After installing Debian Lenny on my father’s and brother’s computer along with my laptop while on vacation visiting them, I was impressed with the stability of Lenny and the amount of documentation on the web. With some patience and reading lots of tutorials I had three stable and some-what up-to-date Lenny systems running using some third party repositories for apt-get. When I got home, I decided to install Lenny on my desktop and document the process. Not only is this the first post on my blog, but the first installment of a series about configuring Debian Lenny.

(I am going to assume that my readers will have some passing familiarity with installing various Linux distributions including Debian.)

First thing I did was download Kenshi Muto’s custom Lenny install iso which provides some nice tweaks such as providing the 2.6.30 kernel image. I installed a command line only interface.

When configuring my family’s system I was smart enough to save the sources.list file on my server; If you wish, you can also use it.

wget http://fishbowl42.com/archive/sources.list

sudo mv sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo chown root /etc/apt/sources.list

Since I use a hand full of third party repos I added all the pgp keys manually.

sudo apt-get update
wget http://apt.wicd.net/wicd.gpg
sudo apt-key add wicd.gpg
rm wicd.gpg
sudo apt-get install debian-multimedia-keyring
wget http://winff.org/ubuntu/AAFE086A.gpg
sudo apt-key add AAFE086A.gpg
rm AAFE086A.gpg
wget http://www.debian-desktop.org/pub/linux/debian/debian-desktop.org.key
sudo apt-key add debian-desktop.org.key
rm debian-desktop.org.key
wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/A42A6CF5.gpg
sudo apt-key add A42A6CF5.gpg
rm A42A6CF5.gpg
sudo apt-get install debian-backports-keyring
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This way I was no longer bugged by warnings of uncertified key-rings. afterwards, it was time to install a basic desktop environment including Xorg and XFCE 4.6. Lenny comes with an older version of XFCE so I added the debian-desktop repositories to my sources.list (don’t forget to update apt-get afterwards). I also included repos for wicd,  compiz-fusion, multimedia, backports, and winff. When I had finished, I installed the basic bones for a XFCE 4.6 desktop.

sudo apt-get install xorg xfce4 menu synaptic leafpad xfce4-terminal gnome-icon-theme update-manager numlockx alsa-base alsa-oss alsa-tools alsa-utils xfce4-mixer

Now we will configure ALSA:

sudo alsacnf

Follow the install script then:

alsamixer
sudo alsactl store
startxfce4

Now that I had a clean and fresh install of XFCE 4.6 on Debian Lenny there where a few tweaks that needed to be done. First thing was to open terminal:

gksu-properties

I changed the authentication mode to sudo so that I would use my user password whenever accessing anything needing root privileges when in X. The next step was to open synaptic and select the distribution tab. Here i changed the prefered version to lenny-backports and closed synaptic. Now it was time to optimize my source list by opening Software Sources and changing the download mirror to other. A dialog pops up and I highlight my country and click on the Select Best Server button. Once it has found the fastest repo, I  click check for updates.

The final annoyance is that Num Lock is not activated by default when in X. The fix is simple after installing numlockx I add the command:

numlockx on

into the Application Autostart tab of Session and Startup (found under settings). Now it is time to install desired software with th apt-get command and with Synaptic.

With some fundamental understanding of Linux, I found Debian Lenny to be easy to configure as an attractive desktop. In the future I will post further tweaks to the Debian Lenny Desktop with XFCE 4.6.

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