Some minor issues with the Karmic Koala

After upgrading from Jaunty to Koala by clean install I experienced some minor annoyances – some of which I’m still working around.

The onion router package tor is MIA from the official repositories. To make things worse, there is no karmic build in the tor project’s repository either. Luckily, the debian sid build works. So adding

deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org sid main

to /etc/apt/sources.list did the trick. Tor is up and running again.

DNS lookup was slow all over the system. And I mean really slow. It took Chromium up to 30 seconds to connect to a server. OpenArena was even completely timed-out in multiplayer mode. I have no clue what the problem is here. Strangely enough, providing alternative nameserver addresses did the trick. I used OpenDNS by adding

prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222,208.67.220.220;

to /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf. Now IP resolving works well. But I don’t like this.

Some strange messages show up during boot, which seem to be harmless:

One or more of the mounts listed in /etc/fstab cannot yet be mounted:
(ESC for recovery shell)

Everything is then mounted ok. It still costs a couple of seconds in boot time. There is some discussion about this being a bug in mountall. What for it’s worth, I’m running version 1.0 of mountall.

Installing apache2 with apt-get now provides the package apache2-mpm-prefork, which doesn’t work with libapache2-mod-php5. This apache needs libapache2-mod-php5filter to parse PHP. Too bad I had simply copied all package selections from my previous install. This kept me busy for a while.