Dzu's Blog (Einträge über debian)

Firmware Updates on GNU/Linux

Detlev Zundel — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 22:01:27 GMT

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Firmware Updates on GNU/Linux

Detlev Zundel — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 22:01:27 GMT

As the NAND storage technology reaches speeds that cannot be satiated with SATA anymore, the modern SSDs are attached over PCIe, the descendant of the very successful Peripheral Component Interconnect standard that allowed for many extension cards in the IBM PC ecosystem. But where most PCI cards could not be software upgraded in the field, the question on how to update firmware on attached PCI devices is not obviously standardized (or am I missing something?). So under Windows, the manufacturers of NVMe modules deliver their proprietary update tool, but what do we do in a Free Operating system like GNU/Linux?

In this blog post I will take a quick look at how I was able to upgrade the firmware of my Kingston SA2000M8250G NVMe drive in my desktop system.

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Updating NVMe Firmware on GNU/Linux

Detlev Zundel — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 22:01:27 GMT

In this blog post I will take a quick look at how I was able to upgrade the firmware of my Kingston SA2000M8250G NVMe drive in my desktop system.

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Empowerment Through Free Software

Detlev Zundel — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 21:15:39 GMT

#+BEGIN_COMMENT .. title: Empowerment Through Free Software .. author: Detlev Zundel .. date: 2025-04-03 23:15:39 CET .. slug: free-software-empowerment .. tags: debian, linux, fsf, gnome, simple-scan .. category: .. link: .. description: .. type: text #+END_COMMENTg

Due to having ordered a new multi-function printer, I find myself wanting a feature in my software stack, which seems not to be available. But as I use a Free Software GNU/Linux system, it is possible to modify and extend the software on every level, so I decide to find out if I can fix the problem myself.

Specifically, the new printer has a document feeder for the scanner, so that I can feed a whole stack of documents to it without manual intervention. Unfortunately, it is not able to do both side scans, as this feature is only available at a much higher price tag. But double-sided scanning can be done in two batches by first scanning the front sides, and then in a second batch the back sides. The scanned pages then need to be reordered in a post processing step to group the corresponding front- and back sides. Already with my own scanner, I am pretty happy using the default scan software from the GNOME desktop, i.e. simple-scan. I used the GUI to remove pages and reorder them manually, but I did not find such a functionality that I would now like to use. So the topic for today is how to make this work, ideally before the printer arrives.

I believe this to be a very good example of how empowering Free Software is, and so I decided to document all my steps in order to show how I approach this task, which is completely inaccessible for people working with non-free software. Actually I invite you to reproduce the steps on your own distribution to get a feeling on how easy (or difficult?) it is to work on an arbitrary aspect of the whole system.

So fire up your terminal and follow along! Expect some transcripts!

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Switching on Secure Boot in Debian

Detlev Zundel — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 21:15:23 GMT

My main desktop machine is an AMD Ryzen-2400G on an ASUS PRIME B350M-A motherboard. It came with secure boot disabled and as the first action I installed Debian on it. Back in early 2019, Debian 10 (i.e. Buster) was stable and based on an 4.19 kernel. I knew that the integrated Radeon Vega GPU of this SoC required a more recent kernel, so I used Debian testing (to become Bullseye) right from the beginning. It took me a bit of fiddling until two monitors worked correctly, but after that it became my main machine.

I did read about enabling secure boot back then, but it seemed the implementation for GNU/Linux systems had not been defined properly, and so I left it disabled. Now that I understand the process better, I want to use that additional level of security against unwanted software on my main desktop. This blog post will explain not only the basics but also follow through to the nitty-gritty of key handling. This will be in the context of Debian that I run on my machine, but we will also compare this to an Ubuntu laptop to get an idea on how the distributions differ in handling of this topic

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Switching to maildir in Debian Bullseye

Detlev Zundel — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 21:23:27 GMT

Although e-mail has lost some of its importance by the advent of secure messaging platforms like Signal, from time to time I still get the itch to improve my existing setup. Recently I wondered why I am still using a single file mbox instead of the more Unixy maildir format on my Debian desktop and how difficult it would to be switch. As we will see, the transition is pretty straight forward.

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Excursion into LXC containers

Detlev Zundel — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 20:51:18 GMT

As I like to live on the bleeding edge by using Debian testing (currently Bookworm), from time to time I run into situations that are not ease to solve from within the distribution. For example currently its impossible to install the yarn package manager:

dzu@krikkit:~$ sudo apt install yarnpkg
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 node-esprima : Depends: nodejs:any
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
dzu@krikkit:~$

As I do not see an easy way to fix this and as I am pretty sure that this will work in Debian stable, let's try spinning up an LXC Debian Bullseye container and work from there instead. The ultimate goal for today is to locally build and view the GNOME Javascript guide from a git clone to locally test modifications.

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Debugging GNOME GThumb

Detlev Zundel — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 20:48:31 GMT

Vivado 2018.3 and DocNav on Debian 10 (Buster)

Detlev Zundel — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 19:38:15 GMT

Late last year the ageing effects of my old GNU/Linux desktop system became so severe that ignoring them would soon not be an option anymore. One of the hard disks developed problems a while ago and although I was able to fix it so that finally the extended SMART test passed again without errors, it still continued to report errors in the form of "unreadable (pending) sectors". The on-board USB controller also complains about one of the internal USB ports for a long time and one DDR3 ram module had to be replaced as diagnosed by the wonderful Memtest86.

On top of all this, the Club 3D Radeon X1300PRO dual DVI graphics card started to occasionally hang the whole system a few seconds after waking up from suspend. Or at least that is what I suspect as the system never recorded error messages in the log files. The display however did visibly degrade and I think I saw some drm error message flash by at some point.

Be that as it will, I was glad that I got the chance to replace the system in time and gradually move stuff off a functioning system instead of attaching disassembled hard disks to a new system. The AMD Ryzen 5 2400G system from ARLT Computer, available without Windows, looked like very good value for money. Together with an HDMI to DVI adapter it should also easily power my two DVI monitor setup and so it did not take long until one of them stood beside my desk for installation. As the Ryzen CPU was introduced early in 2018 and the Linux 4.9 kernel at the core of Debian Stretch was released end of 2016, it was clear that I needed to go for the yet unreleased Debian Buster based on Linux 4.19.

All in all things went smoothly until I turned to the Xilinx tool chain that already gave me minor problems described in my previous post Fixing DocNav 2017.04 on Debian Stretch.

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Fixing DocNav 2017.04 on Debian Stretch

Detlev Zundel — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 17:38:29 GMT

Having installed Vivado 2017.04 on one of my GNU/Linux machines that run Debian 9.3 (Stretch), I realized that DocNav fails to start:

dzu@deepthought:~$ . /opt/Xilinx/Vivado/2017.4/settings64.sh
dzu@deepthought:~$ docnav
docnav: error while loading shared libraries: libpng12.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
dzu@deepthought:~$

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