Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

el_koraco · 2012-05-04 22:50:58

As many of you know (because I keep mentioning it repeatedly), I got m a new computer. So I installed Squeeze, but Intel's developers have unmade some XvOverlay configs and I thought stuff might be "better" in a later release. You can't dist-upgrade to Sid from Stable right now, because dpkg is stupid and attempts to configure libept (whatever that is) before it configures libapt (and you know, libept depends on libapt, so it's Debian hell. But why the fuck isn't libapt configured first, it seems much more important, and it's even first in line alphabetically!). So I dl's a businesscard iso, entered expert mode and tried to install SId directly. The same thing.

I only have a wireless connection at the moment, because I left my ethernet cable in my new apartment (I'm living with my mom untill I fix it up, which is probably why I started the whole thing, it's much better to look at deboostrap than watch TV with mommy).

Anyhoo, the error crops up with a Wheezy businesscard iso as well, but at least that one is WPA capable, which turned out to be the life saver in the end. OK, so I install Wheezy directly, keeping /home. The driver situation is the same, so that blows, and other stuff is not up to par yet - I can't use my preferred theme, not the GTK2 and GTK3 thing, but it doesn't render properly even though I didn't use any GTK3 applications, I had to go through six different permutations of ck-launch and dbus-launch until udisks decided to automount USBs, there's some ridiculous Freedesktop.org config keeping conky from displaying properly in the dwm bar and on and on. I had no interest in dist-upgrading to Sid at that point, so I installed Ubuntu LTS from a mini iso.

Ubuntu boots crazy fast (I'm talking under ten seconds, on a damned 5400 RPM Sata II disk), but everything else is a complete fucking disaster, especially Shitstart (it can't load wpasupplicant's roaming config from /e/n/i and hangs on allow-hotplug wlan0, lol). I mean, it may work OK with Unity and Gnome and stuff, but that's not what I was looking for. How in the hell do they ship a server flavor with a non-functioning ifupdown is beyond me. I tried the 3.4 kernel and the latest Xorg from Xorg edgers, but Synaptics is a mess there.

So onwards to Arch. The netinstall iso, and it's nice to see that dhcpcd is still broken beyond recognition (wpasupplicant associates with the AP easy, but dhcpcd will not get a lease until the fourth or fifth attempt, lol). Why do they still insist on using the "lighter" dhcp solution instead of the always functioning dhclient is beyond me. So after I spent 20 minutes waiting for a lease, I remembered an old "trick" (I guess it's just my trick, I'm not sure anyone else is aware of it) whereby you run aif-partial-configure-network or whatever that's called (Installation Framerowk, lol) after you associate with the AP and it works. But I made the mistake of picking netcfg as my network manager, which is even worse than the last time I used Arch. I gave up at that point, thought for a micro second about installing (...le gasp) Fedora, laughed it out, dd'd the Wheezy iso to the disk, and did an expert install to Stable.

Good Lord, the next time a blog weenie bitches about the debian installer, I'll send Black Ivan to him. On the plus side, I now have an LVM setup, which I dind't go for the last time, and I properly formated the disk and made /home ext4 from the start (I accidentally made it ext3 on the last install, and while you can easily convert, stuff you put on the partition while it wasn't ext4 doesn't use extents, so it fragments and fsck is slow as molasses when it chacks the blocks). So I can fsarchive from a running system with a snapshot, which I'll do in a milisecond.

Thank you!

Last edited by el_koraco (2012-05-04 22:57:03)

machinebacon · 2012-05-04 23:11:09

Time for Waldorf. Or aptosid/siduction. What keeps/kept you from it?

The problems you mentioned really peacocksuck. Especially the apt-part. But to be honest, I love to read rants big_smile

rhowaldt · 2012-05-04 23:14:42

well... i want to reply but not sure how. am i correct in reading that you got it to work in the end?

vicshrike · 2012-05-04 23:18:44

Great rant, I would have turned into a kaboodleschnitzel with all that going on. But seriously....Fedora? You were that desperate for a second? wink

el_koraco · 2012-05-04 23:23:01

vicshrike wrote:

Great rant, I would have turned into a kaboodleschnitzel with all that going on. But seriously....Fedora? You were that desperate for a second?

Yeah, then I remembered all the douchebags who go on talking about upstream and no other distro doing as much as Red Hat Linux Rawhide, so...

@rho and hippiebacon - back on Squeeze, and I'm not moving until February 2013. The point of the rant is that nothing beats Stable.

rizzo · 2012-05-04 23:29:38

vicshrike wrote:

But seriously....Fedora? You were that desperate for a second?

meh, I've just come from a long Fedora stint. I had no complaints with it.

machinebacon · 2012-05-04 23:45:51

el_koraco wrote:

@rho and hippiebacon - back on Squeeze, and I'm not moving until February 2013. The point of the rant is that nothing beats Stable.

Good Sir, Waldorf does beat it. I have been quite critical lately with #!, especially with the mongoloid November release, and I am usually a d*mned bit*h when it comes to criticizing (but also testing) different OS. I wouldn't recommend Waldorf if it wouldn't run perfectly fine (of course I know it is hardware-dependent, and I am lucky here), but you should really consider a test-drive smile

el_koraco · 2012-05-05 00:08:55

Waldorf is still Wheezy. I don't care about Openbox in the slightest bit, nor do I wanna scour through the Freedesktop documentation mess to find out why conky isn't displaying properly, learn CSS to have a proper theme and not buttuugly Adwaita or Clearlooks, or deal with a malfunctioning resolvconf, udisks...

Plus, once you get used to the building from a mini iso, ready made distros are uncool, like stuff for friends and family big_smile

VastOne · 2012-05-05 01:26:00

omns wrote:

vicshrike wrote:
But seriously....Fedora? You were that desperate for a second?
meh, I've just come from a long Fedora stint. I had no complaints with it.

If not for #!, I would still be using Fedora and agree it is a solid OS

Jabroneous · 2012-05-05 01:29:30

el_koraco wrote:

Plus, once you get used to the building from a mini iso, ready made distros are uncool, like stuff for friends and family

Agreed, except I can't !@#$%&* build anything except for Squeeze. And I haet old software. mad

Nice rant.

gutterslob · 2012-05-05 02:35:45

@Benny the Bootstrapping Balkan
Since you seem to prefer the Debian way of doing things;

I've not done a GRML install recently (ever since they replaced the excellent grml2hd with the trad debootstrap), but you could give it a go. http://grml.org/grml-debootstrap/

Here's the default (I think) /etc/debootstrap/config file that it sources. Change the "release" variable to sid and see how it goes.
http://linux.xulin.de/scaleo/debootstrap.config.new

Also; http://blog.grml.org/archives/363-Custo … ripts.html

....and if you're really bored: http://blog.grml.org/archives/365-Remas … l-CDs.html

Last edited by gutterslob (2012-05-05 02:48:49)

machinebacon · 2012-05-05 04:23:40

^ Slob - these links are worth gold, thanks a lot!

mynis01 · 2012-05-05 04:51:09

I dig Fedora too. I never use it, but the times I have, the only thing that pissed me off about it was pulse audio related, and now that's in #! too... I'm using arch on my laptop now (mainly because I nuked my perfectly stable #! on accident in an attempt to write a script to do something with GUID Partition Tables) and I kinda have to guess and check when I'm on different wifi networks whether I should use wicd-curses, network manager, or a simpler solution like netcfg or wpa_supplicant. Usually I just use wicd and if that doesn't work load up network manager and it never goes any further than that. The main thing that sucks about using NM as a fall back is all of the gnome dependancies (which I constantly have to update if I want to use pacman -Syu without freezing packages and dealing with that mess). But hey, if my compiz standalone ever freaks out and stops working I can at least boot up gnome-shell long enough to fix stuff....

sunfizz98 · 2012-05-05 06:57:29

@machinebacon
aptosid/siduction....I have mixed feelings about them since I keep jumping back and forth with their repos. Sooner or later, I'm going to pick one and dump the other.

@el_koraco
Why businesscard instead of netinstall iso? I thought both of them eventually end up with the same end result.

machinebacon · 2012-05-05 07:13:06

@SanFrancisco98er's - hard to say which one is "better", but to me it seems that in siduction there are more apps maintained (probably due to their LXDE flavour). At the end of this month they'll release a new flavour, by the way, featuring razor-qt, along with the release of Siduction 2012/2 "Desperado"

sunfizz98 · 2012-05-05 07:29:43

^I gave up on using siduction isos, since I found myself purging more stuff than aptosid, but I will gladly use their repos as long as it has the towo kernels and updated wine packages.

machinebacon · 2012-05-05 07:41:18

^ maybe they'll manage to release a lite version someday, see Aptosid. wink The difference is around 200 MB.

el_koraco · 2012-05-05 07:57:51

mynis01 wrote:

The main thing that sucks about using NM as a fall back is all of the gnome dependancies (which I constantly have to update if I want to use pacman -Syu without freezing packages and dealing with that mess). But hey, if my compiz standalone ever freaks out and stops working I can at least boot up gnome-shell long enough to fix stuff....

Well, it sure beats

root@mrarch: netcfg -u home
root@mrarch: blinking cursor with no info on why netcfg didn't connect. Maybe you want to try again? 
root@mrarch: netcfg -u home
root@mrarch: lol
root@mrarch: wpa_cli status
Selected interface 'wlan0'
bssid=00:26:18:36:ff:15
ssid=ce4f4d
id=0
pairwise_cipher=TKIP
group_cipher=TKIP
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_state=COMPLETED
ip_address=192.168.0.10
root@mrarch: dhcpcd wlan0
root@mrarch: a thousand lines on not connecting...

As for Fedora, I just don't wanna run the live CD five times before it decides not to crash on invoking Anaconda. I'll not even go into SELinux and yum.

@slob: I did consider grml-deboostrap briefly, but two days of separation from Squeeze satisfied my curiosity for new stuff. I guess I'll just pull a dmz kernel and build it as a masturbatory exercise (Liquorix 3.3 increases my battery life to over five hours, which beats every Windows review of the laptop). Thanks for the links. Btw, just to tout my LVM horn, some select info:

elkoraco@mrdeb ~ % df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/debian-root
                      4.7G  2.1G  2.4G  47% /
/dev/mapper/debian-home
                       28G  964M   26G   4% /home

Awebb · 2012-05-05 09:32:22

You're doing it wrong, el_koraco :-D

dhcpcd is not really buggy, every time I hear dhcpcd is buggy, the problem is found on layer 8 of the OSI model. Since this is not the Arch forums, PM me, if you need a push.

Unia · 2012-05-05 10:48:03

Awebb wrote:

You're doing it wrong, el_koraco :-D
dhcpcd is not really buggy, every time I hear dhcpcd is buggy, the problem is found on layer 8 of the OSI model. Since this is not the Arch forums, PM me, if you need a push.

I too am experiencing issues on dhcpcd (yes, I'm back on Arch - couldn't get used to Debian big_smile ). The issues started around kernel 3.0/3.1 I guess. There has been a bugreport on it and supposedly it got fixed, but not for me. Oke, it worked right after I installed Arch up untill I did my first hibernate. It wouldn't connect after I woke the laptop up and now it still won't even after multiple reboots. Indeed for me dhclient is the only option and I must say it's even faster than dhcpcd.

@el_k, what are your issues with netcfg? It's working perfectly for me, in combination with wifi-select.

el_koraco · 2012-05-05 13:41:39

Awebb wrote:

the problem is found on layer 8 of the OSI model

Hey, it's a rant, not a disertation. By following the official Arch documentation and the unofficial install guide (I'm not sure what the Beginner's Guide is in practice - where it fits in The Framwork), I had to spend 20 minutes setting up DHCP. Other distros let me do my main computer activity (OPUA) by that time, and that's with manually installing Xorg.

Momma don't allow me to PM with persons of unspecified gender!

@Unia - my problem with netcfg is that it doesn't work. As for your dhcpcd trouble, you probably need a PRE-UP or POST-DOWN config. Dunno, ifupdown executes wpasupplicant's pre-up and post-down commands and stuff Just Works, so I never investigated.

Last edited by el_koraco (2012-05-05 13:49:32)

Unia · 2012-05-05 14:12:11

el_koraco wrote:

Momma don't allow me to PM with persons of unspecified gender!

How cute!

el_koraco wrote:

@Unia - my problem with netcfg is that it doesn't work. As for your dhcpcd trouble, you probably need a PRE-UP or POST-DOWN config. Dunno, ifupdown executes wpasupplicant's pre-up and post-down commands and stuff Just Works, so I never investigated.

Hm, I might look into it once. Before it Just Worked and with dhclient it Just Works big_smile

Jabroneous · 2012-05-05 15:46:04

sunfizz98 wrote:

@el_koraco
Why businesscard instead of netinstall iso? I thought both of them eventually end up with the same end result.

The businesscard ISOs let you choose Sid over Squeeze or Wheezy to avoid any bloat/dependency problems from a post-install upgrade. Saves hassle and a little bandwidth to boot.

sunfizz98 · 2012-05-05 22:08:08

^But doesn't editing the sources.list first before doing apt-get update and dist-upgrades do the same thing?

ivanovnegro · 2012-05-05 22:49:42

el_koraco wrote:

Good Lord, the next time a blog weenie bitches about the debian installer, I'll send Black Ivan to him.

CBiz said: DOD!

sunfizz98 wrote:

^But doesn't editing the sources.list first before doing apt-get update and dist-upgrades do the same thing?

Yes, it does the same.

Still on Sid here with Spectrer and evil DWM and everything works perfectly iclusively with Conky. smile I still always somehow miss the issues popping up in Sid like apt and Xorg, I am still alive in Sid land distupgraded today and again passed the Xorg transitions.
Maybe at the moment when you directly want to install Sid you get trapped in the recent problems.

CrunchBang Linux

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#1 2012-05-04 22:50:58

Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#2 2012-05-04 23:11:09

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#3 2012-05-04 23:14:42

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#4 2012-05-04 23:18:44

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#5 2012-05-04 23:23:01

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#6 2012-05-04 23:29:38

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#7 2012-05-04 23:45:51

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#8 2012-05-05 00:08:55

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#9 2012-05-05 01:26:00

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#10 2012-05-05 01:29:30

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#11 2012-05-05 02:35:45

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#12 2012-05-05 04:23:40

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#13 2012-05-05 04:51:09

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#14 2012-05-05 06:57:29

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#15 2012-05-05 07:13:06

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#16 2012-05-05 07:29:43

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#17 2012-05-05 07:41:18

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#18 2012-05-05 07:57:51

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#19 2012-05-05 09:32:22

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#20 2012-05-05 10:48:03

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#21 2012-05-05 13:41:39

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#22 2012-05-05 14:12:11

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#23 2012-05-05 15:46:04

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#24 2012-05-05 22:08:08

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

#25 2012-05-05 22:49:42

Re: Wheezy is iffy, Arch is a package away from usable, and Ubuntu blows

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