Multimedia breezy in Debian Wheezy

Previously on this blog, I've bemoaned the absence of information on running multimedia in Debian. In January 2010 I wrote:

My experience with Debian was made more difficult than it needed to be because there was no multimedia installation page provided by Debian to refer to- I had to get information from a lot of different pages, many of them blogs or Linux resources rather than Debian pages.

And in May 2010:

There's no equivalent of Ubuntu's restricted-extras package in Debian, which makes enabling multimedia less of a breeze. I got Flash and MP3's playing without too much trouble, but playing Flash files I'd saved to my hard drive resulted in an error message. With a bit of Googling, I found I just needed to install a Gstreamer plugin. Not too much of a big deal, but just another issue that would be off-putting for a newbie.
Debian generally doesn't go out of its way like Ubuntu to be user friendly or attractive- a lot of features that are enabled by default in Ubuntu are not present in Debian. They can be enabled, but it takes some Googling, some head scratching and some delving into system settings.

I noted in the January post that work was going on to make multimedia in Debian easier, and I'm pleased to say that after my recent Debian Wheezy install, I came across this excellent Debian Wiki multimedia page which made installing multimedia a breeze.

The Gnome 3 notification area

The Gnome 3 developers have made a conscious decision to get away from the old system tray, where everything but the kitchen sink ended up: program icons, the weather, the time, a volume control, a network manager, email notifications, instant messenger chat notifications, music players...
Gnome 3 has three separate areas where the same things can go, with a rationale for each: running applications in the dash on the left, system settings in the system tray at the top right, and notifications at the bottom of the screen.
It's not a perfect taxonomy. If a music player is running, why can't you see what it's playing and control it from the dash? Does it really belong in the notification area.
But it's a taxonomy I'm willing to go along with. Gnome users, however (who are revolting) are not. They want to put the program icons, the weather, email notifications, instant messenger chat notifications, music players and probably the kitchen sink back in the panel.
There's a Gnome 3 extension to notify the arrival of emails, but it appears in the panel, not in the notification area, where the new paradigm says it should be. Another email notifier, Mailnag, appears in the notification area, where the paradigm says it should be.
I used it in Fedora, but unfortunately Debian Wheezy doesn't have some of the requirements yet, so it doesn't work.
One problem with the new notification area is that notifications are visible for only a few seconds before either disappearing or being moved to the persistent notification area at the bottom right of the screen, which the user has to actively invoke: if you've popped out of the room to make a cup of tea, you're not going to see that new email notification.
There's another Gnome extension that keeps notifications in the message tray until clicked. But using it means that notifications of transient events, for example a song change, will not behave in a rational way: they will remain until clicked.
The obvious answer would be for some notifications to remain until dismissed (new email, IM) and other not. It will be interesting to see how the Gnome developers respond to the issue. Personally I hope they can find an elegant solution within the new paradigm: I'm not one who is inclined to try to recreate the old system tray in my top panel.

Cleaning a laptop fan and heat sink

A bit of dust inside a laptop can see the fan blowing hard almost constantly. It only takes six months or so for this dust to accumulate and have a noticeable impact on the loudness of the laptop. The problem may not be noticeable from the outside.

But if the fan seems noisy, it's worth taking a look inside. Google should provide instructions; with mine it's just a case of unscrewing the CPU panel on the back. You'll find some copper heat ducts and a fan blowing out through the copper grills of the heat sink.

A closer inspections reveals how dusty the fan is.

Now is probably the time to look up a professional cleaning guide. Cleaning the fan with an artist's paint brush and then giving it a good blow like I do is probably not a good idea. However you clean the fan, keep a finger on the central part to prevent the fan spinning, as that can damage the fan.
I like to clean the heat sink fins with a small strip of card.

Holding the laptop up to the light reveals nice clean copper fins.

Don't panic if the fan makes a horrible grinding noise when you boot up again. My does but it settles down to a gentle whooshing then silence after a while.
If yours doesn't, maybe you should have followed the advice about using a professional cleaning guide.
Keen eyes may spot that I have broken off the bars of the case grill that used to cover the copper heat sink grills. I did this one summer when temperatures where I was living were in the low 30's Celcius. The plastic bars prevented me cleaning some of the slots in the copper grill, and also restricted air flow. Breaking them off noticeably reduced fan noise in hot weather. As the laptop is only used on a desktop, possible damage to the copper grill was not an issue.

Latest kernel in Debian Wheezy

Installing Debian Wheezy recently, I was presented with several kernel options. I spotted that I'd need the dual-core kernel (686) of which I had two options: a 3.1 kernel and a seemingly generic package. I went for 3.1 (which worked) but was curious what the other option was. linux-image-686-pae seems to be a "dummy package" that will install the latest kernel, whatever it is (for my specific hardware).
I looked in the Wheezy repository and the latest kernel was 3.2. I decided to install the dummy package and sure enough it installed 3.2. I think this is something useful if you're using the testing repository or stable backports which get new kernels pretty regularly, and you're adventurous. (Not good for a production machine where upgrades have to be rigorously tested, obviously.)

Laptop fan is loud

Quite often when I do a distribution upgrade or hop, I begin to notice how loud my laptop fan is and wonder if it's the fault of the new system. Invariably it turns out that the heat sink is in need of a clean. I confirmed this today. Using my new install of Debian Wheezy, I was sure the laptop fan was loud, and wondered if it was Wheezy's fault. But booting back into Squeeze on the dual boot system, the fan was equally as loud. Time for a clean.
I think the period of version updates or distro hops has coincided with the build up of dust on the heat exchange fins on this laptop. The period for both seems to be about six months.
It only takes a surprisingly thin coating of dust on the copper heat exchange fins to get a laptop fan blowing hard almost constantly.

unprivileged user cannot mount ntfs block devices

I was trying to view the contents of my external hard drive in Debian Wheezy. The HD is formatted in NTFS from my Windows/Linux dual booting days. It's 500GB and more than half full, and my laptop HD is only 80GB, so pulling the data off and reformatting is not an option. The error message gave several suggested solutions, none of which I knew how to implement. Fortunately I spotted this post mentioning /etc/fstab. Commenting out the USB drive entry meant I could access the disk. I'd had exactly the same problem after installing Squeeze from a USB drive, although with a different error message: it seems installing from a USB leaves and entry in /etc/fstab that will prevent an external HD from mounting.

No Gnome 3 shell in Wheezy

The first thing I noticed when booting into Debian Wheezy was that Gnome 3 went into fallback mode. I guessed this might be because my video driver would require the firmware-linux-nonfree package to work. The procedure in Squeeze is pretty simple: just enable the non-free repository and install the package. But in wheezy it was a little bit more tricky. It only seems to be possible to add repositories by manually editing the appropriate file. I found this post on the Debian Forum, and added the entries with the exception of proposed as advised. I tried the install but the package still wasn't found. Ah, yes: I had to rebuild the package database. (Instructions for doing that and installing I found here.) I could then install the firmware.
My suspicions were confirmed: installing the firmware gave me the Gnome 3 shell!