Debian

While preparing for the Madrid edition of the Android Developer Lab, which will happen in a few hours (you know, why doing something in advance, if you can do it at the latest hour), I found an installation problem in my Debian testing (Squeeze of the day) box. I was installing the newest (2.1) Android SDK, via the Android installer (as found in tools r04). When trying to get the list of available packages, I got:

Failed to fetch URL http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/repository.xml, reason: Network is unreachable

After some tinkering, I found the problem (and fix), in How to resolve an issue “Network is unreachable” in Java applications. It seems that it is related to how applications capable of both IPv4 and IPv6 work, and it can be fixed by writing in /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf the following line:

net.ipv6.bindv6only = 0

…and rebooting, since the kernel needs to read this option when booting.

Apparently the problem happens not only in Android, but also in other Java applications, such as Eclipse.

Eclipse is no longer in Debian Squeeze. It seem sit was unmaintained, and the release packaged was too old, so it was orphaned and removed from the release. Since then, somebody has adopted it, and has packaged Eclipse 3.4 for Lenny, but it did not yet enter Squeeze, and it is not clear to me when it will.

So, I went to the Eclipse website, and got the upstream version (Eclipse 3.5). You get a tar.gz file, that you only have to unpackage, and run. However, when running it, I noticed that some buttons (all buttons?) don’t work. Fortunately, it is a known issue. A detailed explanation to the problem, and some workarounds, can be found in Debian bug #550183:

• Explanation (and workaround 1). libgtk2.18.2-1 provides a new way of dealing with mouse clicks, which apparently Eclipse is not honoring. Downgrading to libgtk2.0-0 (in Debian stable) fixes the issue.
• Workaround 2. “Using Enter to trigger the button works and seemingly also to click once onto the button to get it into the broken pressed-state and then pressing the mouse outside and moving it into the button to release there. This also
  triggeres the click.” (Andreas Pakulat)
• Workaround 3. export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true before launching eclipse. Fixes completely the problem for me.

So, for now, I’m going with workaround 3…

Basic installation of Debian Lenny was no problem, although I didn’t try to configure the “special” hardware components (touch screen, built-in camera, wifi, etc.). The internal 128 GB SSD worked like a charm, thought.

I installed Lenny from a USB memory stick, downloading most of the system via network (using Ethernet, which works our of the box). I just followed instructions in Installing Debian GNU/Linux via the Internet (“Tiny CDs, floppy disks, USB sticks, etc” section). After reboot, I get a desktop, and the fundamental components seem to run. WIFI is one which is not working, and according to Installing Debian 5.0 (Lenny) on a ThinkPad X200, you need a customized kernel to make it work. Touchscreen is also not working, but I don’t even try to configure it.

I’m installing Lenny just to upgrade to testing (Squeeze), so I stop here in trying to configure Lenny, and move to upgrade to Squeeze, which is what I will try to configure to work with all the X200 hardware.