Blog: Problems with Debian Squeeze on lenovo X200s

Note: This entry should have been written here in March or April. I wanted it to be published in retrospect because of following blog posts related to Ubuntu and so forth.

I was using Debian for years now and my setup is roughly this one:

• Openbox as Window Manager small, lightweight, configurable in a way that is enough for my requirements
• fbpanel as task bar small, lightweight, configurable in a way that is enough for my requirements
• GKrellm2 as system status indicator the swiss army knife of GUI system status
• Konsole as terminal emulator
• Iron as default browser FireFox only for its print preview (until Iron/Chrome/Chromium offers such a feature)

For a long time, I was using grml as my base system. Because its main focus is its usage as live system and some issues with this contradiction to my requirements, I switched to Debian/GNU unstable (sid) in 2010.

Facing problems there I tried Debian/GNU Squeeze (current stable) which resulted in pretty much the same since Squeeze contains pretty much the same software as my (old) sid installation. But I thought that hardware support would be better with stable.

Unfortunately I still face several problems:

Pretty annoying!

Suspend to ram or suspend to disk works but resume results in reboot or freezed system in approximately 40-60% of the time.

Since I have may open windows, several GNU screen sessions in parallel, I do not want to set up all windows and sesssions each time I boot up my system. I am using suspend/resume all the time, rebooting only if it is inevitable.

So it is a hard problem when my system is not able to provide me that feature.

Since my lenovo X200s had a problem where it could not be started every now and then beeping the sound of "your RAM is defect" while my RAM did pass each RAM test without any problem at all, my main board was exchanged. Since then, the "noes not boot" problem is gone but the "does not resume" problem still exists.

I am not sure if this is another hardware problem or a problem of the operating system.

In my opinion, resume/suspend/restore should be done by the BIOS (or EFI) and not by each operating system seperately.

If a resume worked, some times the trackpoint (my mouse if you want) is gone. External mouse works but internal trackpoint is dead.

To use a projector, I switch back and forth using xrandr. This works so far. But sometimes, after switching back to LCD and then switching to my external TFT setting, the TFT can not be addressed well: the maximum resolution is not recognised any more.

I have to restart Xorg or the computer in order to use the TFT again.

So strange: sometimes (there are a lot of "sometimes" for a deterministic computer, huh?) my system freezes for a couple of seconds when I am selecting an URL using the mouse.

After that, it all works normal and I can paste the URL anywhere I want. But this five seconds of waiting time is annoying, keeping me from continuing my task.

My intel card was not supported back then in 2009 when I first set up my GNU/Linux. It might be the case that this is fixed by now but I did not play around since then and the install routine of Squeeze did not use any native driver either.

Usually this does not bother me at all. But one thing stays: I am not able to test things like Gnome 3 which needs 3d support.

Being in a new WLAN environment, I used to modify /etc/network/interfaces writing a new entry for the new network (which I scanned using command line tools). This is too complicated for a one-time WLAN network access.

I'm sure that there are cool things out there but out-of-the-box it does not provide such a feature.

Unless I can not solve these problems with a reasonable effort, I tend to change to Ubuntu 11.04 because of its "this should be good enough for Joe Everyday with zero knowledge of Linux".

I'm getting old officially.