As is summarized by a mailing list post, Mandriva as being a distribution developed by a company and paid employees, is now an empty box. There is no more head in charge of the future direction of the distribution, who can take the necessary decisions for new releases. It looks like no more paid employees are working on GNOME and KDE packaging, and most people working on the installer and Mandriva’s configuration tools are gone. Looking at the SVN commit history it seems like the members of the security team are almost the only paid employees still working on the distribution. One can safely say that Mandriva is now de facto already a community developed distribution.

In the meantime, the CEO has reacted on a bug report. He says that Mandriva will concentrate on the server market in Europe and on the desktop market in countries like Brazil. Because European developers would have refused to be part of that future direction, they have been fired, according to the CEO. Of course this does not make any sense. There no reason why developers in Europe could not be working on the desktop if the target market for the desktop is mostly Brazil. The real reason why people are being fired, is of course that there is simply no more money to pay them anymore. Furthermore, I am pretty sure that Mandriva can never be a real competitor for distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Server, which are much more popular in large companies. Already even 5 years ago Mandriva was often not taken seriously anymore in corporate environments, according to my experience when working for an IT company specializing in free software. Even free distributions like CentOS and Debian have a much higher reputation in the server market than Mandriva.

Tomorrow there will be a shareholder’s meeting. After that, we might have a clear view on the future of Mandriva as a company. But there should not be much doubt: Mandriva as a distribution developed by the company, has already died now.

And Mandriva as being a communtiy developed distribution? It might work if some solution is found for things like the build system and other infrastructure, now being provided by Mandriva. Maybe there will be a merger with one of these Mandriva forks like PCLinuxOS and Unity Linux. But I am convinced that these distributions currently only exist thanks to Mandriva and will definitely suffer a lot if there is no more upstream where they can copy packages from. So a merger with such a distribution will not magically fix all problems caused by Mandriva’s death. People who are looking for a distribution to install on their system, should rather remove Mandriva from their shortlist, because there are too much doubts about its future…

Recently it became clear that Mandriva was once again in serious financial trouble. Mandriva 2010.1 was even delayed because of that, although not much explanation was given. In the end the company was saved by a new investor, but how things will involve in the more long-term, remains unclear.

Probably because of the financial crisis and the uncertainty of the future of the company, more and more employees started leaving the company, among them some people who played a very important role in the development of the distribution and who have been working for Mandriva for a very long time. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

Employees seem to be unhappy because of their doubts of the future of the company and once even the most faithful employees have the impression that the ship starts sinking, everyone leaves as fast as possible. Because nobody wants to be the last one and go down with the ship… Some of them clearly expressed their frustration with the management of the company in their goodbye message sent to the public mailing lists. There have not been any indications that these employees are being replaced.

The last few years Mandriva had always trouble keeping up with the other big distributions because of lack of staff and that will only become worse now that the company faces more cost cuttings. Does this distribution still have a future? I am not sure whether the company will still continue investing in the distribution. Actually I think it is a waste of money investing in something which will always lag behind the competition. Maybe the company could drop the distribution and specialize in Linux services. On the other hand, I am not sure what is the chance of succeeding if you throw away the main product for which you are best known. Anyway, I can believe that the Mandriva distribution would survive even if the company stopped working on it because right now a lot of work is already being done by external contributors.

Now I have the feeling that Mandriva is not much more anymore than any of those smaller alternative distributions, like PCLinuxOS or Slackware. Those distributions will always have their share of fans but they do not play a significant role in the development of Linux. Already for several years most real innovations happen under the impulse of companies like Red Hat and Novell. Mandriva’s reputation has been very problematic for a long time already and this will definitely not improve after all what is happening now.

I have used Mandriva with pleasure on all my machines for about 10 years and I have always strongly defended the distribution in the past when people criticized it. But now I can only conclude that for me Mandriva does not have any future anymore and that it is time to move on.

So thank you to all the people who made Mandriva such a great distribution in the past and thanks to whom I learned a lot about Linux in those 10 years. I wish them all the best now and in the future!

So, these are some reasons why I prefer Debian GNU/Linux over other distributions:

• All officially released Debian GNU/Linux stable versions are supported for a long time. Where most other free distributions are supported for about 1,5 year, this is much longer for Debian stable. For example, security updates for Debian Etch were published up to about 3 years after its release.
• Debian is more stable than most other distributions. This is due to the large amount of testers and due to Debian’s unique development model: the “unstable” branch contains only software which is considered stable upstream (with a few generally accepted exceptions). When a package is in “unstable” for 10 days without new release critical bugs it gets moved to the “testing” distribution. The stable releases are a snapshot of the testing distribution after a freeze during which all release critical bugs are fixed. Releases of the stable distribution are not time driven: the stable distribution is only released when it is really ready.
• By using apt pinning it is possible to easily mix and match packages from different repositories so that you can run the latest version of specific applications. Apt pinning can be used to pick packages from the extensive backports repository or to install packages from the testing, unstable and even the experimental repositories without having to update your whole system to the same release (unlike Mandriva for example, and as far as I know the same is true for other distributions like Fedora). Instead, carefully defined dependencies will make sure that all packages which need to be updated together are pulled in, resulting in a working system.
• Due to Debian’s development model it is possible to run a pretty up to date system at any time without sacrificing stability by using the testing distribution. I am now running Debian Lenny testing different systems for more than a month, with software which is often more up to date than in Mandriva 2010.1, yet the system is much more stable in general than my systems which were running Mandriva 2010.1.
• Debian is fast. Debian Squeeze boots up very fast without hacks like Mandriva’s speedboot, readahead or preload. Also application start up is very fast. I am not really sure why this is the case, but my guess is that this is due to Debian’s simplicity: it does not install too much daemons and boot up scripts by default. Also Debian uses dash instead of bash for /bin/sh, which also results in faster boot times. Shutdown also feels faster than what I was used to in Mandriva.
• Debian is secure. Because stable versions are supported for about 3 years and because security updates get released very fast. Debian also plays a rather active role in fixing security problems. For example, Debian’s webkitgtk maintainer searched for all webkit security patches and ported them to the webkitgtk 1.2 branch. The fixes were included in Debian’s webkitgtk and then were also included upstream in webkitgtk 1.2.3.
• Debian is available for lots of platforms. You have an old PowerPC based laptop, a GuruPlug or OpenRD system with ARM processor or a SUN UltraSPARC server? Debian will run on all these systems.
• Debian values freedom. Debian allows me to use my GNOME system without PulseAudio without loosing my volume applet in the panel (like was the case in Mandriva). But of course, if you want PulseAudio it is available and you can install it. Debian is not exclusively tied to the Linux kernel: there exist versions with a FreeBSD or even HURD kernels. The choice is up to you. Debian uses the Exim MTA by default but if you do not like this, other MTA’s are available and are equally well maintained and integrated into the distribution. Debian does not include non-free software by default, so that you can safely use distribute and even modify the software in all possible situations without having to worry about the license. But if you want to use non-free software, it is available in the non-free repository.
• Debian is very “standard“. It does not replace standard components by its own implementations like especially Ubuntu is doing. That means that Debian does not use non-standard things like Upstart, notify-osd or indicator-applet by default or does not move the window decoration buttons to the left side. Of course if you do want to use these csutomizations, they are all available (Debian values freedom!), but by default Debian prefers to use the standard upstream software. This ensures the best compatibility with upstream now and in the future, because all these non-standard Ubuntu things might cause conflicts later on with new upstream design decisions.
• Debian is not owned by a commercial organization. The free distribution is not some kind of crippled version of a commercial product which has all features and software available. It ensures also that decisions are not taken based on commercial interests, but only in the interest of the community. If you do want commercial support, there are many companies supporting Debian all over the world.

Related to that: today is Debian’s 17th anniversary and Debian Appreciation Day. If you use Debian, let the Debian community know you appreciate their work http://thank.debian.net.

First I installed Debian on my new Samsung N210 netbook and I was very pleased with the result. Shortly after that, my father experienced a bug while trying to print in Firefox on Mandriva 2010.1. It would fail to print and there were errors related to ps2ps (if I remember correctly) in the Cups log, hinting at some bug in Ghostscript. Actually it was not the first time this bug hit us, I had seen the same problem some weeks ago.

As analysing and having this bug fixed would likely take a lot of time and I needed a rather quick solution, I though it was the right time to reinstall this system with Debian Squeeze (testing). Debian has many additional bug fixes in its GhostScript package so there was a fair chance that printing would be working better. So I did the same as with my netbook last week: I set up PXE booting to start the Debian installer (easier than digging up a CD-R, downloading an ISO and burning it), and then I installed Debian on the disk, leaving the old /home logical volume intact.

The installation went smoothly and after recreating the users and fixing the UID and GID of the home directories, the system was ready to use. Some observations:

• The first reaction when booting a clean Debian GNOME install is that it is much faster than Mandriva, even reusing the home directory from the Mandriva installation. Booting itself feels fast, login feels faster and starting applications feels faster. I am not sure whether this is because Debian itself is faster or because my old Mandriva installation was suffering from file fragmentation and suboptimal location of files belonging together.
• Debian does not install PulseAudio by default. Even better, it is possible to add a working volume applet to your GNOME panel in Debian if you are not using PulseAudio. This is much better then Mandriva, where you are left without a quickly accessible volume mixer if you disable PulseAudio.
• I had to re-add all applets on the GNOME panels. I am not sure why they were all lost after switching to Debian. After all, Mandriva and Debian Squeeze use the same GNOME 2.30 version. Anyway, this was easily fixable.
• If you have a wired connection which is configured in /etc/network/interfaces, then NetworkManager will not pick up the network connection and because of that applications like Evolution will not go online because they think there is no network connection. Either completely remove the networkmanager package (I would recommend this on a desktop system with just an Ethernet connection) or comment out everything in /etc/network/interfaces related to your Ethernet card and configure your connection with NetworkManager (I recommend this on laptop systems where you want to use NetworkManager for connecting to wifi networks).
• And last but not least: printing works fine. There are no ps2ps crashes. I just had to get hplip from unstable because the hplip package in testing is built with python 2.5 while testing switched to Python 2.6 by default very recently.

Firefox/Iceweasel

I am using Iceweasel 3.6 from Experimental because Squeeze (and Sid) only have Firefox 3.5. Do not be fooled by the version number 3.6.4: Debian has patched this version with the single bugfix in 3.6.6, so you are actually using the latest secure 3.6.6.

Compiz

On my netbook, I am using Compiz. To start it in GNOME, I added this line to ~/.gnomerc:

export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/local/bin/compiz-ccp


Then create /usr/local/bin/compiz-ccp with these contents:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/compiz ccp

and make the file executable. There might be an easier way to get this working fine, not involving the creation of the custom start-up script, but this is working for me.

Adobe Flash

Even though I still think Flash sucks (before Firefox started running plug-in in their own process in version 3.6.4, Flash was responsible for 25% of all Firefox crashes!), unfortunately there is no real way around it when installing systems for other users. On 32 bit x86 Debian it is as easy as adding the non-free repository in /etc/apt/sources.list and then installing the flashplugin-nonfree package, which will download the latest Flash and install it for you. If you are using 64 bit however, things get a bit more complicated because Adobe does not publish a 64 bit Flash plug-in. Fortunately, the debian-multimedia repositories contain everything we need to get the 32 bit plug-in working with nspluginwrapper: add the repositories, install the repository’s public key and then install the flashplayer-mozilla package. More details: http://www.debianadmin.com/how-to-install-adobe-flash-in-debian-etchlennysid.html

Application selection and configuration for a netbook with small display

My netbook has only 1 GB of RAM and a resolution of 1024×600 pixels so I made some adaptations to make use of these resources in an efficient way.

Font size

First I decreased the font size in GNOME. In the menu System – Preference – Appearancd – Fonts I configured it to use 9pt fonts and a 8pt monospace font.

Avant Window Navigator

I disabled the standard gnome-panel and use Avant Window Navigator instead. It combines an application launcher and taskbar in one dock and it can be configured to automatically hide, saving space on my netbook screen. When you have started Avant Window Navigator, right-click on the dock and choose Dock Preferences. I set the panel behaviour to IntelliHide and chose the 3D style and I added the Cairo Main Menu, Show Desktop, Launcher/TaskManager, Notification Area and Notification Daemon applets. Now to make awn replace the gnome-panel by default at login, start-up gconf-editor, and go to /desktop/gnome/session/required_components and change the value of the panel key to avant-window-navigator.

Epiphany

For maximum performance on my netbook I use Epiphany most of the time instead of Firefox/Iceweasel. Epiphany has some useful extensions available in the epiphany-extensions package which you might want to install too. For example it contans an AdBlock extension and an extension which lets you view Youtube movies without using Flash.

In Epiphany, you can switch to full screen mode by pressing F11, which is quite handy on a small netbook screen

Evolution

For e-mail I use Evolution. It is pretty heavy but there are not that many lightweight alternatives available except maybe for Claws Mail. However I do not like its interface too much and it also has less advanced IMAP support (Evolution now supports the IDLE extension in its IMAPx implementation). I switched Evolution to vertical style (View – Preview – Vertical Style) and I disabled the status bar ((View – Layout – Show Status Bar ) and the Switcher buttons in the bottom part of the sidebar (View – Switcher Appearance, uncheck Show Buttons).

Video acceleration

To squeeze (!) the best performance out of my Intel graphics chip in my netbook, I decided to install the latest versions of the mesa and the Intel driver available in experimental. This has not caused any stability problems for me. I also installed cairo 1.9.10 from experimental but as this is really an upstream development version this is much more risky. I seem to experience some glitches which might be caused by this so you have been warned!

Software Centre

If you want a very nice application for finding and installing new software, then you definitely need to install the software-center package.

So, these were some quick notes about using Debian on a desktop and netbook system. I am quite pleased with the result so I will probably be migrating my other Mandriva systems too in the near future.

Now that I have a new battery, it is time to take a look again at trying to lower power consumption as much as possible. On my system I am using Mandriva 2010.1 Cooker with GNOME 2.30 and laptop-mode-tools 1.54, but this howto should apply (sometimes with slight modifications) to other distributions too.

Setting up ondemand cpufreq governor

The first thing to check is whether CPU frequency scaling is enabled. This should be supported on most up to date CPUs, including Intel Pentium M and Intel Core series and all AMD Athlon 64 and Turion CPUs.

Install the cpufrequtils package:

# urpmi cpufrequtils


Now run the cpufreq-info command to see the current cpufreq settings of your processors. It should show the different clock frequencies supported by your processors and which cpufreq governor and which frequency is currently active. Even when not running on battery power, the “ondemand” cpufreq governor should be used so that it will use the lowest frequency when your system is mostly idle and will switch to the fastest frequency when your system gets loaded. To configure the ondemand governor by default, you can install the cpufreq package with urpmi. It will load the governor set in /etc/sysconfig/cpufreq at boot up, which is ondemand by default.

If cpufreq-info complains that no cpufreq driver is loaded, you can try to run

# modprobe acpi-cpufreq

if you have an Intel CPU or

# modprobe powernow-k8

if you have an AMD CPU and retry. These are the most widely used cpufreq drivers. If one of these is successful and it was not loaded automatically, you can add the right driver name to the /etc/modprobe.preload file so that it gets loaded automatically at the next boot.

Setting up gnome-power-manager

In GNOME open the menu System and then choose Preferences – Power Management.

You can already set up some power savings measures in the AC Power tab. Personally I have it set to go to sleep after 1 hour, to blank the screen when the laptop lid is closed and to put the display to sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity. I have set the display brightness to 100% and disabled dimming on idle.

In the Battery Power tab I have configured to go to sleep when inactive for 10 minutes and to blank the screen when the lid is closed. When battery power is critically low I let it hibernate (so that no data is lost when the battery runs out completely) and I let the hard drives spin down. The display goes to sleep after 1 minute of activity and the display is dimmed when idle.

If you have root access on your laptop, I recommend clicking on the Make Default button, so that it will use these settings for all users and also when you are not logged in yet.

Now there are some more advanced settings which are not shown in gnome-power-manager’s preferences utility. Start up gconf-editor (System – Preferences – Configuration Editor) and navigate to /apps/gnome-power-manager in the tree of the left side. Under that folder you will find the subfolder backlight. Select it to see more detailed settings at the right side. There I have set the brightness_dim_battery key to 80 for a still lower brightness when running on battery power. You will see the effects of changing the value immediately when you are running on battery, so you can try out different values to find what suites you best. The idle_brightness key (the brightness to be used when idle) is set to 20 and idle_dim_time (amount of seconds after which the screen backlight will be dimmed) to 15.

laptop-mode-tools

Make sure you have the laptop-mode-tools package installed. This tool will automatically implement all kinds of power saving settings when you system switches to battery power.

Open the file /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf in a text editor as root. Only a few settings need to be tweaked.

To enable most power saving modules, set

ENABLE_AUTO_MODULES=1


When running on battery power, it is recommended to make sure all file systems are mounted with the noatime option, in order not to cause any writes every time a file is read. Set

CONTROL_NOATIME=1
USE_RELATIME=0


Laptop-mode-tools also controls the hard disk idle timeout. I set it to the same values as gnome-power-manager so that they will not override each other:

CONTROL_HD_IDLE_TIMEOUT=1
LM_AC_HD_IDLE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=60
LM_BATT_HD_IDLE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=60
NOLM_HD_IDLE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=7200


The various laptop-mode-tools are configured in the files in /etc/laptop-mode-tools/conf.d. Again the defaults are pretty nice. I made these changes:

• I do not use Bluetooth very often and when I use it, I am always on AC power. So to save battery time I ldisable Bluetooth when running on battery power. In /etc/laptop-mode-tools/conf.d/bluetooth.conf, set
  
CONTROL_BLUETOOTH=1
BATT_ENABLE_BLUETOOTH=0
AC_ENABLE_BLUETOOTH=1
BLUETOOTH_INTERFACES="hci0"

• Thanks to the cpufreq package, we already set up the ondemand cpufreq governor. However when running on battery it is even better to run the conservative governor: instead of going to full speed when the machine gets loaded, the conservative governor will more gradually switch to the frequencies between the minimum and maximum frequencies. In /etc/laptop-mode-tools/conf.d/cpufreq.conf set
  
BATT_CPU_GOVERNOR=conservative

• In the file /etc/laptop-mode-tools/hal-polling.conf, HAL polling is disabled by default when running on battery. If you do not want this (it might prevent automounting of CD and DVD media when running on battery power, set
  
CONTROL_HAL_POLLING=0

  However, if you want to enable this, check that your CD/DVD drive is mentioned the polling devices configured in that file. By default it will disable polling on all /dev/scd? devices but on my system the DVD drive is called /dev/sr0, so I modified it to /dev/sr?. Unfortunately, laptop-module-tools does not yet support udisks-daemon, a replacement for HAL which also polls the CD/DVD drive.

Laptop-mode-tools can also disable certain services when running on battery power. This is interesting for scheduling daemons like crond and atd.

cd /etc/laptop-mode/batt-stop
ln -s /etc/init.d/atd .
ln -s /etc/init.d/crond .


After changing the laptop-mode-tools configuration, restart the service:

# /etc/init.d/laptop-mode-tools restart


Enabling caching in rsyslog

In order to prevent too much disk wake-ups because of logging it is recommended to enable caching for all log files in rsyslog. Edit /etc/syslog.conf and make sure there is a – before every /var/log file name. Then restart rsyslog:

# /etc/init.d/rsyslog restart


Run powertop to identify applications causing too many wake-ups

Install the powertop package and run powertop as root. After it has collected enough data it will show the processes causing the most CPU wake-ups. Stop any unneeded applications causing lots of wake-ups. Powertop will also give you power saving recommendations but you can actually ignore them: if you have set up laptop-mode-tools as explained above, all of them are implemented already.

Disable WiFi if you do not use it

And last but not least: switch off your wireless network card with the wifi kill switch on your laptop if you do not use it. This simple trick can easily give you more than 10% more battery life time. You can also disable it when you temporarily do not need the network connection, for example while reading long web pages or while writing e-mails.

With all these measures in place and with a bit of conservative wifi usage, it seems my battery will last more than 7 hours. That is a nice improvement!

At the same time, I updated WordPress to the latest version 2.9.2 and installed a new theme, the Arjuna X which looked nice at first sight. All visitors using Internet Explorer will get a banner with a recommendation to update to a better browser thanks to the No IE Welcome plug-in. I hope more people will put up such a banner on their website in order to help spreading the word about better browsers. Especially in light of the current Theora vs. H264 video codec in HTML 5 discussion, I think we really need to promote those browsers that favour a really open codec. Firefox, Chrome and also Opera (from version 10.50, not yet available for Linux) are the good guys supporting Theora.

I expect I will not be able to resist to updating a package now and then, but because I am considering switching to another distribution (which would likely be Debian testing), this might also end in the future. In any case, also don’t expect “Cooker noteworthy updates” posts any more on this blog.

Now it is time to enjoy life! :-)