Debian Jessie – problem with suspend mode after closing laptop lid

With my ultrabook “Wortmann Terra Mobile 1450 II” running on Debian Jessie I have had a problem with the suspend mode. When I close the laptop lid the laptop goes into suspend mode, and after reopening the lid the laptop awakes. But than after some seconds the laptop goes back into suspend mode. That was an annoying problem.

I solved this after reading this stackexchange question. After playing around with some settings is seems that suspend mode is not working correctly with my hardware wen closing/opening the lid. My solution is now to set the machine in hibernate mode instead of suspend mode. This can be done by setting the following flag in the ‘/etc/systemd/logind.conf’ file.

HandleLidSwitch=hibernate

It takes now some seconds until the ultrabook is in hibernate mode and it needs a complete boot when opening the lid, but thanks to the SSD hard-disk this is quite fast.

Next Debian release will be incredible

The upcoming Linux distribution Debian 8.0 – code name ‘jessie’ – will become an amazing operating system.  I am testing the jessie release since one year and to me it looks promising what we can see so far.

For those who are not familiar with Linux distributions: Debian is the most used Linux destribution in the server world and most internet web servers are running on Debian. But Debian is also the base for the more known Ubuntu distribution. In fact everything you read about tips & tricks for Ubuntu is also valid for Debian and vice versa.

Unlike Ubuntu, Debian is an operating system which focuses on stability and sobriety. There is not a lot of bells and whistles. Debian uses the latest version of Gnome Shell for the desktop which is also focusing on clarity and simplicity. I personally like Gnome Shell and I recommend everyone to try it out.

systemd – speeds up booting

But one of the most impressive parts is the kernel architecture with the new “systemd” daemon. systemd is a system management which is the first process executed in user space during the Linux startup process. Therefore, systemd serves as the root of the user space’s process tree.  systemd allows more processing to be done concurrently or in parallel during system booting and reduces the computational overhead of the shell. systemd replaces the SysVinit concept and it results in an incredible increase of speed during the boot process. My own Ultrabook (Intel Core i7-3517U Ivy Bridge, 8GB RAM, 256 GB SSD) starts up in less then 10 seconds!

Altogether Debain feels very fast and compact. I like to work with this operating system and I like that debain is more clear as Ubuntu which becomes more and more confusing in its strategy (Unitiy vs Gnome, Mir vs Wayland).

Still not final….

Note that the Debian 8.0 which I am talking about is yet not final and still in a testing phase. This means you should not try it out if you are not familiar with Linux. Things can become broken and unstable. But if you can wait I guess Debian Jessie will be available in the end of this year.

 

Debian freezes randomly

Since about one year I own a ultrabook ‘Wortmann Terra Mobile 1450 II’ which I run on Linux.  The system contains a Intel Core i7-351U chip set and 8GB RAM. But this system shows a very strange problem on Linux (and as I guess maybe also on other operating systems): randomly the system freezes.

When the system freezes no mouse , no keyboard, no REISUB was possible. The screen is corrupted and did not update. The only key board functionality which is still possible is Fn+F9 (switch display on/off). So the only possibility was to to switch off the system hard.

The freeze occurs when the system runs on battery as also when it is plugged. It looked as if the errors occurs more frequently at high memory usage.

The memory…

A memory check (with memtest86+) indicates no problem. Therefore, I thought it had to do something with the kernel. See also the discussion here. But updating every week a new kernel version and playing around with several kernel boot options the problem still occurs.

Back to the idea that the problem comes from the RAM I installed the tool ‘memtester’. With this tool you can test memory when linux is running. For Example I started a test to check 7GB RAM with the following command:

memtester 7G 1

And now I was able to force the freeze. During such a test each time my system freezes. Also when I booted in kernel recovery mode the same situation – system freezes! So this indicated to me that the problem is with the memory.

The solution

If the memory seems to be ok in general (memtest86+ indicates no errors) but the system freezes in situations with heavy  memory usage (memtester) then it may have something to do with overclocking the memory?

In my BIOS settings () I found the following setting:

->Chipset
-> System Agent (SA) Configuration
-> Memory Configuration
-> Memory Frequency Limiter

This was defined as ‘AUTO’. What ever this means I changed the value to lowest available setting of ‘1067’ (other values where 1600, 1867, … up to 2667). With this setting I can not see any substantial impairment of the speed. But from now on my system runs without any more freezes!

So if you are also faced with the problem of random freezes, first try to control the overclocking of your memory. I hope this will help you too.

After all the last question is: Is my hardware to fast for linux or is linux to fast for my hardware 😉

 

Eclipse crashes in Debian Jessie

After some updates in my Debian/Jessie installation I run into a strange problem with Eclipse. When I start Eclipse first everything looks fine, but in the moment I use some type-ahead features or browsing classes or methods in a java-file Eclipse crashes without any error message. Maybe the problem is related to an update in libwebkitgtk-3.0.

After some searching I was finally able to fix the problem by adding the following line to my eclipse.ini:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla

See also this bug report:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=334466

Character encoding de_DE on Linux Debian

On my debian server today I run into a problem with the encoding of XSL templates running on a GlassFish server. The problem was that German characters where not displayed correctly.

After a long time of searching, I figured out that the reason for that problem was not my MySQL database, nor my GlassFish installation. It was simply the missing German language support on my linux debian.

You can test the installed locales with the following command:

locale -a

In my case only ‘en_US.utf8’ was listed.

In debian you can simply add the german language support by changing the file /etc/locale.gen. Simply uncomment the lines:

de_DE ISO-8859-1
de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8
de_DE@euro ISO-8859-15

and run the command:

locale-gen

After restarting my GlassFish server the xsl transformation works fine with german characters.

The command “locale -a” now displays the following locale:

C
de_DE
de_DE@euro
de_DE.iso88591
de_DE.iso885915@euro
de_DE.utf8
deutsch
en_US.utf8
german
POSIX