A Debian Jessie Update

Since Wheezy turned stable, I've been running Jessie on a spare iBook with varying degrees of success/heartbreak, so I figured I'd throw in a progress report for those of you who are curious about upgrading (DON'T!!!!!!!!!!). I keeed.

It's actually been smooth running except for a few very slightly minor bugs. Like sound, for instance. Completely broken. I don't know if this affects every sound card, but mine isn't detected with the new kernel. Also, suspend to RAM has a very slight, minor bug. Also completely broken. I left two bug reports, No sound on PowerPC with Jessie upgrade and Suspend fails on iBook G3 Dual USB PowerPC, in case anyone wants to add to the crickets left by Debian's kernel maintainers.

Both of these problems can be dealt with, fortunately, by an easy workaround. If you upgraded from Wheezy to Jessie, you can boot into the previous kernel (3.2.0-4) by hitting tab at the second yaboot prompt and typing in "old". Afterward, sound and suspend should be back to normal. Incidentally, if you have several old kernels and need to boot into one specifically, the sixth post in this Ubuntu thread tells you how to edit /etc/yaboot.conf to achieve that.

I suppose those problems will be eventually fixed, but with the latest update I saw even worse news. Xserver-xorg-video-radeon was updated to a KMS-only version, meaning if you have a Radeon GPU and don't have KMS activated, it throws it back to the fbdev driver, meaning video playback will suck and you'll only see 8 bit colors. You can fix the 8 bit colors problem by passing the yaboot parameter "video=radeonfb:1024x24-32@60" at start up (replace 1024x768 with your native resolution). This is familiar to anybody who followed zen's guide to installing Lubuntu. However, this won't help you speed up video playback which, as mentioned, sucks with fbdev.

You can always activate KMS with the yaboot parameter "video=radeonfb:off", but there are downsides (along with the upside of enabling 3d). First, KMS breaks suspend on PowerPC and I found no indication work is being done to correct this. Also, your keyboard brightness keys may not work. But worst of all, when I tried enabling KMS on two of my machines, I got a black screen (iBook) and persistant system freezes after boot (Sawtooth). So KMS is totally unusable for me. So how do I get back my fast 2d desktop with decent video playback that I had with the old radeon driver?

Fortunately you can downgrade select packages. I'm sure there's a more elegant way by using dpkg, but here's my quick and dirty way of downgrading to the previous radeon driver. First, edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and change all the listings from jessie to wheezy. Then do a sudo aptitude update to update the repositories, then switch to a console and kill X with sudo /etc/init.d/yourloginmanager stop, and then (on one line):

sudo aptitude remove xserver-xorg-video-radeon

Aptitude told me it needed to remove two dependencies, xserver-xorg-video-all and xserver-xorg-video-ati as well, so I said fine and proceeded. Next, I reinstalled the drivers using the old wheezy repositories with (one line):

sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-ati

There's one more step and that's to put a hold on the radeon driver, that is, to tell your package manager to keep it at that version and never upgrade it. I found the instructions for that at Not So Frequently Asked Questions, but it's basically:

sudo -s

to make yourself root. And then (on one line):

echo xserver-xorg-video-radeon hold | dpkg --set-selections

and to confirm the new setting:

dpkg --get-selections xserver-xorg-video-radeon

Finally you'll want to revert back to the Testing repositories by restoring your edits to /etc/apt/sources.list and running sudo aptitude update again.

Afterward when I did a full-upgrade to upgrade all my packages, the video-all and video-ati packages were upgraded, which I didn't care about, but the radeon package remained at its old version. Now when you startx or reboot, your desktop should be back to its old snappy self.

I should note here, you should be cautious about putting holds on packages. It's possible you can have a cascading amount of packages held back from upgrades as the dependencies on that original held package build up. But in this case with the radeon package it hasn't been a problem, but it's something to keep an eye on. I just made sure to save a note about how to hold and unhold packages from the above link.

One more snafu you should be aware of, the new gtk-3-0 update will break some themes causing gtk3 applications to quit immediately upon open. I'm not sure this is a bug that will ever be fixed since the problem is supposedly with the themes themselves. So if yours breaks, you can either wait for the theme maintainer to release an update or find a new theme (and given I hate all themes, except one which I find satisfactory but which is now broken, this is an unfortunate burden). --UPDATE: or you could take the gtk-3.0 folder out of your theme folder from ~/.themes and use gtk3 apps without a theme.

I didn't bother downgrading gtk-3-0 because it had too many dependencies. It would've gotten too weird.

So that's where Jessie is. I admit to being discouraged and depressed about it, especially on the graphics side. A few years ago I had this vision of Linux on PowerPC always getting better and better, but with support for older graphics cards being dropped left and right, and now this KMS-only business, it looks like we'll be patching together systems with sticks and chewing gum for the foreseeable future.

Maybe the Debian team can be convinced to realize they found perfection with Wheezy and to maintain it with security updates and backports for like the next ten years, or at least until our PATA hard drives burn out ;)