Debian Bug Reporting Party!


This is my second post title in a row that ends in an exclamation point. But before I get voted off the island, I thought it would be a good idea to have a post dedicated to the reporting of Debian bugs great and small. I could kick it off by whining reporting my findings and linking to various bug reports I've left, and then you the reader can confirm and augment my bug report with your own additions. Then in the comments section, you can tell us about bugs you've run into and we can confirm and resolve to file a report to the ever-responsive bug squashing gods.

I've been switching over to Debian Jessie and I've run into several bugs that seem to be PowerPC issues. There are of course KMS issues with Xorg's radeon driver (black screen, system freezes, broken suspend), but I'm not sure there's much point in leaving bug reports since Xorg developers have basically said they don't have the hardware or inclination to debug our issues. This is a bit of a conundrum since KMS will now be required to use the radeon driver, and those of us who can't switch because of the above bugs are stuck with the fbdev driver and an unaccelerated desktop.

That said, maybe we can find a more receptive audience with sound bugs. The one I'm most interested in is this Clementine bug. It crashes whenever I try to play a music file, and it happens on all three systems I've used it on. I've never seen anyone else report a similar bug, so my question is, can anyone on PowerPC get Clementine to play files? Or is it just me?

Another bug I found is tangentially related to Clementine. Clementine pulls in gstreamer1.0-alsa as a recommended dependency, but with that package installed, all other GStreamer players crash. After I uninstalled gstreamer1.0-alsa, GStreamer apps like Rhythmbox and Banshee could once again play files. Again, I haven't seen this reported elsewhere, so maybe it's a PowerPC thing.

Definitely a PowerPC thing is this soundcard-detect issue, also reported and commented on in many other places. Hopefully somebody's working on it behind the scenes, or maybe the next bug report will be the magic one?

Finally, two other audio bugs: Quod Libet's equalizer plugin failed, and I can't get an audio server with jackd2.

In kernel bug news, I found a couple. First, hibernate isn't working for me, and second, when DPMS powers off the screen after 10 minutes of inactivity, the backlight won't come on after I wake it. The only way to turn the backlight back on is to toggle the brightness keys. This is on my iBook using the fbdev driver; I haven't tested it with KMS on my Powerbook as I've not upgraded that to Jessie yet.

As for GUI bugs, I found a massive one — as in it makes your icons massively oversized. This only happens in GTK3 applications when using an SVG icon theme, so an easy workaround is to ditch SVG icons or GTK3 apps.

In terribly sad news, xfburn appears to crash whenever I add files in preparation for a data burn. The package maintainer had nothing to say, but another developer with an interest seemed to think this was a PowerPC, or at least a 32-bit, issue.

This brings up something else. In the bug reports I've filed, package maintainers haven't been exactly jumping off their stools to respond. In a lot of these reports I left backtraces and everything, but there appears to be precious little debugging. Maybe if more PowerPC users chime in, we can get a better response. Or at least make developers feel really really guilty inside when they don't do anything.

Any bugs you've come across that really bug you? Leave them in the comments, and me and hopefully others can try to confirm them and organize a party of pitchfork and torch bearers to show up at a developer's doorstep.

17 comments:

  1. Webkit browsers (midori, surf, laukit) are busted in Jessie. They took midori and luakit out of the repos but surf was still so I was able to put a bug in but that was three weeks ago and no response. I post a thread in the forums and the mailing list. Lubuntu is even worst. QT browsers like qupzilla are crashing as well. Also worth noting that w/o KMS enabled in Jessie Xvid will not play. I do hope Jessie stays in testing for a while longer.

    rican-linux

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    1. Oh, yeah, I forgot about the webkit problems. And that no response habit by Debian maintainers is seriously annoying. Maybe I should just report bugs upstream from now on.

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    2. You are telling me! If you are going to support an powerpc then it would help if you respond to bug reports.

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  2. hi guys i and another developer are try to build fsuae Kvm on linuxPPc i have success made the PPC version for macosx on youtube there is my video AmigaOs4 running on PowerMac G5 .
    But i have big problem build and working Kvm kernel on my Quad g5 . My Debian is the Wheezy 7.5 and kernel is 3.4.63 ... Any tips!?

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  3. When installing Debian Jessie from the NetInstall CD on my PowerMac G5 the fans will blast at full speed. It probably lacks SMU support.

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    1. Right, the installer doesn't support the G5's fan control. You have to adjust settings after the install. Those links rican-linux left below are helpful, and if you need more, google "G5 Linux windfarm".

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  4. Check out the Ubuntu PowerpcFAQ on fan control. May you need load the correct modules. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ#How_do_I_adjust_my_fan_limits.3F

    Also there a thread on the Debain forums you could check out
    http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=105268

    rican-linux

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  5. I'm still running Wheezy on my iBook (I'm not insane, especially with all these bugs that you're mentioning). Please report these bugs, everybody, or else all the other PPC Linux users on Stable will get a rough surprise when they move to Jessie. I don't want to have to move over to Gentoo or anything (it might kill my poor G4 processor), and there's not a 32-bit issue, but a PPC issue. I have a Thinkpad with nearly identical specs to my iBook - Same graphics card, same resolution, Pentium M, and it's working fine on Debian testing.

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    1. I agree more PPC users need to be reporting bugs. The problem that I am seeing is that all these issues are upstream. I have seen the same issues on both Jessie and Lubuntu. KMS will be one of the biggest issues for people who have radeon cards when the move to Jessie comes. There looks like there will be no help from the upstream developers. Here is a good example of the frustration being felt on the Ubuntu side of the house: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1377878

      rican-linux

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  6. Although Debian officially supports 13 CPU types, it's really only the 32 and 64 bit x86 versions that get the developers full attention all the time. Others such as PowerPC, ARM and SPARC are such a tiny percent of the user base that they seem to come under some neglect during the testing period.

    We actually have it much better than some of the other architectures that are "officially" supported. I have heard tales of long abandonment of some bug fixes from SPARC people.

    Debian is a large but slow moving distro. That's just the reality. Because it's so slow moving, some things may not be fixed until the next stable, if at all. It's certainly more DIY than most others; besides maybe Gentoo, which is the DIY king of Linux.

    This is why most people naturally gravitate to the stable. Just the word "stable" is full of warm and fuzzy feelings of no BS going into it.

    Think about this... Debian is 21 years old (first released in 1993), and in that 21 years there have only been 7 stable releases. That tells us everything we need to know to make sense of all these bugs in the testing release, even this far in to testing. They average one every 3 years, and Wheezy is only about 18 months old as the stable.

    Early adopters need to welcome bugs, because that's your job as testers. Be strong young testers, and fight the good fight. :)

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    1. Thanks Zen for throwing in some perspective. I have since gone to back to Wheezy and am happy with "boring" :) I am thinking about getting another powerbook or ibook to continue testing Jessie. Speaking of SPARC it looks like it is being pulled from support in Jessie : https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/powerpc/release-notes/ch-whats-new.en.html#idp158592

      rican-linux

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    2. My goal/point was to add some sense to the bug neglect, not encourage people drop testing and move to stable. The testing version needs testers, and Dan made this post to help get bugs on the table and sorted; something I fully put my support behind.

      If we all stick with the stable, it will be harder to achieve greatness when Jessie finally hits stable. Wheezy was a better stable release than Squeeze, so hopefully if all the testiers keep at it, and be as loud as possible (in as many places as possible), then hopefully Jessie will be better also by the time it hits stable. That could potentially be another 18 months, or even 2 years.

      Keep the faith, and report those bugs as loudly as possible!

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    3. You did not move to go to stable. It was a culmination of fustrations that I was experiencing with Jessie. I do not know if Dan experienced this since he uses only Openbox but in Jessie lxsession was crashing. I reported a bug and the maintainer suggested that I use the Sid package. It looked that this was working for a while but I noticed that LXDE was taking for ever to load, then it would not load at unles I dropped to commandline and enter startx. Then it started impacting my openbox session after I started to use lxsession to manage what apps would launch on startup. It just got very annoying and time consuming.

      I do plan go back to Jessie and keep seeing what other bugs I can find. I do want Jessie to be as smooth and stable as wheezy is now.

      rican-linux

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  7. I just got back word that there may be a fix coming for webkit in Jessie! There is hope after all!

    rican-linux

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  8. Tested last debian kernel 3.16 and :
    The kernel gave the opportunity to have the Kvm Pr (finally)
    but : crash Xorg if used the 7800gtx 512 (it is working on 3.2.63)
    i swapped to the 6600 and there i can have only software resterizer if Gallium the Xorg freeze. plus the fans spins like a jumbo jet in software resterized mode....
    My config is Quad G5 with 8gb of ram

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  9. UPDATE: looks like there is a patch for webkitgtk on powerpc but they are having issues applying the patch. You can follow the thread here

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  10. UPDATE II: There is now a patch for webkitgtk browser for Jessie! You can find the details here. It looks like laukit is no longer in the Jessie repos but a similar browser dwb is there to try.

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