Update: As explained in other posts, I’m no longer using this xserver version myself. So this stays here, but I’m not planning to update it in any manner.
The goal of the xserver downgrading is to run intel IEGD drivers on recent GNU/Linux distribution (debian squeese in my case). This seams to be the only maintained driver for the US15W GMA500 (poulsbo) chipset.
The first reference for installing debian on an Eee PC is The Debian Eee PC project. However it says on
its models page that it does not fully support 1201HA, because it uses the Poulsbo chipset. The reason is that it’s not supported by mainstream debian: see #533450 for details…
However installing debian Squeeze (testing) using the debian installer snapshot was fearly easy. Read DebianEeePC/HowTo/InstallUsingStandardInstaller for details.
The only noticeable issues I had was with partitioning where the partition table was not reloaded by the kernel; and grub that installed itself on my installation USB Key instead of the primary drive.
A good point is that network and wifi worked out of the box. So then I needed X to work with the native resolution.
Reading the above bugreport and a few other website showed that there are two drivers out there. One poulsbo driver (that seams to come from ubuntu) and the intel IEGD driver. Nobody seams to maintain the first one, and the second is proprietary but at least works. However none work with the 1.7 version of xserver. So the first step is to get an older xserver.
Lenny has and old one but downgrading all X related packages (including gnome ones) was a pain, so I quickly switched to an other solution:
Rebuilding and xserver 1.6 package.
See next post for details on building the xserver 1.6 packages.
This solution worked fine with the IEDG 10.3 driver.
I’m still experiencing some X freeze from time to time (which are solved only by rebooting). The touchpad does not have the multifinger features I was used to, and sometime the cursor jump to the lower right corner, but I didn’t really tried to investigate this anyway.
Update
As Steve McIntyre pointed out there is an other way to get the native resolution, using grub2 and fbdev, see http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/Model/1101HA for details.
I just updated to this configuration and it works !
Well this server is home hosted over our DSL connection, so it had to move too 😉
That explain the one week offline period two weeks ago, if anyone (other than google) noticed.
So the moving has taken most of my time, I had to pack everything including my electronic stuff so the projects didn’t move much…
Also I offered myself an EeePC 1201HA, I wanted the 12 inch screen to get something more usable than the 701p. However it comes with windows 7 and the chipset is a gma500 (pouslbo) which does not help for linux, but I managed to get debian on it (still some to do, see a later post for details).
After yesterday’s trouble, I just upgraded all my plugins.
Gengo’s URI renaming scheme with language code at the end was leading to an infinite redirect (adding fr+en/ to the URI) so I had to disable it. But doing so breaks the existing URI on your bookmarks (if you had some) and on Google…
So I hacked gengo again so that if the URI ends with a language code, it is redirected to the basic URI.
A recent reading : Cool URIs don’t change is just about keeping the URI, here I’m redirecting, that’s not as good, but at least you wont get the 404 😉
The link was on Peter Eisentraut’s Blog. I was reading his article about Remove and Purge. I was tempted to do the same, I even did for a few days. Then I read the comments, and ended using aptitude l~c view 😉 . I was previously using synaptic only for purging residual configuration…
Well, I’m actually more reading than writing since I added Planet Debian to my feed aggregator gregarious.
Also did a few changes to the themes, updated wordpress without issue. Thanks to both wordpress and debian.
Finally this blog has electronics in the headline and I’ve never talked about it yet, but I’m practicing 😉
I’ve been looking for software to draw my schematics and keep track of my work, first for myself and when ready to post my work here.
One project that seamed interesting is Fritzing but it seams too unstable, I don’t mean that the software is unstable but the file formats are. That means that some project done with it today might not be readable by tomorrow’s version.
So I ended up using The gEDA project tools. Starting with gschem to draw the schematics and then adding PCB to prepare my boards.
I’m not actually doing real PCBs, I prefer using prototyping boards and soldering lots of small wires, but using PCB with a 100mil grid really helps for arranging the placement.
I started hacking with Atmel’s AVR microcontrollers using avr-gcc and avr-libc. I first build an
Almost forgot, I recovered an old bookmark on Chip Directory. It’s a pinout database of many old chip references including 74xx TTL series and 40xx MOS series.
To fit a particular job, several choices are often available. For softwares, it the same!
For example, while configuring a system we need a text editor. On recent distros, we get nano, on others we have vi (or a variant like nvi, vim…). On debian the defaukt editor is simply called editor.
Let’s see that:
$ which editor /usr/bin/editor $ ls -la /usr/bin/editor lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 mar 4 09:01 /usr/bin/editor -> /etc/alternatives/editor
So editor is not a program, simply a symbolic link to the same file name in /etc/alternatives and that last on is an other link to the actual editor program.
To update the editor we could change the link, but that’s quite direct were debian gives us a nice way to do it with the command: update-alternatives.
Obviously to update system configuration you have to be root (use su or sudo whatever you like best)
# update-alternatives --config editor
A text menu will propose you the available alternatives.
That’s for the big picture, I was first on using this on the case of the flash plugin for firefox (well iceweasel). Even after installing flash form debian-multimedia repository, firefox was still using swfdec, ad removing swfdec was breaking gnome’s dependencies… The solution is above, firefox uses a flash-mozilla.so plugin, this is an alternative! So:
# update-alternatives --config flash-mozilla.so
There are 2 choices for the alternative flash-mozilla.so
Selection Path
-----------------------------------------------
*+ 1 /usr/lib/swfdec-mozilla/libswfdecmozilla.so
2 /usr/lib/flashplayer-mozilla/libflashplayer.so
Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:2
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/flashplayer-mozilla/libflashplayer.so to provide flash-mozilla.so.
You did it!
That’s no because flash is not open source that we have to read on debian or ubuntu forums that the solution is to remove manually libswfdecmozilla.so or any similar nonsense, there is a way to do it, that what new users should learn.
Having the system log on a background transparent window on the desktop look nice and can be useful (USB key plug events, network connection events and so on).
One way is to use a terminal like aterm or Eterm for instance using the following command:
aterm -tr -bl -ib 0 -title log -name log +sb -geometry '140x16+0+791' -e bash -c "tail --follow=name /var/log/full.log | ccze" &
With the -title and -name option the window decoration can be removed at the window manager level. OK, this is nice.
But when using fluxbox desktop wheeling will not work over the log as it is a window not the desktop.
So I switched to xrootconsole, but it has no color support… not a big deal, I just hacked it in 😉
Here is a sample usage of the hacked xrootconsole, the important part is the -A parameter for ANSI to ccze as the default is to use curses:
tail -n 16 --follow=name /var/log/full.log | ccze -A | xrootconsole --wrap --bottomup -geometry 233x16+1+818 &
Now that Lenny is out, testing is moving again !
So I could upgrade my wordpress debian package to the testing version and get the 2.7.1 !
Note that my system is still running lenny (stable), this is using basic apt pinning, the more basic you can do is :
APT::Default-Release "stable";
in /etc/apt/apt.conf (or in one file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d)
sudo aptitude update
and that’s it you can install some specific packages from testing.
However to use stable, testing and unstable you have to really do the pinning !
But for testing, unstable and experimental the above method with testing as default release will works. Just because experimental has NEVER automatic upgrade.
Hi all,
That was long, but here is my signed debian repository !
Investigations:
Even with an “official archive”, you can create a much simpler archive than the real official one. This is explained in Debian Reference (lenny) using apt-ftparchive in apt-utils and dupload. All uploaded packages are located in a directory and no database server is needed. This may be good enough for people hosting a few packages.
Well this was good enough for me, also I’m currently not using dupload but I put the commands suggested as postupload in a script.
The update script, apt-ftparchive configuration and pgp public keys are on the root of the repository.
to use it:
#add in source.list deb http://silicone.homelinux.org/repository/ unstable main deb-src http://silicone.homelinux.org/repository/ unstable main #for gpg signature verification get siliconerepositorykey.asc # sudo apt-key add siliconerepositorykey.asc
The actual content of the repository is currently just one program: a hacked xrootconsole with ANSI color support, but this will be the subject of a next post 😉