISS religion yet.

Anyway, Gnome worked well for the most part. We have set some defaults in gconf for things like panel icons. We also set a few mandatory defaults. I fixed a couple of bugs in the vfs system related to nfs4 support, which manifested themselves as icons for files newly saved to the desktop never showing up.

We wanted to present a customized menu to people based on what their job function is. That is, we are using a single system image, so all apps will be installed on all machines. But we didn't want people to have to see a ton of software that they don't use. That was easily enough accomplished for custom apps by creating desktop files with mode 0640 and setting the group to the set of people that should see the program on their menu. We removed a few stock programs (such as the terminal) from the menu as well, using dpkg-statoverride. That was also quite easily done. However, I will say that the entire Gnome XDG menu thing is woefully under-documented.

We use Firefox for the standard web browser. It is integrated well enough with Gnome and we have no problems there, aside from sites that are IE-only. We solve that with a Windows terminal server, which I'll discuss later.

Our network printing was already based on Cups. The individual machines are set up as Cups clients only, which works fine. We did find, however, that gnome-cups-manager automatically installs a tray monitor for cups. This monitor puts little printer icons on the tray when printers are in use. Unfortunately, it figures out which printers are in use by polling the server, and it is turned on by default out of the box, with no good way to disable it short of dpkg-statoverriding it to 0000. You can imagine that hundreds of users times dozens of printers times numerous polls per minute created quite the load on the server. This was a really braindead design and the people that wrote it should have known better. It is also quite useless to have icons coming on for all the printers on the network, which on some networks could be thousands, and not even on the same continent as the user.

Printing is generally a bit iffy in Gnome. They seem to be transitioning between about 3 different printing toolkits, all of which have different print dialog boxes with different supported features and different ways of selecting printers. One chief annoyance is that the print box in evince (the document/PDF viewer) does not let people access printer-specific features such as hole punching and stapling. So we installed gtklp and xpdf for people. The people that print heavy PDFs are huge fans of gtklp these days; it's a nicer solution than we had in Windows. Nobody really likes evince. We also have had some trouble with evince generating PostScript output that some printers can't grok. It sounds like all this should be much better in newer versions of Gnome, which if true, would be welcome news.

The Gnome screenshot tool makes it easy to save off a screenshot to a file, or to drag it into an email, but it is difficult to print it (you have to save it first). That was a common complaint around here, so I wrote a little wrapper around xwd and gtklp for printing screenshots. People really like that because gtklp gives them lots of options about orientation and size of the image if they want it, or a simple "Print" button to click if they don't care. We set a gconf default to bind this to Ctrl-PrintScr and it works well. KDE's screenshot tool is much more capable, and if we were using KDE, we wouldn't have had any problem with screenshots.

The bottom line on Gnome is that we, and are users, are happy with it after we've made these customizations. But we have had to do more customization that we should have. I still think that Gnome has been better for our users than KDE, but I do wonder how long we'll be able to survive with our "no KDE libraries" policy, as people want ksnapshot, kolour, etc.

Something I often hear from people that talk about Linux on the desktop is this: people want to be able to go to the store, buy hardware, and be confident that it will Just Work.

I would like to point out that things are rarely this simple on Windows. And, in fact, things are often simpler on Linux these days.

Here's the example that prompted this post.

I have a computer that's about 4 years old. It's my main desktop machine at home. It was still fast enough for me, but has been developing all sorts of weird behaviors. Certain USB ports stopped working altogether a few months ago. Then it started hanging during POST whenever I'd try to reboot -- but would still boot OK about 80% of the time after a power cycle. Then it started randomly losing contact with my USB mouse until a reboot. And the last straw was when the display started randomly going out. I've told everyone that my machine has cancer and is slowly dying.

The case is a pretty nice full tower -- solid and sturdy. I have an 160GB IDE drive in it. So I figured I will upgrade the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and add a 500GB SATA drive since they're so cheap these days and I'm running out of space. I'd also have to buy a new video card since my old one was AGP and the new motherboard only has PCI Express for video. So about $700 later from Newegg (I got a Core 2 Duo E6750), the parts arrived.

I spent some time installing it all. The motherboard had only one IDE channel, and I didn't have any IDE cable long enough to connect both the IDE hard disk and the optical drive, so I popped in an old Maxtor/Promise PCI Ultra133 controller I had sitting around to use with the DVD burner.

Now, to recap, the hardware that the OS would see as new/different is: CPU, RAM, IDE controller, SATA controller, Promise IDE controller, integrated NIC, sound, video.

Then the magic smoke test.

I turned on the machine. Grub appeared. Linux started booting.

Even though I had switched from the default Debian "supports everything" kernel to a K7 kernel, it still booted.

And every single piece of hardware was supported immediately. There was no "add new hardware" wizard that popped up, no "I've found new hardware" boxes. It just worked, silently, with no need to tell me anything or have me click on anything.

Only one piece required configuration: the NIC, thanks to some udev design flaws (it got renamed from eth0 to eth1 by udev). That took 20 seconds. Debian saw the IDE HDD, the SATA drive, the Promise controller, the DVD burner, the video card, the sound, and it all worked automatically. And Debian is not even a distro that occurs to a lot of people when they think of great hardware support.

Now let's turn to Windows.

The Windows Nightmare

I have a legal copy of Windows XP Home that was preinstalled on the machine when I got it. I resized its partition down to about 20GB so that I could use 140GB for Linux. I use it rarely, primarily for gaming, and I've bought about 3 games in the last 4 years. I usually disconnect the network when I boot to Windows, though I do keep it current with updates.

I did some research on what Windows was going to do when I replace the hardware. The general consensus from people on the 'net is that you can't just replace a motherboard and expect everything to be happy. There were generally three different approaches suggested: 1) don't even try, just reinstall; 2) do a rescue install after you move over; and 3) use sysprep. The rescue install has to be done by booting from an XP install CD, then picking a rescue install option somewhere. It will overwrite your installed Windows with the version from the CD. That means that I'd have to re-apply SP2, though bits of it that didn't get overwritten would still be on the hard disk, and who knows what would happen to the registry.

Option #3 was to download sysprep (must have the Genuine Disadvantage ActiveX to get the free download from MS). Sysprep is designed to be used just prior to taking an image with ghost for replication. It removes the hardware-specific config (but not the drivers), as well as the product key, from the machine, but otherwise leaves it untouched. On the next boot, you get the "Welcome to XP" wizard.

One other strike against #2 is that Compaq "helpfully" didn't ship any install CDs with the machine. Under Windows, they did have a "create rescue CD" tool, which burned 7 CDs for me. But they are full Compaq-specific CDs, not one of them an XP CD, *AND* they check on boot to see if you're using the same Compaq motherboard, and exit if not. Highly useless.

So I went with sysprep. Before my new hardware even arrived, I downloaded the Windows drivers for all of it. I burned them to a CD, and installed as many as I could on the system in advance. About half of them refused to install since the new hardware wasn't there yet. I then took a raw image of the partition with dd, just in case. Finally, right before I swapped the hardware, I ran sysprep and let it shut down the machine.

So after the new hardware was installed came the adventure.

Windows booted to the "welcome to XP" thingy. The video, keyboard, mouse, and IDE HDD worked. That's about it.

I went through the "welcome to XP wizard". But the network didn't work yet, so I couldn't activate it. So I popped my handy driver CD in the drive. But what's this? Windows doesn't recognize the DVD drive because it doesn't have drivers for this Promise controller that came out in, what, 2001? Sigh. Downloaded the drivers with the imac, copy them to a CF card, plug the USB CF reader into Windows.

While I was doing that, about 6 "found new hardware" dialogs got queued up. Not one of them could actually find a driver for my hardware, but that didn't prevent Windows from making me click through them all.

So, install Promise driver from CF card, reboot. Click through new hardware dialogs again. Install network driver, reboot, click through dialogs. Install sound driver. Install Intel "chipset" driver, click through dialogs. Reboot. Install SATA driver. Reboot.

So the hardware appears to all be working by this point, though I have a Creative volume control (from the old hardware) and a Realtek one in the tray. Minor annoyance to deal with later.

Now I have to re-activate XP. I dutifully key in the magic string from the sticker on my case. Surprise surprise, the Internet-based activation fails because my hardware is different. So I have to call the 800 number. I have to read in 7 blocks of 6 digits, one block at a time. Then I answer some questions: have I activated Windows before, have I changed hardware, was the old hardware defective (yes, yes, and yes). Then I get 7 blocks of 6 digits read to me. Finally Windows is activated. PHEW! Why they couldn't ask those questions with the online tool is beyond me.

Anyhow. Linux took me 20 seconds to get working. Windows, about 2 hours, plus another 2 hours for prep and research.

I did zero prep for Linux. I made one config change (GUI users could have just configured their machine to use eth1).

Other cool Linux HW features

Say you buy a new printer and want to get it set up. On Windows, you insert the CD, let it install 200MB of print drivers plus ads plus crap plus add something to your taskbar plus who knows what else. Probably reboot. Then the printer might actually print.

On Debian, you plug in the printer to the USB port. You type printconf. 5 seconds later, your printer works.

I have been unpleasantly surprised lately by just how difficult hardware support in Windows really is, especially since everyone keeps saying how good it is. It's not good. Debian's is better, in my opinion.

Matthew Garrett

A lot of background on the state of laptop support in Linux. It worked reasonably well in the 90s, but with the migration to ACPI, has become much more complicated and less reliable in general, especially with suspend/resume and video.

Emporer Linux and System 76 produce Linux supported laptops.

I wanted some more in-depth technical information and found Matthew later on at the Intel booth. Here's what I learned:

s2ram is little more than a wrapper around standard ACPI sleep that has options to do video mode save/restore

I asked him about all the many, many different userland laptop management tools. He recommends simple acpi-utils with the ondemand governor. laptop-mode-tools tries to do way too much, and there is little point to using a userland governor anymore.

I've been having a problem with my MacBook Pro (Core Duo) hanging on suspend about 10% of the time. I explained the symptoms and asked him how to go about debugging it. He suggested disabling console suspend and enabling PM debug in the kernel. I will give that a try and see what I get.

Here's how you use a Sierra Wireless 595U USB modem to connect to wireless Internet service with Sprint:

Insert the modem into the USB slot. lsusb should show:

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1199:0120 Sierra Wireless, Inc.

rmmod usbserial

Then:

modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1199 product=0x0120

You should see /dev/ttyUSB0, ttyUSB1, and ttyUSB2 appear. See also instructions for automating this with a similar card (modify vendor and product to above settings).

Now you will need to configure PPP for this. On Debian, run pppconfig. Your settings will be:

Phone number: #777
Username: 1234567890@sprintpcs.com (replace 1234567890 with your data card's "phone number", no dashes)
Password: your sprint password
Speed (BPS): 921600 (use lower numbers such as 115200 if you have trouble with this)
Port: /dev/ttyUSB0
Init string: ATZ

Here are some other helpful pages:

Verizon EVDO
Sprint and Linux
Cingular AT&T UMTS
Sierra's Linux page

At work, we use Linux (and Debian, in specific) for a lot of different things: everything from our phone system (running on Asterisk) to file serving and running some proprietary applications. I'm one of the people that finds, sets up, and maintains these systems, and I write code for our in-house use as well. I like to learn from others, and get to know others that may have things in common with me and with our environment. So going to conferences is a useful thing to do.

I'm hoping that some reader out there will have a good suggestion for a conference I ought to attend. Here are some that I've looked into and my thoughts on them:

• Usenix Annual Tech Conference: I went last year. There were some very good talks, but the audience size was not all that large. I got to meet some peers there, but I didn't get to talk in-person to anybody I'd worked with online before. (LISA being in fall/winter means it's too early to consider it just yet)
• LinuxWorld Conference & Expo: My general impression of LWCE in the past has been that its technical talks aren't very technical; that is, they either cover things I already know or don't care about. They are starting to publish their program this year, and I see a few interesting things though. There have traditionally been a lot of Debian folks at the .org pavillion.
• Debconf: It seems to be focused almost exclusively on developing the Debian operating system, rather than on using it. While I am a Debian developer and have been for quite awhile, I would find new uses of Debian to be more interesting than new ways to hack on Debian. Plus, the insanely early registration requirements means that it's too late to go this year anyhow. (And my brother is getting married right in the middle of it.)
• OSCon: There look to be some interesting talks in the database area, and some about Xen and virtualization, and Simon PJ (one of the ghc hackers) will be there. So this would be interesting, though somewhat light on the admin side of things.
• OLS: Seems very focused on the kernel, and not much else. That is of interest, of course, but is one piece of many. Though there was a talk about Linux deployment at Nortel that sounded interesting.

My leading candidates are probably Usenix and OSCon. I'm interested to hear what people think, especially those that have attended some of these conferences.

Yesterday afternoon, we started our information meetings with employees about our Linux on the desktop project. We're underway on our migration.

But before I talk about that, I need to back up and describe what the project is.

We are converting approximately 80% of our 150 or so PC users to Linux desktops. They're Debian etch (4.0) running Gnome, Firefox (Iceweasel), Evolution, NFSv4, and SystemImager. Over the coming days and weeks, I'll be writing about why we're doing this, how we're making it happen, things we've run into along the way, and the technology behind it.

Today I'd like to start with a high-level overview of the reasons we started investigating this option.

It became apparent that Vista was going to be a problem for us. Most of our desktop PCs are not very old, but Vista meant a significant degradation in performance from the Windows XP Pro that most people were running. A performance dip so significant, in fact, that it would have created a significant negative impact on employee productivity.

We tend to buy PCs with Windows licenses from the vendor (Windows preinstalled). As such, we knew it wouldn't be long before XP-based machines would be hard to find. If we stuck with Windows, we'd be running a mixed-OS network -- which we knew from experience we did NOT want to do. The other option would be to replace all those old PCs. The direct costs of doing that, with the associated Vista and Office licenses, would have been more than $200,000.

So we started to look at other options -- changing the way we license Windows, sticking with XP for awhile, or switching away from Windows. This last option sounded the most promising.

I took a spare desktop-class machine, representative of the hardware most end users would have, and installed etch (then testing) on it. I spent a bit of time tweaking the desktop settings, making things as transparent to the user as possible. We liked what we saw and started pursuing it a bit more. We knew we had some Windows apps we couldn't discard, so we tested running them off a Windows terminal server with the Linux rdesktop client. That worked well -- and the appropriate Server 2003 licenses plus CALs would still be far cheaper than a mass migration to Vista.

To make a long story short, we are getting quite a few benefits out of all this. One of the most important is a single unified system image. Excepting a few files like /etc/fstab, every system gets a bit-for-bit identical installation from the server, updated using rsync. /home is mounted from the network using NFS (v4). So our users can sit down at any PC, log in, and have all their programs, settings, email, etc. available. A side benefit is that hardware problems become minor annoyances rather than major inconveniences; if your hard disk dies, we can just bring up a different PC. We had tried numerous times to make roaming profiles work in Windows, but never really achieved a reliable setup there -- perhaps because it seemed virtually impossible to assure that each Windows PC had the exact same set of software, in the exact same versions, installed.

More to come.