Firefox slow as HEL even after boosting RAM from 4GB to 16GB

The title says it all: Firefox is the only piece of software that shows zero sign of improvement in its performance after quadrupling the amount of RAM installed on my 64-bit desktop computer. All other applications show a significant boost in performance. Yet, among all the applications I use, Firefox is the one that most needed this speed boost. To say that this is a major disapointment is an understatement. FFS, Mozilla devs!

OpenWRT Backfire on WRT54GL signal strenght

Because I wanted my home router to use at least decently supported software that provides complete out-of-the-box support for native IPv6, I recently got around upgrading my WRT54GL's firmware from White Russian to Backfire, which is the most recent OpenWRT release that fits the hardware's limited amount of flash memory.

One issue remains unanswered:

In GNOME shell's top panel and WiFi menu, the signal strength remains at 2 out of 4 bars. Given how the router sits only a few meters behind me, I would have expected much better signal strength than that.

Would anyone happen to know how to improve on these results? Thanks!

Debian within a Windows partition?

A few years ago, I remember that Ubuntu had a trick that allowed the distribution to be installed as one large file within a Windows partition. Does the same thing exist to install Debian?

Batch photo manipulation via free software tools?

I have a need for batch-processing pictures. My requirements are fairly simple:

• Resize the image to fit Facebook's preferred 960 pixel box.
• Insert Copyright, Byline and Bylinetitle into the EXIF data.
• Optionally, paste my watermark onto a predefined corner of the image.
• Optionally, adjust the white balance.
• Rename the file according to a specific syntax.
• Save the result to a predefined folder.

Until recently, I was using Phatch to perform all of this. Unfortunately, it cannot edit the EXIF data of my current Lumix camera, whose JPEG it claims to be MPO. I am thus forced to look for other options. Ideally, I would do this via a script inside gThumb (which is my main photo editing software), but I cannot seem to find adequate documentation on how to achieve this.

I am thus very interested in hearing about other options to achieve the same result. Ideas, anyone?

xf86-video-geode 2.11.18

Yesterday, I pushed out version 2.11.18 of the Geode X.Org driver. This is the driver used by the OLPC XO-1 and by a plethora of low-power desktops, micro notebooks and thin clients. This release mostly includes maintenance fixes of all sorts. Of noticeable interest is a fix for the long-standing issue that switching between X and a VT would result in a blank screen (this should probably be cherry-picked for distributions running earlier releases of this driver). Many thanks to Connor Behan for the fix!

Unfortunately, this driver still doesn't work with GNOME. On my testing host, launching GDM produces a blank screen. 'ps' and other tools show that GDM is running but there's no screen content; the screen remains pitch black. This issue doesn't happen with other display managers e.g. LightDM. Bug reports have been filed, additional information was provided, but the issue still hasn't been resolved.

Additionally, X server flat out crashes on Geode hosts running Linux kernels 4.2 or newer. 'xkbcomp' repeatedly fails to launch and X exits with a fatal error. Bug reports have been filed, but not reacted to. However, interestingly enough, X launches fine if my testing host is booted with earliers kernels, which might suggest what the actual cause of this particular bug might be:

Since kernel 4.2 entered Debian, the base level i386 kernel on Debian is now compiled for i686 (without PAE). Until now, the base level was i586. This essentially makes it pointless to build the Geode driver with GX2 support. It also means that older GX1 hardware won't be able to run Debian either, starting with the next stable release.

Stupid Design: Facebook's Selling Something feature

Over these past few months, I've been going through my personal belongings to reduce them to the bare essentials – more-or-less following the rule "If I cannot remember that I had it, I probably don't need it" – with an explicit goal to make it easier for me to relocate in the near future.

Part of that iterative process has involved selling surplus items via Facebook groups. While I initially rejoiced at the invention of the new Selling Something feature, the more I use it, the more I end up cursing at the lack of thought that went into designing that feature:

For instance, in the feature's most recent implementation, it has become possible to post the same ad in several groups. Great idea, right? Actually, no. What this option does is post individual copies of that exact same ad in each group. Managed to sell a particular item? You'll have to sort through each and every duplicate post in each group to mark the item as sold. Need to edit the ad to lower the price or add requested information about the item? Same thing: go through each individual copy of the ad in each group. Seriously, Facebook? Who the fuck designed that senseless implementation?!

Here's a better implementation: centrally manage all items via the user's account preferences, and let the user tick checkboxes besides each item to decide which groups will see that particular item. Ditto whenever editing the ad's content or marking an item as sold; do everything via the user's account preferences. Rather than making the content group-centric, make it user-centric.

You're welcome.

xf86-video-geode: Last call, dernier sévice

I guess that the time has finally come to admit that, as far as upstream development is concerned, the Geode X.Org driver is reaching retirement age:

While there have indeed been recent contributions by a number of developers to keep it compilable against recent X releases, the Geode driver has accumulated too much cruft from the Cyrix and NSC days, and it hasn't seen any active contribution from AMD in a long time. Besides, nowadays, Xserver pretty much assumes that its runs on an X driver that leverages its matching kernel driver and thus won't require root priviledges to launch. This isn't the case with the Geode driver, since it directly probes FBDEV and MSR, both of which reside in /dev and require root priviledges to access.

On Debian, as a stopgap measure, the package now Recommends a legacy wrapper that enforces operation as root. Meanwhile, other distributions are mercilessly droping all X drivers that don't leverage KMS. Basically, unless a miracle happens really quick, Geode will soon become unusable on X.

Back when AMD was still involved, a concensus had been reached that, since the Geode series doesn't offer any sort of advanced graphic capabilities, the most sensible option would indeed be to make a KMS driver and let Xserver use its generic modeline driver on top of that, then drop the Geode X driver entirely. Amazingly enough, someone did start working on a KMS driver for Geode LX, but it never made it as far as the Linux kernel tree (additionally, Gitorious seems to be down, but I have a copy of the driver's Git tree on hand, if anyone is interested). While I'll still be accepting and merging patches to the Geode X driver, our best long-term option would be to finalize the KMS driver and have it merged into Linux ASAP.

xf86-video-geode 2.11.17

This morning, I pushed out version 2.11.17 of the Geode X.Org driver. This is the driver used by the OLPC XO-1 and by a plethora of low-power desktops, micro notebooks and thin clients. This is a minor release. It merges conditional support for the OpenBSD MSR device (Marc Ballmer, Matthieu Herrb), fixes a condition that prevents compiling on some embedded platforms (Brian A. Lloyd) and upgrades the code for X server 1.17 compatibility (Maarten Lankhorst).

Pending issues:

• toggle COM2 into DDC probing mode during driver initialization
• reset the DAC chip when exiting X and returning to vcons
• fix a rendering corner case with Libre Office

This and That

I haven't blogged anything in months and figured that now might be a good time to get around that. Here it goes:

Free Software

While I occasionally upgrade the packaging of the software I maintain at Debian to keep up with best practices, my activity downsizing goes on. Simply put: I never had any ambition to become a Debian Developer. My involvement has always remained pragmatic and mostly from the perspective of packaging software that I found useful. Even then, my motivation for doing that keeps on dwindling into nothingness, because key pieces of software keep on breaking, whenever someone upstream decides to reinvent the wheel.

For instance, GNOME no longer works at all on Geode chipsets and it barely works on Nouveau chipsets. This happened as soon as GNOME 3.14 was uploaded into unstable, right before the freeze started. Then again, I wouldn't jump to a conclusion that GNOME itself might be at fault, since Plymouth also stopped working on the same two video platforms at the same time. For all we know, this could be caused by some changes in the X.Org server code. Bugs were filed, additional information was provided, but no fix has taken place.

Given how Geode and Nouveau represent 80% of my hardware investment (my Intel laptop being the sole exception), it essentially means that the upcoming Debian "stable" is useless for me. Now try and remain motivated, even just as a mere Free Software end-user. At this point, I'm done.

Politics

Finland is holding national elections this April. I still have no idea who I'll vote for this time. The guy I voted for last time has become a career politician with an inflated ego and zero connection to the average Finn's aspirations and worries. Meanwhile, two friends are standing as candidates: one who is a razor-sharp fact finder and who is a proven pragmatic decision-maker, but whose values are slightly off with mine, and one whose actions come straight from the heart but whose concept of today's Finnish reality leaves a lot to be desired.

National Defence

There's been a lot of recent articles about how former hardware and locations of the Finnish defence forces and border guards have been sold, often for peanuts, to Russian interests. In some cases, we're only talking about buildings formerly used for on-site staff accommodations. In other cases, former patrol boats and navy harbours changed hands. Now, to top it all, it appears that our north-western neighbour, Norway, has sold a former submarine base to German investors who, in turn, leased it to – you guessed it – Russian interests.

Looking at Russian actions in Ukraine, I cannot help but feel great concern that strategic locations are falling into potentially dangerous hands. Just seeing the picture of a former navy harbour with a handful of patrol boats on standby, right on the Finnish coastline, half-way between Helsinki and Turku, was a sobering experience. While the whole idea of shooting at people – even invading armies – gives me the creeps, at this point, I cannot help but start pondering whether defending this country might in fact be an occupation worth training for.

Employment

It has now been 6 years since I held my last dayjob. Since then, the only thing I've found is an unpaid training in the national bureaucracy. I've also freelanced as an actor and model, but that barely brought me pocket change, if even that. Seeing my face on posters advertising a movie I participated in last year was indeed nice, getting some media attention in connection to that too, but it hasn't lead to additional gigs. As far as I can tell, this was just my Warholian 15 minutes of fame.

However, there's a larger issue at stake. Newspapers recently published an employment statistics map for Nordic countries and the truth couldn't be more bleak: while Norway and Sweden's employment figures are nearly spotless for almost every province, those of Finland are – save for a couple of mildly successful provinces – outright catastrophic. Given this and despite feeling relatively happy living in Finland and having developed a will to defend this country from an eventual Russian assault, I've come to the conclusion that I would be better off going West, with a strong preference for Norway.

Now, the main question is, doing what? 6 years later, I have strong doubts that I would be remotely considered for any high-tech job. Besides, come to think of it, I wouldn't want any new office job. Off the top of my head, my idea of a cool job that would allow me to stay physically fit would be working as a tourist guide in Lapland. However, if Norway is anything like Finland, someone probably needs a dozen of permits of all sorts (first aid certification, C or even D class driving license, college degree in tourism, etc.) that I cannot afford. What then?

GNOME is destroying the whole GTK universe

When GNOME 3.14 components were uploaded into Debian (just a few days before the Jessie freeze started), GNOME stopped working on two video platforms: Geode (xf86-video-geode) and NVIDIA (xf86-video-nouveau). On Geode, GDM launches into a black screen. On NVIDIA, GDM launches as expected, but then the GNOME session itself barfs with the dreaded "Oh No! Something went wrong. [Logout]" dialog during session initialization. Basically, components in GNOME have become too tightly dependent upon some video driver features. Thinking out loud, I figured that reverting to a desktop environment that is based upon GTK+3, without GNOME's bells and whistles, would at least restore operation on my NVDIA hosts. Alas, it does not: Cinnamon, too, barfs during session initialization. Great. Now what?

On the Joey debacle

Looking back, I cannot think of a single moment when Joey wouldn't have shown the utmost patience and courtesy towards anyone involved in Debian, even towards mere users filing sometimes senseless bug reports against his packages. From this perspective, I cannot help but venture that whatever chain of events lead to Joey's decisions essentially means one thing: Debian must have seriously gotten off-course for someone who has been involved for so long to call it quits. As for the current situation at hands, while I admittedly haven't followed too closely who or what caused Joey's decision, I nonetheless cannot help but feel that whoever pushed Joey's buttons so hard as to make him decide to leave Debian ought to be the one(s) kicked out of Debian instead.

HEL has just frozen over. Wait. No. Debian did.

Noticing that Debian just entered its freeze, I went ahead and changed the APT sources on a spare host that is currently running stable. Then, it was time for this command to be executed:

sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get install apt dpkg locales && \
sudo apt-get --purge dist-upgrade && \
sudo apt-get --fix-policy install && \
sudo apt-get --purge autoremove $(deborphan --guess-all)

I guess I'll be busy filing bug reports for the next few hours. Wish me (and each faulty package's maintainer) luck!

PS: Apparently, so many aspects of Debian have become dependent upon GPG features that merely upgrading APT, DPKG and libc6+locales is no longer enough. One must also upgrade gnupg and gnupg2. Thus, the second element of the above recipe has become:

sudo apt-get install apt dpkg gnupg gnupg2 locales && \

Hopefully, APT's dist-upgrade command already knows that these must be upgraded first...

PPS: Hosts running Network-Manager cannot be upgraded remotely, because Network-Manager insists upon killing the network connection and the SSH daemon with it, when its turn comes to get upgraded.

Outstanding issue in Debian: unroutable public v6 IP

Given how Debian and Ubuntu nowadays enable IPv6 support by default, the routing table includes some IPv6 entries by standard. However, this has the unpleasant side-effect that lib C tries to connect to public IPv6 addresses, even in a case when the only IPv6 entries are for loopback and local link. Apparently, libc incorrectly assumes that the mere presence of any IPv6 means that there is a usable default IPv6 route. This results in, among other things, APT failing at fetching packages from the Debian repository if the DNS rotation returned the IPv6 address for the server first. I was thus wondering whether libc6 could be made to reject public IPv6 addresses, in cases when the host has no IPv6 gateway in its routing table? Or would there be a smarter way to prevent applications from failing at contacting IPv6 addresses whenever there is no IPv6 connection to the outside world?

xf86-video-geode 2.11.14

A few days ago, I pushed out version 2.11.14 of the Geode X.org driver. This is the driver used by the OLPC XO-1 and by a plethora of low-power desktops, micro notebooks and thin clients.

This release mostly features long-overdue fixes to rendering issues under GTK3+ and xulrunner, plus yet more ongoing changes to make this driver compile under recent X servers.

Sadly, the release took place much too late to be included into the upcoming stable Debian version, Wheezy, which is already deeply into freeze, pending publication.

HTML5: Firefox without Flash

Over the past few days, I decided to purge Gnash and LightSpark from my laptop to see whether my Internet experience would be affected in any dramatic way. Amazingly, a number of sites seem to offer video content encoded in Theora (VP3) or WebM (VP8). Sadly, a handful of popular sites such as Vimeo insist upon using the H.264 (MPEG-4) CODEC, which cannot be safely supported on Free Software because of unclear licensing issues that might impose an ulterior usage fee onto the end-users.

The good news is that the Mozilla Foundation has decided to avoid the issue together: starting with the most recent release of the mobile version of Firefox, content decoding is offloaded to the platform's native media CODEC library. On most Free Software platforms, this means that Gstreamer will handle the content and, in turn, use gstreamer-plugins-bad to perform the decoding. However, Gstreamer support is still rather sketchy, as attested by this Debian bug report and thus disabled by default. This leaves me wondering how little is missing for this to properly work. Would either Canonical or Red Hat perhaps be interested in funding this?

Bounty: PulseAudio: implement compression into the RTP modules

I'm looking for someone – preferably based within the IBAN zone – to implement compression support into PulseAudio's RTP modules. Please contact me via my Ubuntu address for details.

PulseAudio: system mode broken

Ever since version 1.1 of PulseAudio was released, remote audio stopped working for me. Basically, the tunnel created by enabling "Detect native remote PulseAudio sinks" in paprefs on the client side immediately crashes the PulseAudio server on the remote host. I reported the issue at Free Desktop bug #49681. The issue still exists in version 2.0, which is what Debian's next stable release is supposed to ship (and in 2.1, available via the experimental repository). This essentially means that I cannot upgrade my hosts to Wheezy without losing my remote speakers. Would anybody knowledgable enough with PulseAudio internals be able to help me track down the cause of this bug?

OpenWRT: SLAAC and DHCPv6 on White Russian

As I recently reported, I have been trying to configure my Linksys WRT54GL running the OpenWRT firmware (version 0.9 a.k.a. White Russian) to support SLAAC and DHCPv6 out of the box.

Most of the feedback I got involved upgrading the OpenWRT firmware to a more recent release that might not fit the available storage capacity of the device, which felt like too risky of an operation to attempt.

The solution I found instead involved adding ipkg sources to OpenWRT's backports repository, which offers a minimalistic DHCPv6 client. Although I haven't been able to find any proper documentation for this client, the content of its configuration file is mostly intelligible. What remains now is to actually configure it to cooperate with the kernel's native SLAAC implementation and, whenever an IPv6 network is found on the ISP side, to propagate the address space, DNS and routing information to my LAN using radvd.

Would anyone located within the Helsinki metropolitan area happen to have an IPv6 testing environment that would at least allow me to configure and test my router?

OpenWRT: accepting Router Adverts from the ISP in White Russian?

As we are getting closer to the World IPv6 Day, I thought that I'd see if I can upgrade my WRT54GL's OpenWRT (White Russian) installation to accept Router Adverts from the ISP to acquire an IPv6 address (rather than via a 4-to-6 tunnel broker, which seems to be the most documented case), and to propagate its IPv6 address space to my local network via my WRT45GL's radvd. Unfortunately, most of the instructions out there concern newer OpenWRT releases to which I cannot upgrade to because their software base takes up significantly more space than White Russian does. Still, I figure that someone in the community must have already succeeded at configuring their WRT54GL for this and might be able to help. Anyone? :)

Ubuntu: LTS to LTS+1 upgrade leaves cruft

Over the past few weeks, I upgraded my Ubuntu hosts to the Precise release due to be published next month. While the upgrade on my desktops from Oneiric to Precise went mostly well, the upgrade of my terminal server from Lucid to Precise was more daunting. In short: too many packages leave an undue amount of cruft behind, namely tons of obsolete configuration files that are not correctly handled by maintainer scripts, to either delete obsolete files or to rename them to the currently valid filename. At Debian, these oversights are periodically monitored using piuparts and reported to the package maintainer, but Ubuntu doesn't seem to offer this sort of automated Quality Assurance process yet. Perhaps this would be something worth developing?

PS: For those who wonder how I spotted those obsolete configuration files, I simply enabled the FLAUSCH environment variable before running upgrade-system.