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May 2003

Mozilla Firebird on Debian Woody

29 May, 2003

I love the Debian philosophy and package management system; for the most part, if you stick to the 'stable' packages everything just works once you install it.

Critics are always quick to point out that this stability comes at the cost of generally having somewhat older versions of software packages installed on your system. This became painfully apparent to me after a few days of using Konqueror as my primary browser at home. I am fully dependent on tabs; there's just no way around it.

Not wanting to install the full-blown Mozilla platform with mail, newsreader, instant messaging, chat, and kitchen sink, I Googled for "debian phoenix" and only found some very preliminary packages... hoping to avoid any Redhat-style package dependency nightmares by introducing unstable stuff onto my system, I decided to go for a non-standard install and just download the Mozilla binary direct from the source. I unzipped the tarball into my home directory, where it made a directory named MozillaFireball. I was able to create a KDE panel shortcut to the MozillaFireball executable in that directory, but the first thing I discovered when the program loaded was that the Google search plugin, as essential to the browsing experience as tabs, was broken; the search box would only let you search the text of the current page.

Search after search for the elusive location of the searchplugins directory on Linux returned only page after page of instructions reading "Just put the search plugins in your searchplugins directory". After much cursing and creation/deletion of test searchplugins directories in places like /usr/lib/mozilla, /usr/lib/phoenix, etc., I finally renamed the MozillaFirebird directory to phoenix, making the full path to the search plugin directory /home/andy/phoenix/searchplugins. Firebird opened right up when started from a shell within the phoenix directory, and the Dmoz and Google search plugins were suddenly there!

To get Firebird to start smoothly from the KDE panel I threw together a quick shell script that sets the working directory before launching the app:

#!/bin/sh
cd /home/andy/phoenix
./MozillaFirebird &

The script is what actually gets run by the panel shortcut, and all is well with the world. My Debian installation is no longer "pure", but the Firebird is nicely self-contained - when a stable .deb becomes available the transition should be trivial.

2003-06-01 - I should have specified, that was the KDE 2.2 version of Konqueror I was stuck with. Not long after my post I got so annoyed with KDE 2's clipboard behavior that I upgraded my whole installation to the still-testing Sid, leaving Woody behind... thus, I now have a much newer version of Konqueror complete with tabs.

Debian Woody, Kernel 2.4.20, and DHCP

25 May, 2003

A couple of weeks ago I got my first new computer in 3 1/2 years, a Compaq Presario something or other with a nice Athlon XP, DVD-R/CD-RW (32x write speed, a darn sight better than the 4x external HP I've been using), and a monstrous 80 Gigabyte hard drive.

I have to concede (sinister activation methods aside), WindowsXP is an improvement over 98 while incorporating some of the "power user" features of NT... but as spoiled as I've gotten by Mac OS X at work it wasn't long before I decided to devote a partition to Linux so I can have all of my command line tools back. (Cygwin is pretty good, but too often stuff won't compile correctly under Win32)

This time around I didn't feel like making the time investment to build a LFS system, and although I've always found RedHat to be easy to install, it always seems to install a lot of extraneous crap and I've never been impressed with the RPM package management system.

I decided upon Debian, which has always sounded interesting to me. I did an HTTP-based install, and with an astounding ~150K/Second download speed a full base install, including XFree86 and KDE 3, only took about an hour.

Yesterday I decided I wanted to upgrade the kernel from 2.2 to 2.4 because I want to get my Creative Extigy set up with the available Linux driver.

The first kernel I tried was 2.4.18, from the stable packages, but I ran into all kinds of problems with my particular Ethernet card, which uses the RealTek 8139 chipset; the 2.4 kernel uses the 8139too module instead of the older rtl8139 module used by the 2.2 kernel. The only problem is a bug somewhere in the kernel code (I think) that hosed support for the 8139. I manged to determine that the problem is fixed in kernel 2.4.20, and off I went.

At first I thought I was having the same problem with my network card; I would reboot and have no connectivity, and restarting network services proved fruitless... I tried installing the dhclient package, but that didn't work either. Then I read something about pump, and sure enough pump -i eth0 grabbed an IP address and got me onto my home network in a snap... but only when I ran it manually; it didn't work during startup.

Finally, as I started my second cup of coffee this morning, I came across a post instructing hapless users in my situation to make sure that CONFIG_FILTER is set to y in the kernel source .config file. After recompiling and rebooting for the umpteenth time in the last 24 hours, it worked! And it's only 9:00 AM! I have all day to tear my hair out trying to get sound out of my Extigy.

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Andy Chase
(978) 297-6402
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