Re-enabling right click functionality for my Thinkpad touchpad

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga 11e running Debian Sid. The touchpad has a left and a right click area at the bottem. For some reason, the right click ability recently stopped working. I have not yet found the reason, but I was able to fix it by adding the emphasized lines in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/70-synaptics.conf.

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "Default clickpad buttons"
        MatchDriver "synaptics"
        Option "ClickPad" "true"
        Option "EmulateMidButtonTime" "0"
        Option "SoftButtonAreas" "50% 0 82% 0 0 0 0 0"
        Option "SecondarySoftButtonAreas" "58% 0 0 15% 42% 58% 0 15%"
EndSection

Edit

Nope. Stopped working again and both bottom areas act as left click. As it is working as a left click, I guess, the touchpad is physically ok. So I have no idea, what's going on :(

Edit 2

Thanks to Cole Robinson and the link he provided I found the reason and a fix. GNOME 3.28 uses the clickfinger behaviour by default now. By setting the click method from the 'fingers' (clickfinger) method back to 'areas', either using gsettings or gnome-tweaks, the right click ability is back after rebooting the system.

PS: With the new default clickfinger method, the right- and middle click are emulated using a two- and three-finger tap.

Make 'bts' (devscripts) accept TLS connection to mail server with self signed certificate

My mail server runs with a self signed certificate. So bts, configured like this ...

BTS_SMTP_HOST=mail.wgdd.de:587
BTS_SMTP_AUTH_USERNAME='user'
BTS_SMTP_AUTH_PASSWORD='pass'

...lately refused to send mails with this error:

bts: failed to open SMTP connection to mail.wgdd.de:587
(SSL connect attempt failed error:1416F086:SSL routines:tls_process_server_certificate:certificate verify failed)

After searching a bit, I found a way to fix this locally without turning off the server certificate verification. The fix belongs into the send_mail() function. When calling the Net::SMTPS->new() constructor, it is possible to add the fingerprint of my self signed certificate like this (bold):

if (have_smtps) {
    $smtp = Net::SMTPS->new($host, Port => $port,
        Hello => $smtphelo, doSSL => 'starttls',
        SSL_fingerprint => 'sha1$hex-fingerprint')
        or die "$progname: failed to open SMTP connection to $smtphost\n($@)\n";
} else {
    $smtp = Net::SMTP->new($host, Port => $port, Hello => $smtphelo)
        or die "$progname: failed to open SMTP connection to $smtphost\n($@)\n";
}

Pretty happy to being able to use the bts command again.

Troubleshoot

I have no idea, what these errors mean. $searchengine and manual pages didn't reveal anything.

That's the first one. It occurs during boot time. Might be a bug somewhere, recently introduced in Debian Sid.

kernel: [ ... ] cgroup: cgroup2: unknown option "nsdelegate"

And that's the second one. It simply occurred. No real issue with NFS though.

kernel: [ ... ] nfs: RPC call returned error 22
kernel: [ ... ] NFS: state manager: check lease failed on NFSv4 server XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX with error 5

Any explanation is appreciated.

Correct keyboard layout (QWERTZ) with Logitech K400 attached to an Android HDMI stick

I've bought an HDMI stick with Android 4.4.2 to connect a TV to the local network (stream, DLNA) and the internet (Video portals etc.). The stick comes with no input device whatsoever. So I decided for a wireless Logitech K400r keyboard. Unfortunately the keyboard layout used by Android seems to be American (QWERTY) although the language and location settings are set to German. So I neither get Umlauts nor special signs correct nor do the media keys of the K400 work. But there is an easy way to make all this work. I've recently seen some people suggesting to install an app called External Keyboard Helper to fix things, which comes in a demo and a pro version, the latter with costs. Fortunately I didn't need any of these for the Logitech keyboard plus I got all media keys of this keyboard to work in just three steps without any cost :)

Step 1

First I went to the Google Play Store and installed the Logitech Keyboard Plus app by Logitech Europe S.A. (See? No external stuff and without costs. Ignore anything that's written in its description about Bluetooth.)

Step 2

Then I opened the settings section and went for Settings > Language and Input (Einstellungen > Sprache und Eingabe). Under KEYBOARD & INPUT METHOD (TASTATUR & EINGABEMETHODEN) I activated the entry called Logitech keyboard (Logitech Tastatur) as shown below.

Step 3

Now a click on the field above that is called Default (Standard) and (here) defaults to Deutsch - Android-Tastatur (AOSP) ...

... opened a popup called Choose input method and there I've chosen Logitech keyboard (Logitech Tastatur) as shown below and confirmed it.

The default now is the Logitech keyboard:

Finally ...

... it's done. The keyboard now behaves as expected and also the media/function keys do work. It is however not possible to adjust or configure anything, because this presumes a confirmed Bluetooth pairing between the keyboard and the android device and the K400 is not a Bluetooth device. It would probably be a good idea for Logitech to make this app usable for all available Logitech keyboards, even USB and Unifying(TM) ones. Update: As of now it is possible to cancel the Bluetooth pairing attempt without leaving the application. So this app in fact can be used for USB and Unifying(TM)-based Logitech keyboards.

WISO Steuer-Sparbuch unter Debian Linux

Ich bin begeistert, denn meine USB-Stick Installation vom WISO Steuer-Sparbuch lässt sich ganz einfach unter Debian Linux mit Wine nutzen:

wine32 /media/pfad/mein/stick/WISO/Steuersoftware\ 2014/usbstart.exe

Es gab überhaupt keine Probleme während der mehrstündigen Arbeit!! Die Update-Funktion werde ich bei Gelegenheit noch testen, genauso wie die Installation auf den USB-Stick unter Wine. Für letzteres hatte ich noch auf Windows zurückgegriffen. Genial :)

Update 10.12.2014: Leider wird die Steuererklärung (Kurzform) nicht erstellt und scheinbar auch nicht via Elster übertragen. Die erstellte PDF-Datei enthält nur die Checkliste sowie die Übersichten zu einzelnen Positionen. Ich musste leider doch Windows aufrufen, um die Erklärung und die PDFs korrekt zu erstellen. Schade! Werde das ans WISO-Team melden.

Install automatically starting XBMC to N54L microserver under Debian Wheezy 7.7

This is a followup to my previous post about getting sound output from the Sapphire Radeon HD 6450 card in my HP N54L microserver via HDMI. This post will describe, howto install XBMC from Wheezy backports and how to automatically start it. Again, there are vaious ways and I'll only describe mine. Further, this is, what I did so far: enable the audio output for the Radeon card and install X.org together with lightdm.

Step 3 - Install XBMC

This is a pretty easy task. I've chosen to install XBMC 13.2 from the Wheezy backports repository.

# apt-get install -t wheezy-backports xbmc

Step 4 - Automically start XBMC

There are various ways; some involve starting it a s a service using init scripts für sysvinit or upstrart or systemd. You'll easily find them. I've chosen to create a user, automatically log him into X and start XBMC. The user is called xbmc.

# adduser --home /home/xbmc --add_extra_groups xbmc

I used to choose a password. But I wonder, if using --disabled-password would work too? Next I adjusted /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf. Below are only the differences to the stock version of this file. I haven't touched other lines.

[SeatDefaults]
greeter-session=lightdm-gtk-greeter
user-session=XBMC
autologin-guest=false
autologin-user=xbmc
autologin-user-timeout=0

The file /usr/share/xsessions/XBMC.desktop is the stock one, no changes made. After restarting lightdm:

# service lightdm restart

XBMC is started automatically. If anything goes wrong or doesn't work, I suggest to check /var/log/auth.log, /home/xbmc/.xsession-errors and /var/log/lightdm/*.log. In a few cases it seems necessary to login the user xbmc manually once although it wasn't necessary here.

JFTR: When I checked /var/log/auth.log I saw a few errors and installed gnome-keyring too:

apt-get install --install-recommends gnome-keyring

Step 5 - Useful packages

There are some packages, which might be useful running XBMC, e.g.

• udisks
• upower
• usbmount

Conclusion

I'm now running XBMC on top of Debian Wheezy on the N54L microserver without a bloated desktop environment. The system automatically starts the XBMC session on start/reboot. Video and sound are working fine, though it was necessary to install recent firmware and a recent kernel from Wheezy backports to get it done.

Thanks to the whole OSS community for aksing, for answering, for blogging, for using and for continue developing! I currently enjoy the results :)

Getting the audio over HDMI to work for the HP N54L microserver running Debian Wheezy and a Sapphire Radeon HD 6450

Conclusion: Sound over HDMI works with the Sapphire Radeon HD 6450 card in my HP N54L microserver. It requires a recent kernel and firmware from Wheezy 7.7 backports and the X.org server. There is no sound without X.org, even if audio has been enabled for the radeon kernel module.

Last year I couldn't get audio over HDMI to work after I installed a Sapphire Radeon HD 6450 1 GB (11190-02-20g) card into my N54L microserver. The cable that connects the HDMI interfaces between the card and the TV monitor supports HDMI 1.3, so audio should have been possible even then. However, I didn't get any audio output by XBMC playing video or music files. Nothing happened with stock Wheezy 7.1 and X.org/XBMC installed. So I removed the latter two and used the server as stock server without X/desktop and delayed my plans for an HTPC.

Now I tried again after I found some new hints, that made me curious for a second try :) Imagine my joy, when (finally) speaker-test produced noise on the TV! So here is my configuration and a step-by-step guide to

• enable Sound over HDMI for the Radeon HD 6450
• install a graphical environment
• install XBMC
• automatically start XBMC on boot

The latter two will be covered by a second post. Also note, that there is lot of information out there to achive the above tasks. So this is only about my configuration. Some packages below are marked as optional. A few are necessary only for the N54L microserver (firmware) and for a few I'm not sure they are necessary at all.

Step 1 - Prepare the system

At this point I don't have any desktop nor any other graphical environment (X.org) installed. First I purged pulseaudio and related packages completely and only use ALSA:

# apt-get autoremove --purge pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils pulseaudio-module-x11 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio
# apt-get install alsa-base alsa-utils alsa-oss

Next I installed a recent linux kernel and recent firmware from Wheezy backports:

# apt-get install -t wheezy-backports linux-image-amd64 firmware-linux-free firmware-linux firmware-linux-nonfree firmware-atheros firmware-bnx2 firmware-bnx2x

This put linux-image-3.16-0.bpo.3-amd64 and recent firmware onto my system. I've chosen to upgrade linux-image-amd64 instead to pick a special (recent) linux kernel package from Wheezy backports to keep up-to-date with recent kernels from there.

Then I enabled the audio output of the kernel radeon module. Essentially there are at least three ways to do this. I use the one to modify /etc/modules.d/radeon.conf and set the audio parameter there. The hw_i2c parameter is disabled. I read, that it might cause trouble with the audio output here although I never personally experienced it:

options radeon audio=1 hw_i2c=0

JFTR: This is how I boot the N54L by default:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi=force pcie_aspm=force nmi_watchdog=0"

After rebooting I see this for the Radeon card in question:

# lsmod | egrep snd\|radeon\|drm | awk '{print $1}' | sort
[..]
drm
drm_kms_helper
i2c_algo_bit
i2c_core
radeon
snd
snd_hda_codec
snd_hda_codec_hdmi
snd_hda_controller
snd_hda_intel
snd_hwdep
snd_pcm
snd_seq
snd_seq_device
snd_timer
soundcore
ttm
[..]
# lspci -k
[..]
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Caicos [Radeon HD 6450/7450/8450 / R5 230 OEM]
        Subsystem: PC Partner Limited / Sapphire Technology Device e204
        Kernel driver in use: radeon
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Caicos HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 6400 Series]
        Subsystem: PC Partner Limited / Sapphire Technology Radeon HD 6450 1GB DDR3
        Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
[..]
# cat  /sys/module/radeon/parameters/audio 
1
# cat  /sys/module/radeon/parameters/hw_i2c 
0
# aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
# aplay -L
null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
pulse
    PulseAudio Sound Server
hdmi:CARD=HDMI,DEV=0
    HDA ATI HDMI, HDMI 0
    HDMI Audio Output

At this point, without having the X.org server installed, I still have no audio output to the connected monitor. Running alsamixer I only see the S/PDIF bar for the HDA ATI HDMI device, showing a value of 00. I can mute and un-mute this device but not change the value. No need to worry, sound comes with step two.

Step 2 - Install a graphical environment (X.org server)

Next is to install a graphical environment, basically the X.org server. This is done in Debian by the desktop task. Unfortunately tasksel makes use of APT::Install-Recommends="true" and would install a desktop environment and some more recommended packages. At the moment I don't want this, only X. So basically I installed only the task-desktop package with dependencies:

# apt-get install task-desktop xfonts-cyrillic

Next is to install a display manager. I've chosen lightdm:

# apt-get install lightdm accountsservice

Done. Now (re-)start the X server. Simply ...

# service lightdm restart

... should do. And now there is sound, probably due to the X.org Radeon driver. The following command created noise on the two monitor speakers :)

# speaker-test -c2 -D hdmi:0 -t pink

Finally there is sound over HDMI!

Step 3 - Install XBMC

To be continued ...

Debian Sid and GNOME 3 - Restoring automount function of USB devices

I recently found, that the automount feature of my recent Debian Sid / GNOME 3 system didn't work anymore. For example: I plugged in an USB stick. Nothing happened, although dmesg clearly showed, that the system recognized it. After manually mounting and unmounting the device, nautilus automatically offered to automount it. But I always had to manually mount and unmount it first. Seems the culprit was a pmount installation. JFTR: In some cases also usbmount might cause trouble.

(WW) AllowEmtpyInput is on, devices using drivers <kbd> or <mouse> will be disabled

Maybe you will observe a changed mouse and keyboard behaviour after updating X.org recently in Debian Sid. Then you will probably discover the warning mentioned in the title in your X.org server log /var/log/Xorg.0.log. The very short and dirty solution to get things working for the moment is to put this into your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "ServerLayout"
    Option "AutoAddDevices" "off"
EndSection

See the first entry in /usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg/NEWS.Debian.gz and follow the mentioned links for more information. However, the above solution should only be a temporary workaround: Try to migrate things (I will post changes for my system asap).

Network doesn't come up after update to udev 0.140

The recent update to udev 0.140-1 lead to a system without network access to me. The error messages were:

Running 0dns-down to make sure resolv.conf is ok...done.
Setting up networking....
Configuring network interfaces...
ioctl[SIOCGIFFLAGS]: No such device
Could not get interface ‘ath0′ flags
ioctl[SIOCSIWPMKSA]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWMODE]: No such device
Could not configure driver to use managed mode
ioctl[SIOCGIWRANGE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCGIFINDEX]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODE]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCSIWAP]: No such device
ioctl[SIOCGIFFLAGS]: No such device
wpa_supplicant: /sbin/wpa_supplicant daemon failed to start
/etc/network/if-pre-up.d/wpasupplicant exited with return code 1
SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
ath0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
SIOCSIFNETMASK: No such device
SIOCSIFBRDADDR: No such device
ath0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
ath0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
Failed to bring up ath0.
done.

It seems, the update added rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules by increasing the device number and applying the last applicable NAME directive instead of the first one. This lead to the following file here:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:a7", ATTRS{type}=="1", NAME="ath0"

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:18", NAME="eth0"

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX", NAME="eth1"

# PCI device 0x10ec:0x8139 (8139too)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:18", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth2"

# PCI device 0x168c:0x0013 (ath_pci)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:a7", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="ath*", NAME="ath1"

So the devices created were eth2 and ath1 but /etc/network/interfaces contained entries for eth0 and ath0. So fixed /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and rebooted.

<rant>Is it really necessary to break network access with an update???</rant>

Update

I forgot this one: #521521.

/usr/lib/python2.3 garbage

Yesterday I stumbled about files and dead symlinks left in /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ on my Sid box. These files/symlinks seem to have been shipped/created(?) by:

python-ldap python-cairo python-crypto kiki python-foomatic python-mysqldb
python-logilab-common python-egenix-mxtools python-numarray python-pygresql
python-imaging-sane python-imaging python-xml python-reportlab

Deleting /usr/lib/python2.3 (dpkg -S didn't show any package relationship nor did I find something in /var/lib/dpkg/info/) and reinstalling the above mentioned packages did not recreate the files/symlinks. So it seems the directory can be safely removed. Maybe I missed some announcement or one (or more) packages need to be fixed. No time to examine it atm.

Update

This is known as Debian bug #409390. Thanks to Josselin Mouette for the information.

[DSA 1571-1] New openssl packages fix predictable random number generator

Ok, shit sometimes also happens to Debian users.

Now I read a lot of FUD, flames, arrogant claims and much more bad things, including blaming of downstream in general.

Well, Debian maintainers are NOT upstream authors. Maintainers often care about a lot more than just 1 package. Now I wonder if one can really expect, that maintainers know the source code of their packages as good as upstream authors do? Is this, what the user or the Debian project expects from a package maintainer? I agree, that this would be the ideal situation. But how realistic is it, if one maintains 10, 20 or more packages?

Normally users report us issues. We take a look at the source, try to catch the issue, track it down and fix it. And IMHO in almost all cases this is enough and it lets us handle several packages. And maybe this is also, what happened here. The maintainer got a report, tracked it down and tried to fix it. It seems, he posted it to the openssl-dev list, which is to my reading considered for such questions, and got a positive response. And with fixing it, he made a horrible mistake. But apparently it also seems, that the question had been discussed earlier more than just once (I wish, the OpenSSL guys would have created the FAQ entry earlier).

I don't want to blame the maintainer for doing this mistake. We are humans. But do we need another instance, that (periodically) checks (probably only Debian-specific) patches/changes to security relevent software or do we need different requirements for maintainers of such software ^[1] or should we simply archive this under “Shit sometimes happens … even to Debian users”?

[1] Consider gnupg which is currently almost unmaintained. It also has Debian specific patches applied and I wonder, which skills the new maintainer should or must(?) have (IIRC this question was raised in the linked threads too)?

[SOLVED] Evolution mail view always showing mail bottom

Issue

I noticed, that my evolution was always directly scrolling to the end of a mail in the mail view. That was really annoying.

Solution

This is the “Cursor mode”. Just pressing F7 disables it and the mails are shown from the beginning. Source: MID <rj9914-vjk.ln1@calamity.informatik.uni-bremen.de>

My harddrive says “goodbye” and I'm off for a (short) while

Just a short note: One of my harddrives is going to die (only 16 months after purchase) and unfortunately it's the one with my beloved Debian installation. All data is saved and I'm now going to send my drive (for those who want to know it: it's a Samsung SP1614N) back to the manufacturer. So for the moment I'm unable to do package maintenance (but I hope Michael will do it if necessary), but I hope to be back very soon.