ongardie.net

2010-02-21 15:48

I've switched my laptop over from Debian Lenny (stable) to Squeeze (testing). While I made it this far with the aging software available in Lenny by pulling newer packages from backports and unstable, I finally gave in for Python 2.6.

In case it helps anyone else, my laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 with an Intel graphics chip and wifi card. Much of what broke is related to kernel mode-setting (KMS). Here's the list:

I had vga=794 in my /etc/default/grub, which is no longer compatible. On Squeeze's kernel with this setting, the console framebuffer did not display anything. I think the GRUB_GFXMODE variable is supposed to replace it.
X failed to start and failed to let me switch back to the consoles on Squeeze's kernel (linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-amd64 2.6.32-5). I think you need an Intel graphics chip and 4GB of RAM to enjoy this bug (which seems at least related to FreeDesktop's Bug #25510). If you're so lucky, the kernel in unstable fixes the problem for me (linux-image-2.6.32-2-amd64 2.6.32-8).
I had a residual config file that apt did not purge at /etc/udev/rules.d/z60_xserver_xorg_input_wacom.rules that caused screenfuls of warnings early in the boot process.
Something has broken ifconfig wlan0 up on boot, but an easy work-around is to turn the hardware radio kill switch to off and then back to on.
Despite my efforts, Bluetooth is enabling itself. I'll have to find a way to turn that off again.
Instead of using module-assistant to build the ThinkPad SMAPI module, I installed the tp-smapi-dkms package.
IPython doesn't ship with /usr/bin/ipython2.6 yet, but copying /usr/bin/ipython2.5 seems to work fine. (It uses $0 to determine which version of Python to call.)