Time for a little end-of-the-month looking back.

(Looking back… o-ver my shoul-der…)

What about X11-based graphical installer?

After the one-week rush early this month, a summary of my findings was posted on debian-boot@, including udebs, patches, and source packages, labelled as v1.

People seemed to like the idea, and I received a bunch of comments to fix or improve various things. It took some time to implement everything in a satisfying (at least to me) manner, but I reached a point where I was confident enough to publish a v2 set of udebs, patches, and source packages. That was also announced on debian-boot@, and then re-announced once I’ve been able to rebuild the image with speakup enabled again.

Hopefully, that’ll be (more or less) the final plan, and d-i folks should either give us a green or red light based on that v2 set. Some details will have to be ironed out (some items were mentioned in both v1 and v2 summaries), but they shouldn’t prevent us from starting adding the needed udebs; or at least not too long.

Speaking of X11, xserver-xorg-video-intel is buggy as hell!

Basically, yes, and that’s known. Many bugs were due to kernel issues, and regressions got fixed in the series of 2.6.32.y stable updates. Usually, upgrading to at least 2.6.32-3-$arch (from linux-2.6’s revision 2.6.32-9) helps, as well as running latest libdrm, xserver-xorg-core, and mesa from sid. Trying with some 2.6.33-ish kernels from experimental would be nice as well.

You’re of course very welcome to keep us posted through the bugs you opened already, closing them if appropriate. And before reporting more bugs, please make sure you’re running recent versions of all those components. That should help people walking the list of remaining bugs to deal with them more efficiently.

A very annoying bug which can still be experienced with an up-to-date sid environment is described in freedesktop’s #26723.