Confessions of a “practical” FSF fanboi

Without getting into all the politics, we all use GNU/Linux and many of us appreciate the four freedoms advocated by the Free Software Foundation.

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the community a chance to help from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Linux-libre

I came across the GNU/Linux-libre almost by accident and have enjoyed taking Trisquel and Parabola gnulinux for a test drive. I found both communities friendly and helpful.

Trisquel 5.5 is based on Ubuntu 11.10 and has a visually pleasing gnome-shell

KDE is also available.

Parabola gnu/linux is based on Arch and is thus a rolling release. The installer is a bit dated and hopefully they will release an updated CD in the near future.

I made a pair if user bars, feel free to use them if you wish

Rubber meet pavement

Booting Trisquel, Parabola, or a gnu/linux-libre kernel is where the rubber hits the pavement and many people will find it frustrating if, as with any operating system, they do not have compatible hardware. The two most common problems are incompatibility with graphics cards and wireless, although you could also have problems with BIOS.

You basically have to buy hardware that is compatible with the FSF GNU/Linux-libre definition of open source drivers.

While this may sound harsh, it is true of any OS, and while I do not expect everyone to run out and purchase new hardware, understanding hardware compatibility is crucial to successful future purchases.

GNU/Linux pre-installed

Many people buy hardware with Windows or OSX pre-installed and then have a bad experience when they try to install “Linux”.

The simplest solution is to encourage “Linux users” (yes you) to make their next hardware purchase with Linux pre-installed. We should support OEM that support Linux.

Home work

It is due diligence to research your hardware before you buy. There are several online resources available, h-node maintains a hardware listing of -libre compatible equipment.

Using that guide, I was able to find graphics cards, manufactured in 2010, ranging from as little as $10 (single head) up to $50 (dual head) in less then 10 minutes.

Wireless cards are a little more difficult as you need to identify the wireless chip, which is not always easy. I found USB wireless cards ranging from $10 to $20.

So for a little as $20 I could find both a graphics card and wireless card that offer decent performance ( video single head 1600×1200 ).

Again, next time you purchase hardware, I strongly advise -libre compatible hardware. Compatible hardware is not more expensive, will work with any distro, and performance will be better than a more expensive, incompatible, unsupported piece of hardware.

Recent experiences

Politics aside, hardly a day goes by when I do not see someone on IRC converting from closed source hardware drivers to open source. The costs are minimal and it is simply less hassle to use compatible hardware. For example, if you have a Nvidia card, and you have not taken the open source nouveau driver for a test spin, I highly encourage you to do so. It is not uncommon for people to find adequate or sometimes better performance with the nouveau driver then the Nvidia driver.

Again, if you use Linux, consider supporting the OEM who support open source.

To use these skins, save the following zip files to ~/.local/share/audacious/Skins/ .

You do NOT need to unzip the files =)

bodhi.zazen’s Fedora skin

Original BlubuntuBlue skin

The “trick” is to use a few boot codes. Personally I use flash drives. Once I “install” Ubuntu to a flash drive, simply edit “syslinux.cfg” and add the following boot options.

quiet splash console=tty1 acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux acer_wmi.blacklist=yes mem=1920mb

Without the first option, console=tty1 the desktop (X) starts distorted, the desktop flickers and is partly displayed on the top of the screen. I could not get a screen shot of this. If you forget this option, simply run sudo service lightdm restart .

If you are getting a black screen, try disabling the boot splash (plymouth) by removing splash from the boot options.

quiet console=tty1 acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux acer_wmi.blacklist=yes mem=1920mb

Or if that fails, disable Plymouth altogether:

sudo mv /etc/init/plymouth.conf /etc/init/plymouth.conf.disabled

The next three options acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux acer_wmi.blacklist=yes enable the brightness buttons on the keyboard.

The acer_wmi module is both Acer specific and specific to my model (AO751h). If you do not have an AcerOne 751h, do not use it.

The acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux options are a bit more generic, but are also hardware dependent. Do not use them if your backlight works without these options (they have the potential to disable your backlight as was pointed out in the comments).

The last option, mem=1920mb allows more memory for the available for the gma500 and (slightly) improves performance. If you have 1 gb of ram, use mem=896mb

After installing, first restart X. ctrl-alt-f1 to get to a console, then

sudo service lightdm restart

Log in , then, using any editor, open /etc/default/grub

Change the line – GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash console=tty1 acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux acer_wmi.blacklist=yes mem=1920mb"

Or, if you are having a problem with a black screen, a more generic set of options would be

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet console=tty1 acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux mem=896mb"

And then update grub

sudo update-grub

And finally reboot.

Additional workarounds / fixes

Black screen

From form dfrossar on the Ubuntu forums you can try 915resolution

Using any editor, create a file /etc/grub.d/01_915resolution , add in lines

echo insmod 915resolution
echo 915resolution 58 1366 768 32

Make the file executable

sudo chmod a+x /etc/grub.d/01_915resolution

Next, edit /etc/default/grub, assign value 1366x768x32 to variables GRUB_GFXMODE and GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX (be sure to change “1366×768″ to your desired resolution):

GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=1366x768x32

Then update grub.

sudo update-grub

and reboot.

Fix Suspend

From “unziberla” in the comments below:

Guys, i fixed suspend on my AO751h with 12.04 starting from old patch for 11.10 from which i removed one quirk.

Open a terminal and use the following commands:

gksu gedit /etc/pm/config.d/gma500

Add in one of the following codes and save the file (apparently one “-” works for some and others need two “--” in front of “quirk-vbemode-restore”):

ADD_PARAMETERS='-quirk-vbemode-restore'

ADD_PARAMETERS='--quirk-vbemode-restore'

The good – The intel gma500 (poulsbo) graphics card, my wireless card, and most interestingly gnome-shell were all working out of the box. Wow, gnome is looking great !!!

The bad – Performance was a little slow (running from a flash drive), there was some occasional blanking out of the screen, and the netbook seemed to be running a bit hot.

Screen shots (click thumbnails for larger image):

In the Linux 3.3-rc1 (mainline) kernel the driver has moved out of staging and re-named.

It is now located under

Device Drivers ->
Graphics support ->
DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) ->
Intel GMA5/600 KMS Framebuffer

and is now called “gma500_gfx”.

Once the kernel team with your distribution of choice makes the adjustment, the GMA500 should work “out of the box” on any Linux Distribution using kernel 3.3 or higher.

I have made a copy publicly available for those with one of these graphics cards. Please keep in mind it is an alpha release of 12.04

The gma500 should be working out of the box and works well live, and you can use a persistent home directory to preserve user data across boots.

Make a file in the root directory of any partition or your flash drive (after making a live flash drive from the iso)

# this will make a 1 Gb file for storage, increase / decrease the count as needed
dd if=/dev/zero of=./home-rw bs=1M count=1000

Make a file system on the file

mkfs.ext4 home-rw

mke2fs 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)

home-rw is not a block special device.

# Answer ‘yes’ here

Proceed anyway? (y,n) y

Remove the reserved blocks

tune2fs -m 0 -L home-rw home-rw

If you select the persistent option at the boot menu, the file system will then automatically be mounted at /home by the casper scripts.

If you install it, however, you would need to make some (minor) modifications.

using any editor, open /etc/default/grub

Change the line – GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash” to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="poulsbo.blacklist=yes console=tty1"

And then update grub

sudo update-grub

The iso and md5sum are here:

Live CD
md5sum

Acer Aspire One AO751

I have been one of the frustrated owners of an Intel GMA 500 card – see how kick your friends face gma500 for details.

Support for this card in Linux has historically been poor, at best, and X typically fails when you boot most distros. For example, the GMA 500 is excluded from Fedora Intel Test Days .

Many people have resorted to attempting to reverse engineer various closed source (PSB and IEGD) and more recently the EMGD driver with mixed results. Support has been best for Ubuntu, and spotty at best for other distros.

In February of this year , Alan Cox started working on a driver gma500: Intel GMA500 staging driver and I have been using this driver on Gentoo for the past few months.

The advantage of the psb-gfx driver is that it is in the Linux kernel and performance is quite acceptable. The driver is 2D, No 3D, Xv, Hardware Accelerated Video.

With some minor changes to the kernel configuration, the psb-gfx driver should soon be working, at native resolution, out of the box, without any end user configuration in both Fedora and Ubuntu.

Note: When starting the live CD/Flash drive, X is distorted when it starts. You need to re-start X (log out an the log in screen is fine, ctrl-alt-backspace in Fedora). Once you install, it helps to disable the boot splash.

Thank you to Alan Cox for developing the psb-gfx driver and to the Fedora and Ubuntu teams for making the adjustments to the default distribution kernel.

Screen shots – click on the images for a larger picture.

In order to get the system to boot I have written a custom initramfs. In case it helps others I am posting some information on the contents.

The files included are listed here:

biraries in /bin or /sbin are either static, or libs identified with ldd are included in /lib

The init script is sort of adapted from several sources and is as follows

#!/bin/busybox ash
# Modified from http://lunaryorn.de/articles/initramfs_gentoo.html

# Report errors / print messages
err () { echo "ERROR: $@"; }
msg () { [ "${quiet}" != 'y' ] && echo $@; }

# Global variables
export ROOT="/dev/mapper/lotus-root"
export PATH="/bin:/sbin"
export CRYPTROOT="/dev/sda10"
export CRYPTNAME="gentoo"
export CONSOLEFONT="ter-v16n"

# Mount proc and sys
mount -t proc none /proc
mount -t sysfs none /sys

# Silence kernel messages
msg "Silencing procfs …"
echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk

# Read kernel command line options
read CMDLINE </proc/cmdline
export CMDLINE
for x in ${CMDLINE}
do
  case "${x}" in
    quiet)
      quiet='y'
      export quiet
      ;;
  esac
done

# Create devices
echo "/sbin/modprobe" > /proc/sys/kernel/modprobe

msg "Creating device nodes …"
echo /sbin/mdev > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug
mdev -s

# set keymap
#kbd_mode -u /dev/tty1
printf "\033%%G" >> /dev/console
msg "Loading keymap …"
loadkmap < /etc/kmap-us

# set console font
msg "Setting font …"
setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/${CONSOLEFONT}.psf.gz -C /dev/tty
printf "\033(K" >> /dev/console

# Open LUKS Crypt
msg "Open LUKS Crypt …"
while ! cryptsetup luksOpen -T 3 $CRYPTROOT $CRYPTNAME >/dev/null ; do
  sleep 2;
done

# setup splash screen
. /etc/initrd.splash
msg "Setting up splashscreen …"
splash init

# LVM
lvm vgscan --ignorelockingfailure > /dev/null
lvm vgchange --ignorelockingfailure -ay >/dev/null

# Mount root fs ro for fsck
mount -o ro /dev/mapper/lotus-root /newroot

# Clean up and exit to rootfs
umount /sys
umount /proc
exec switch_root /newroot /sbin/init ${CMDLINE}

The only problem is that the boot splash does not display any area to enter the LUKS password. Hit alt-F1 and enter the password on the console.

The only other thing I think I need to address is running fsck, but I will leave that for another day.

I hope to cover “the basics” of iptables in #fedora-classroom on September 15th , 21:00 (UTC)

The session is planned to last an hour, with 30 minutes for questions. Target audience – users new to iptables.

The goal is to cover iptables syntax and configuration. To get the most out of the session it will help if you understand the basics of networking TCP/IP protocols and to that end I posted an outline at IPTables.odt.

The session will start with the filtering table and I can cover NAT as time allows.

Selinux has been suggested as a topic for future sessions.

Benefits of Ubuntu membership include:

1. Voting privileges to confirm Ubuntu Community Council nominations.
2. An @ubuntu.com email alias that forwards to your real email address.
3. An ”Ubuntu/member/your_nick” cloak on freenode.
4. The right to print business cards with the Ubuntu logo.
5. Syndication on Planet Ubuntu of your Ubuntu blog or the Ubuntu category posts in your blog, if you have one.
6. An Ubuntu Member title at the Ubuntu Forums.
7. A subscription to Linux Weekly News.
8. Ability to join the Official Ubuntu Members group on LinkedIn.
9. Signing up for SixXS account with an Ubuntu email address and a link to your Launchpad page will grant you an “Ubuntu Credit Bonus” of 25 credit points.
10. SFTP access to a Web-accessible directory on people.ubuntu.com .

See The Ubuntu Wiki Membership page for details regarding the benefits of Ubuntu Membership.

In addition, we will almost certainly be selecting future forums staff from among Ubuntu Members active on the forums.

How to petition for membership:

1. Create a wiki page.
2. Create a Launchpad page. Although not mandatory, many people use the same identity/nick on Launchpad and on the forums.
3. Sign the Ubuntu code of conduct. This has traditionally been one of the more difficult steps. FYI: A bug has been opened on Launchpad to make the process easier in the future.
4. Create a thread in the Ubuntu Membership Applications section requesting a review of your application. Be sure to emphasize your forums contributions and include a link to your wiki and launchpad pages.
5. Testimonials from friends may be posted on the thread you start on the above forums (preferable) or on your wiki page.

There is a “sticky” note in those forums Applying For Ubuntu Membership via Ubuntu Forums Contributions with a template for applications as well as some general advice on how to apply.

For additional information see Ubuntu Membership via Forums participation .

Current members are listed on Launchpad at: Ubuntu Forums Members .

If you are currently an Ubuntu member and would like to be added to the Launchpad team or if you need recognition on the forums feel free to send me a PM on the Ubuntu Forums with a link to your launchpad page.

We are moving to a system of open enrollment and we are accepting applications as they come in. Please keep in mind the FC is a volunteer staff thus the review process may take a few weeks.

Once one is approved and Ubuntu email is automatic (takes a few days), but many of the other benefits require a request from the approved individual to the proper team / location as outlined on the The Ubuntu Wiki Membership page.