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Debian 4.0 on Dell Latitude D505

So tried my hand at getting Linux up and running on a hand me down laptop that I'll be doing a lot of work on. It is a Dell Latitude D505 with 1.2 Gigs of DDR ram, 1024x768 15in LCD, Pentium-M 1.5Ghz, Intel based wireless (802.11b), 120Gig Drive, and Intel based video card.

Started off wired to the Internet, Debian 3.1 install CD, linux26 install and everything was smooth sailing during install process. I selected http for getting my apt sources, wrapped up the install, rebooted. Once logged in, I immediately added testing and performed a aptitude dist-upgrade. This bumped me up to Debian 4.0. I installed the latest kernel 2.6.22 as it comes with the ipw2100 driver automatically. The earlier kernels do not and require you to compile yet more source code. The first hurdle (and reason why Debian still isn't ready for your mum): Even though the ipw2100 module loads, it can't bring the wireless card online without a firmware. Well, you're in luck because someone out there is providing it for us but Debian won't do any of the work for you.

http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/firmware.php

Go there, agree to their EULA, and download the latest firmware. Unpack the contents into your /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware and you should be good to go.

By this time you may be wondering else you will need, so I suggest (because it works) to do a aptitude install wireless-tools which will make life a lot easier for you when setting up your wireless connection. Up to you have you want to do it, I installed gnome and had it's network tool handle everything.

Now if you are a road-warrior and gnome and iwconfig takes to long, there is another tool that you can use called Wicd.

http://wicd.sourceforge.net/

It is simple stupid to install and use, works great and remembers your keys when you are hopping around. I only wish gnome's network tool was that smart. (Hint Gnome Devs)

Now, basically everything on the laptop works marvelously well, except the Lid issue. While in X (Xorg), if you close the lid the system will hang. I have the A11 bios update, which is known to cause all sorts of crap. I haven't yet had the chance to downgrade to A09 yet, but I may. A stupid hack around this is to dump to console (ctrl-alt-f1) and close the lid. When you want to go back, open lid and press (ctrl-alt-f7) to get back into X. If anyone else has suggestions to get past this, please let me know. I just want the LCD to go off and on when button is depressed.

So all in all, a success with a few minor flaws. I'll add more details as they creep into my mind.

Apache2 with SSL on Debian

I found myself at a loss on how to enable ssl on apache2, it seemed so simple. Make sure ssl.conf and ssl.load where both in mods-enabled and restart apache2, and done. Not so fast, the damn thing needs a self-signed certificate and the normal scripts are no where to be found on Debian 4.0 Etch. After a bit of searching I've come across this little gem that I hope will help all of you too. aptitude install ssl-cert

/usr/sbin/make-ssl-cert /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem

This uses everything that Debian 4.0 gives you by default.

USB not showing up in VMware

For the longest time USB used to work quite well in VMware, then as if by magic, it all stopped working. However, after poking around I've discovered that there is a solution and it involves usbfs (usbdevfs). So here is a solution to get you all back up and running.

  • Create a new user group and name it usbfs, let's say that it has gid 1003
  • within /etc/fstab change the following line usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0- if you have it, change it to below, if you don't have it, then just add the following line usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw, devgid=1003, devmode=0640, busgid=1003, busmode=0550, listgid=1003, listmode=0440 0 0- add vmware users to group usbfs usermod -G usbfs vmwareuser- If you get an error like this: mount: mount point /proc/bus/usb does not exist - then you have to compile a custom kernel from sources with CONFIG_USB_DEVICEFS enabled.

SSH with Public Key Authentication

Okay, say you have a server, you have to ssh to this server ... say 20 times a day? It gets irritating having to login and type your password repeatedly. Not to mention it can be insecure if anyone is sniffing the network.

So on your desktop machine you want to create some keys. This can be done with the following command:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

At the prompts just press enter for all the defaults. This includes an empty password.

Now you should have a file in .ssh/id_rsa.pub , this file has to go to the server. You can do this with this command

cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh username@servername "cat - >>.ssh/authorized_keys"

All going well, this should exit cleanly. Test it by ssh'ing again to the server normally, if all goes well it shouldn't prompt but just drop you into your remote shell. If this fails make sure your servers /etc/ssh/sshd_config has the following line

RSAAuthentication yes PubkeyAuthentication yes AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_keys

Also, you will need specific permissions in order for this to work as well, so the follow needs to be run as the user you are logged in as.

server$ chmod go-w ~/ server$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh server$ chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Enjoy your keyless SSH access.