Saturday 19 June 2021

Debian 10.10 media checking - RELEASE - 202106192215

And that's it for another release. A few bugs but nothing show-stopping.

Thanks again to Sledge, RattusRattus and Isy, to Linux-Fan and schweer.

As the testing page notes, there's a bug in some arm64 installs - the fix should come out via debian-security shortly but you might want to be aware of this.

 Here's to the next one: only a short time until Bullseye

Debian 10.10 media checking - 202106191837 - We're doing quite well

Linux-Fan and Schweer have just left us: Schweer has confirmed that all the Debian-Edu images are fine and working to his satisfaction.

 After a short break for food, we're all back in on testing: the Cambridge folks are working hard.  There have been questions on IRC about the release in Libera.Chat as well. Always good to do this: at some point in the next couple of months, we'll be doing this for Debian 11 [Bullseye] :)

Thanks as ever to all behind the scenes making each point release happen and to those folks supporting LTS and ELTS. It takes a huge amount of bug fixing, sometimes on the fly as issues are discovered, to make it work this seamlessly.


Fixing Wayland failing to start when a desktop environment is installed but your machine needs firmware. ...

This came up in an install that I was just doing for Debian 10.10 media testing.

 I hadn't seen this before and it would be disconcerting to other people, though it is a known bug, I think.

 I was installing an image that had no network and no firmware. KDE failed to run and dropped me to a text mode prompt. This was because the Zotac SBC I'm using requires Radeon R600 firmware to work. There was a warning message on screen to that effect.

 The way round this was to plug in a network cable and edit /etc/apt/sources.list.

 Editing /etc/apt/sources.list was to add contrib and non-free to the appropriate lines to allow me to install  firmware-linux-nonfree and firmware-misc-nonfree which includes the appropriate AMD firmware for the embedded Radeon chipset.

 Since the machine hadn't been connected to a network at install time, I also needed to run a dhclient command to obtain a network lease and allow me to install the non-free metapackages over the network.

Result: success: a full KDE desktop. [The machine is an old Zotac SBC with embedded graphics hardware: AMD E350 - specifically, it requires firmware-amd-graphics and amd64-microcode].

Debian 10.10 release 202106191548

 Late blogging on this one.

Even as we wait for the final release of Bullseye [Debian 11], we're still producing updates for Debian 10 [Buster].

Today has thrown up a few problems: working with Steve, RattusRattus and Isy in Cambridge, Schweer and Linux-Fan somewhere else in the world.

A couple of build problems have meant that we've started later than we otherwise might have been and a couple of image runs have had to be redone. We're there now and happily running tests.

As ever, it's good to be doing this. With practice, I can now repeat mistakes with 100% reliability and in shorter time :)

More updates later.