Bye bye, Ubuntu, Hello Debian

Sadly, the new version of Ubuntu, 8.04, didn't accept my laptop (an a few years old Acer TravelMate 290, without any strange hardware). I couldn't find any information on how to resolve the problems I ran into, so I had to ditch Ubuntu, and replace it with Debian 4.0.

This was a pity, since the new Ubuntu looked quite promising. The install is incredible easy and rather quick. Apart from the desktop background image, the new system looks and feels good. They appear to have made good choices when it comes to the pre-installed software. But this doesn't help when Ubuntu fails to shutdown the computer properly.

Installing Debian is not as straightforward, but still not very hard. It took a little longer, mostly because I used the net installer that grabs the software packages from the internet and not from the installation CD-ROM.

However, compared to Ubuntu, it takes some more fixing after the installation to get a system that your are comfortable with. For instance, the Debian people appear to think that you should prefer a web browser called Epiphany to Firefox... They don't even offer you the standard Firefox browser, but their own version, "Iceweasel". (There seems to be a totally silly reason as to why Firefox is not called Firefox.)

Worse, the default fonts did not look good on my laptop, so I had to install new fonts (by running apt-get install msttcorefonts, I think?).

A bit surprisingly, Debian supports playing mp3 files without installing additional libraries.

After a bit of tweaking, Debian feels nice. Still, I would prefer a working version of Ubuntu. It would be interesting to know what went wrong in the relationship between Ubuntu 8.04 and my laptop.

Beware of Firebird 2.0 Debian package

We are migrating an application to the Firebird 2.0 database manager (firebirdsql.org). Our server runs Debian (AMD64), and we used the Firebird 2.0 (superserver) Debian package as suggested in the Firebird site's FAQ section. However, when the package was installed, it appears to have silently overlooked a dependency, missing a library necessary for getting the "user defined functions", UDF:s, to work correctly. (Firebird didn't find the UDF:s, resulting in runtime errors when calls to the functions were issued from a Firebird database.)

We made sure that Firebird as well as the UDF:s were all compiled for AMD64.

When uninstalling the apt-get Firebird package, and manually installing Firebird 2.0.3 from the standard .tar.gz file, the missing dependency was spotted, and the database could be properly installed. Unfortunately, I didn't keep a record, but it might have been the correct version of libstdc++ that was missing.

As far as I can remember, this is the only time a Debian apt-get package has failed me. In addition to the fact the apt-get install of Firebird might be broken, you have to be careful not to apt-get install "Firebird 2", since this will give you Firebird 1.5! Peculiar. (But see the comment from mariuz below).

I had a similar experience the first time I tried to install Firebird from a Debian package. This was Firebird 1.5 (the Firebird 2 Debian package), before Firebird 2.0 was released. I never got that one to run either, but had to install the tar.gz version obtained from the official Firebird webserver. I can't remember exactly what went wrong at that time, but it was impossible to get the Debian package that we tried at that time to work. The manual install worked perfectly, just as it did this time.

Update: The Debian Firebird2 package (containing Firebird 1.5) appears to be discontinued.