Tag Archives: Debian

Upgrades Galore

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I fitted my new SSD to my fileserver yesterday as it was a rainy Sunday afternoon. Oddly enough the new 2.5″-to-3.5″ drive rails I got don’t fit in a floppy bay – well they do but the screw holes won’t line up, so I fitted it in my one remaining hard disk bay.

Anyway I was surprised how quickly I replaced the Ubuntu 9.10 setup with Debian 6.0.3 without losing any functionality. I decided to stick to Squeeze+Backports as Wheezy like on my desktop machine is way too much maintenance for a fileserver – I can’t cope with the “apt-get upgrade” fear! ;-)

Speaking of backports, to replace OpenOffice.org with LibreOffice, you need to run this and answer “yes” to the dependency questions:

apt-get -t squeeze-backports install libreoffice libreoffice-gtk

Anyway the main thing I was worrying about – the printer/scanner was truly plug’n'play – I turned it on to do some scanning and CUPS automatically configured the printer part, and SANE just worked. None of the Epkowa (iscan+pips) Epson proprietary crap required.

I encrypted the boot drive using LUKS+LVM so I only need to enter the passphrase once, that seemed a lot easier than when I installed Wheezy and did multiple partitions.

I copied across the fstab and /etc/exports and all the various disks mounted and shared over NFS to the Mac seamlessly. I literally rebuilt the fileserver in two hours! Plus now it is all encrypted I can use it as a backup desktop machine for work.

Next up was the Mac Mini, currently running Leopard 10.5.8, I decided for £21 I might as well upgrade to Lion 10.7.2 as I already have 2Gb RAM and a Core2Duo, and apparently the new version of Plex doesn’t work on 10.5

Luckily I had a Snow Leopard 10.6.8 install in a virtual machine, so I bought Lion via the App Store (basically iTunes) using that. Wow the App Store is crap – I had to sign in about 6 times, I guess they’ve not heard of sessions at Apple.

I then used these instructions to create a bootable USB disk to do a fresh install of Lion – all within VirtualBox.

I’m actually dual booting Leopard and Lion using these instructions. Shrinking the disk so I could add a partition in the free space took the longest, installation was about 25mins. I’m glad I did it actually as although Lion runs fine (except it doesn’t like etherwake) the latest Plex 0.9.5.1 is rubbish, so I’m booting Leopard and Plex 0.9.3.4 at the moment.

PulseAudio on Debian 7

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Well I finally got fed up of crackling audio and gnome-volume-control-applet crashing, so decided to install PulseAudio on my Wheezy system.

I mostly copied from these instructions, which was basically:

apt-get install pulseaudio libao4 paprefs libpulse-mainloop-glib0 \
pulseaudio-module-jack pavucontrol pulseaudio-module-x11 \
gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils libasound2-plugins \
paman pulseaudio-module-gconf libgconfmm-2.6-1c2 libpulse-browse0 \
pavumeter libglademm-2.4-1c2a pulseaudio-esound-compat libpulse0 \
libpulse-dev pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat \
pulseaudio-module-gconf  pulseaudio-module-x11  \
pulseaudio-utils lib32asound2 lib32asound2-plugins  ia32-libs-gtk 
 
usermod  -a -G pulse,pulse-access username

Then create a basic /etc/asound.conf

pcm.pulse {
    type pulse
}
 
ctl.pulse {
    type pulse
}
 
pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}
 
ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}

That was about it. I rebooted back to 2.6.39 as I had my suspicions that its general bad behaviour before was due to it not liking ALSA, and I was right – it plays fine with PulseAudio. All of the startup daemons and applications were already setup and I removed the old mixer applet from the Gnome Panel.

Hey presto, Skype worked first time, VirtualBox is more portable with PulseAudio (I can use the same config on my Fedora box) and Flash doesn’t crackle anymore. I’ll see if UrbanTerror performance has improved in a minute.

I noticed microphone volume was lower than with Fedora, which generally liked input to be about 40%, on Wheezy 100% is pretty quiet (128% seems loud though).

My old command for muting the monitor’s speakers and running everything through my headset still works too:

amixer -c0 -q set Surround 0%

Update: UrbanTerror is miles faster with PulseAudio – back to how it was on Fedora, also helped by the Nvidia 275 graphics drivers I expect – which have an odd quirk of corrupting Firefox’s autoscroll icon.

Routing of sound is still a but unreliable – for some reason I have to fire up alsamixer and switch between 2chan and 6chan and back again before I get anything from my speakers, and Skype I seem to have to make a test sound/call before I want to make a call. I think PulseAudio must be timing out or not fully initialising or something.

Debian 7

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Well I’ve almost completely rebuilt my PC trying to fix the crashing bug – PSU, motherboard, RAM, graphics card, cleaning the lot! Turns out its a Fedora bug of some sort as neither Debian Sneeze or Wheezy have the problem, so I’m sticking with Wheezy now.

I’ve ordered a couple of Yate Loon D12SL-12 fans as the one that came with my Corsair H50-1 is whining, I expect the bearings have gone. The radiator was caked in dust on the one side though! I’ve also ordered some screws so I can properly mount the two fans to the radiator, although these are slimline fans so should be thing enough anyway.

Annoyingly my new motherboard has replaced Firewire and eSATA with USB3, although I’ve bought a £2 SATA-to-eSATA bracket, the only machine I have with Firewire for the camcorder is my Mac Mini.

I’m glad to be rid of Gnome3, my productivity is much better with good old Gnome2 and Compiz Fusion. I’ve got everything working in Debian that I had in Fedora other than Seahorse-plugins which I’ve kind of replaced with an alias of:

gpg2 -se -u <sender> -r <recipient1> -r <recipient2> <filename>

The 2.6.39 kernel seems to mess with my audio routing and maybe Compiz, so I’m sticking with 2.6.38 which seems rock solid. UrbanTerror is not as fast for some reason, maybe due to Alsa instead of PulseAudio – it does seem to have crackling audio artifacts and every now and then causes the volume applet to crash. Firefox 5 seems to be no difference to 4 though!

My new Conky screen with radiator/case fans and thermistor/cpu/southbridge temps:

Conky

Conky

Debian 6

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I’ve been trying out Debian 6.01a (well actually Wheezy, as I’ve upgraded it to “testing” so its more like 7.0 than 6.0) in a VirtualBox VM, as I’m seriously thinking of migrating from Fedora 15 when I rebuild my desktop machine with its new motherboard, RAM and GFX card (and maybe NIC).

I’ve found that the forums are about as useless as the Ubuntu forums, full of questions with no answers or really n00bish stuff. So I’ve made a list of things I’ve found that fix the main issues:

Also to upgrade from Sneeze to Wheezy you have to edit /etc/apt/sources.list and replace “sneeze” with “wheezy” or “testing”, simples!

I had to rename ~/.thunderbird to ~/.icedove to get the Debian-branded Thunderbird to import my settings, ~/.mozilla opened fine in Iceweasel or whatever Debian call Firefox.

Apparently getting the Nvidia drivers working is easier than on Fedora too – codecs, JDK6, Eclipse and Flash were certainly easier.

There is a bug with seahorse-plugins unfortunately which will totally remove Gnome if you try to install it! As I use that a lot, I hope they fix it soon. Nessus 4.4.1 is supposed to be getting a Debian 6 .deb soon too.

Here’s a screenshot including Conky which migrated with minimal changes.

dpkg -i followed by apt-get -f install does dependency resolution on .deb files like Skype, although apparently gdebi does it in one go.

Here’s my apt transaction(s):

apt-get install -t squeeze-backports iceweasel icedove
apt-get install dkms screen gcc g++ bcc iasl xsltproc uuid-dev \
zlib1g-dev libidl-dev libsdl1.2-dev libxcursor-dev libasound2-dev \
libstdc++5 libhal-dev libpulse-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev \
libqt4-dev qt4-dev-tools libcap-dev libxmu-dev libxml-dom-perl \
mesa-common-dev libglu1-mesa-dev linux-kernel-headers \
libcurl4-openssl-dev libpam0g-dev libxinerama-dev \
libqt4-opengl-dev makeself ia32-libs libc6-dev-i386 lib32gcc1 \
gcc-multilib  lib32stdc++6 g++-multilib  gSTM knockd gnome-mplayer \
vlc git-core gnupg flex bison gperf libsdl1.2-dev libesd0-dev \
libwxgtk2.6-dev squashfs-tools build-essential zip curl \
libncurses5-dev zlib1g-dev sun-java6-jdk pngcrush  g++-multilib \
lib32z1-dev lib32ncurses5-dev lib32readline5-dev expect \
flashplugin-nonfree acroread libspreadsheet-writeexcel-perl \
audacious build-essential module-assistant make  compiz \
compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-fusion-plugins-main \
compiz-gnome compiz-gtk fusion-icon compiz-fusion-plugins-extra \
compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported gnote google-talkplugin \
sun-java6-plugin checkinstall alien compizconfig-backend-gconf \
libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 gstreamer0.10-plugins-really-bad \
nautilus-open-terminal smplayer qtgstreamer-plugins \
debian-multimedia-keyring p7zip-rar rar unrar conky gnupg2 \
ttf-mscorefonts-installer gedit-plugins fakeroot dh-make \
schedtool nvidia-settings jfsutils nvidia-kernel-dkms \
gstreamer0.10-gconf virtualbox-4.1 opera-next nvidia-glx-ia32 \
google-chrome-unstable ttf-mscorefonts-installer msttcorefonts \
firmware-realtek gdebi subversion libxrandr-dev python-dev \
texlive-latex-extra eclipse texlive-base ffmpeg mencoder \
iceowl-extension etherwake gip hydra hydra-gtk nmap \
geoip-bin qgit apt-file gftp-gtk libxml-dom-perl strace ltrace \
pyqt4-dev-tools python-wxgtk2.8 bsdiff dos2unix screenruler \
wireshark tcpdump mysql-client numlockx ntpdate icedove-enigmail \ 
backintime-gnome backintime-common gkrellm lm_sensors

Update: It appears the Nessus .deb for Debian 5 works on Wheezy (installed using gdebi too!) although the official Debian 6 package will include a static openssl 0.9.8 with SSLv2 support.

update-rc.d -f nessusd disable stops it starting on boot, its not as nice as chkconfig but its certainly better than systemd on Fedora 15!

New fileserver

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I’m thinking of moving my fileserver from CentOS 5.2 to something more up-to-date. Partially due to 5.3 being pretty late, but also because the NIC bonding seems to be flaky due to the old kernel I guess.

The main requirements that have to be met by a replacement distro are:

1. Must be able to run PIPS for my Epson Stylus Photo RX425;
2. Must be able to run iscan for above scanner, which also requires a graphical display (Xorg);
3. Must be able to run NFSv4;
4. Must be able to do NIC bonding;
5. Must be able to mount JFS drives;
6. Must be supported for free for longer than a year;
7. Must be reasonably up-to-date, i.e. kernel 2.6.24 or later.

I can’t use Ubuntu Server as it has no X11, I can’t use OpenSolaris as it won’t work with the printer/scanner, I can’t use Fedora10 as it’ll need updating in six months.

So far I think its down to Debian Lenny or Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS Desktop edition.

I’ll probably setup my Pentium4 as a new fileserver in parallel with the existing AthlonXP fileserver for zero downtime.

I’ve already got iscan and PIPS working in an Ubuntu VM, I converted the Fedora RPM to a .deb file using alien, with instructions from here, screenshot.

I got NFSv4 I setup in the Ubuntu VM using instructions from here, which I wish I had when I was setting it up on CentOS as it would have saved me a lot of going through poor documentation.

Update: just got NIC bonding working on the Ubuntu VM using these instructions. If I disable eth0 in VirtualBox, my SSH session stays open using the bonded eth1. I also got rid of Avahi (zeroconf) and NetworkManager.

iptables is a bit different on Ubuntu to RedHat, there’s no automatic startup of your firewall rules! I got it working within the ifup scripts using instructions here.