dm93 * home DebianLinuxJustWorks

The PerfectOffice runs debian GNU/linux because:

What I like about debian is the way software installation works after the initial OS install. e.g. you can add x-windows after the fact. And when you install, say, apache, the debian installation script actually sets it up running. And the debian default configurations are reasonably secure.

My experience with RedHat? was that you had to completely re-install the OS every 6 months or so in order to stay reasonably up to date. If I wanted to do that, I'd just use Windows, thanks. ;-) In fact, I do rely on WinFourLinOnDebian as a way to run Quicken. (I hope for a better FractalAccounting solution).

Since I have two debian machines (DirkMachine and SonyVaioJammer) and I do software development, I use Debian's "unstable" banch; it occasionally lives up to the "unstable" branch on one machine, but I've never had both machines out of commission at the same time.

See also: DebianPackage, DebianBug, OpenSourceWishList, hmm... JavaOnDebian?

resources: debian weekly news, #debian IRC channel, #debian channel info, @@howto docs, debian universe book.

Aug2004: UserLinux... interesting.

from ESemWeb:DanConnolly

How to install sarge with the new debian-installer (sandro)

Index of /debian/dists/sid/main/installer-i386/20040102/images

May2004: Debian From Scratch (DFS). way cool. bootable CD with kernel 2.6 and lots of recovery and installation tools. The built-in CD burning gizmo in nautilus actually worked!

8Apr2004: DPL election... I like Martin Michlmayr's Platform. He's close to the new maintainers, which is how the community perpetuates itself. His goal of working with companies on a hardware database is one I share (@@where did I write about that?).

25Mar2004: tried to get the new keyboard working on the DirkMachine. lost. see QandA in the debian wiki and a rdfig chumplog entry.

4Feb2004: DWN notes filelight; interestingly similar to diskchart.py

synaptic article

4Nov2003: my usual apt-get install of galeon resulted in hundreds of updated package. It seems gnome 2.4 has hit debian sid. I concur with the ars technical review: "The end result is a pleasant desktop that is nimble, attractive and unobtrusive. While it's not perfect, the foundation is now there and the overall product has matured."

My setup:

Dec2001: I tried to stick to just main, but oddly, ntpdate is in non-US (as is ssh, less surprisingly). And acroread is in non-free.

GnomeTweaks?: Hooking evo into menu panel? David Hoover karma@deadmoose.com 03 Jan 2002 16:41:35 -0800

some notes: OpenOfficeInstall

Nov2003: trying out new debian installer, using etherboot. wiki instructions, found from Debian Weekly News - November 18th, 2003.

hmm... DebianPackage:lvm10, LVM howto... SFS: one for ConfidentialityVersusAvailability

9Jul2003: still working on integrating this usb flash disk... USB automounting article is helpful... I had to edit {{{/etc/hotplug/usb.usermap}}} by hand to fix...

Jul  9 09:22:09 dirk usb.agent: ... no modules for USB product ea0/6803/100

Is there some linux USB database I can contribute this knowledge to?

PQI downloads has the Win98 driver for this USB travelling Disk.

Aug2003: downloaded rettcd.iso (from dwn).

2May2003: knoppix rocks! so does DebianPackage:bittorrent.

  $ btdownloadgui --url http://f.scarywater.net/KNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-03-28-EN.torrent

I had a little trouble with cdrecord, so I apt-get updated, and I saw that DebianPackage:cdrecord recommends DebianPackage:xcdroast; following that recommendation paid off. Works great!

So I burned a knoppix CD and stuck it in my kids games PC. Wow! the splash screen is cool ;-) Playing the demo .ogg music just worked. Quicktime just worked. Reading MS write files just worked. Running .exe's with wine didn't just work, though. I'm hoping power management just works.

16Mar2003: hmm... why doesn't the clock in the gnome panel update when I do tzconfig? DebianPackage:gnome-system-tools seems to be the supported way to change timezones in gnome. Bummer my SonyVaioJammer is kinda out of sync with the latest stuff, but I'm not going to sync up because I did it on DirkMachine and for some reason Amaya won't run since then.

Jan 2003: I'm in flux. PerfectBrowser?? no, the perfect web user agent is an editor too... : I like galeon for so many things (smart bookmarks for google search, pop-up defense) but it doesn't grok editing. I like Amay's XHTML support, hyperlink editing, structure support, etc. but it can only edit public Zope pages; there's a bug somewhere in editing confidential pages. Mozilla composer doesn't really grok structure nor link editing nor XHTML, but it gets along with Zope for confidential pages. So my history and password vault and bookmarks are spread acrosss N web user agents. Not to mention when I upgraded evolution it somehow lost the connection to galeon as my default browser. Argh!

Oct 2002: Nifty article Debian GNU/Linux: The Past, the Present and the Future from Oct 29 debian weekly news.

Jan 9, 2002

building a patched kernel seems to work. For one thing, the debian kernel-image package is made from unpatched kernel sources, so I could have just grabbed the .config from /boot of the installed kernel.

I discovered that the kernel-image-2.4 source package is mostly about building kernels for different processors etc.

DebianPackage:fakeroot is interesting. Here's what I actually used:

$ make-kpkg --rootcmd fakeroot --bzimage --initrd --revision=dm93v7 kernel_image

and it works. The initrd stuff is pretty fiddly.

Dec 2001: linux.com poll on how/why folks switched to linux How did you first hear about Linux? December 2nd, 2001

Dec 10, 2001

ugh... CD recording under linux isn't so nice. I got a shiny new acer 40x read 20x write 10x rewrite CD-RW drive. I was able to burn CDs? under Win2k without reading any directions.

Under linux, I see (form an article ) that I need the ide-scsi module. I don't have it.

You'd think that linux kernel modules were modular and I could just build the one driver and load it. But no, the debian make-kpkg stuff seems to screw with the build process so that I can't just go to the relevant directory and say:

  make ide-scsi.o

as I'd expect. Sigh.

Dec 11

Well, after fidgeting with kernel building for a while, it does work.

I looked at several GUI tools (kreatecd, gcombust) but none of them was any easier than the command-line tools:

  # mkisofs -r -J -o /mnt/veg0109/dm93qdata.iso dm93qdata/
  # cdrecord dev=0,0,0 speed=12 /mnt/veg0109/dm93qdata.iso

note the speed=12. Very nice!

Nov2000 tried corel linux (purchased 19Nov2000 from Microcenter); support wasn't as good as free debian, so why bother?

when? trying a new take on java-on-debian tonight... the blackdown stuff seems up to snuff on Java2.

added this to my /etc/apt/sources.list:

  # blackdown java
  deb ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/linux/devel/lang/java/blackdown.org/debian/ woody non-free

need DebianPackage:libstdc++2.9-glibc2.1 to avoid: LoadPlugin?: failed to initialize shared library /usr/local/jre1.3.1_03/plugin/i386/ns600/libjavaplugin_oji.so [libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory]?

when? As a StudentOfMacOsX, I like their volume naming... when I stick a CD in the drive, I'd like its name to show up under /vol or whatever.

Ugh... but I don't like $129 price tag for new major versions.


comments:

usb flash drives don't just work --connolly, Mon, 18 Jul 2005 16:54:00 +0000 reply
Tried and failed to figure out how to get a usb flash drive to automatically show up in gnome. I learned that DebianPackage:hal-device-manager is the GUI for hal, and that hal is a freedesktop thing more than a gnome thing; the docs include a nice diagram. I got the impression DebianPackage:gnome-volume-manager is supposed to do what I want, but I can't get it to work.