Posts Tagged ‘stable’

The other day I switched back to a 32bit Debian Lenny install on my main computer. The advantages to a 64bit system on a desktop are debatable, but rather minimal. The only real advantage and motivation to using 64bit was I had a system with 4 gigs of memory. However, some programs acquired from third party sources are not compiled for 64bit kernels, such as Mozilla’s Binaries for Firefox. With that said, where a 64bit OS really excels is with business grade servers.

Since initially attempting to install Firefox 3.5 on Debian Lenny, I found the package I had made from compiled source was rather blouted, and the processes itself was rather tedious and harry and have been looking for other alternatives. First I tried Swiftfox, but was frustrated by trying to get flash to work. In the past I have used Swiftweasel, but a 3.5 current has not been released yet.  Finaly I found glandium’s blog entry for installing Iceweasel 3.5 from experimental. I found I had to midify his instruction just slightly.

First is I added the testing and experimental repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list

#TESTING AND EXPERIMENTAL
deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian testing main
deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian experimental main

then I preformed these commands in terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -t testing libstartup-notification0 libsqlite3-0 libnss3-1d libhunspell-1.2-0 libasound2 libxcb1
apt-get install iceweasel/experimental

Then I commented out the testing and experimental entries in /etc/apt/sources.list and performed an upgrade. To get java and flash to work I simply had to install them as usual.

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree sun-java6-plugin

Thus far I have found this the easiest way to get a Firefox 3.5 based build running on Debian Lenny. However, I am no longer running a strictly stable release of Debian, but with the other third party and backport repositories I use I don’t feel bad about this. For security issues Firefox/Iceweasel/Swiftfox is one of the few programs I actually desire to have the latest release and that it is the most used program on my desktop.

If you fallow the instructions at Repository of Shame you can have Compiz-Fusion power your Gnome or XFCE desktop for Debian Lenny. Once the repository is added just:

sudo apt-get install compiz compiz-fusion-extras compiz-fusion-gnome compiz-fusion-plugins-unstable compiz-fusion-unsuport fusion-icon

You can activate the fusion-icon for compiz to take effect. To do this at system start up in XFCE use Session and Startup from Settings in the menu and fusion-icon to your start up programs.

In the Settings menu use the CompizConfig setting manager to tweak your desktop with special effects.

OpenOffice is the premier open source office suite. However Lenny ships with the older 2.x version of OpenOffice. However, you can add the backports repositories and make sure it defaults to the backports repos in synaptic. Now you can install OpenOffice 3.

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org openoffice.org-gtk

You can substitute openoffice.org-kde if needed.

Upon a fresh install of X, Debian defaults to the open source NV driver for nVidia graphics cards. Since I  used Kenshi Muto’s custom Lenny install iso I had the latest 2.6.30 kernel by default and had to do some tweaking to get the preparatory nVidia driver to work. First I had to download the following files from Sid:

linux-headers-2.6.30-1-amd64
linux-headers-2.6.30-1-common
linux-kbuild-2.6.30

If you are not using the 2.6.30 kernal simply type this:

apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Exit Xorg. Now that you have the headers and kbuild we want to create a symlink so that your system has no problems finding them; Then install the nvidia-glx and fetch the preparatory drive with wget (remember to make it executable):

cd /usr/src
sudo ln -s linux-headers-$(uname -r) linux
cd ~/
sudo apt-get nvidi-glx
wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/185.18.14/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.14-pkg2.run
sudo chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.14-pkg2.run
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.14-pkg2.run

Allow the install script to download the necessary files. Once that is finished reboot your system and when you next start X you should see the nVidia logo briefly, indicating it worked.