Home

Moving to Debian Stable (Sarge)

This page is a log of my experience with switching to Debian GNU/Linux. I've been a Linux user since 1994 and Linux has been my primary system for quite some time (although it is still far from the point of becoming my only OS). For the last 3 years I've been using SuSE 9.1, and then 9.3 on all my machines. SuSE is a terrific system and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone, who wants to get Linux up and running without investing too much time into it. I have been, and I still am a very happy SuSE user. Yet I've recently started to play with Debian and I plan to make a switch at some point in the fairly near future (probably by March 2007 when SuSE 9.3 is no longer supported). Without going into another religious war about distributions, let's just say that out of all community-based distributions (and OpenSuSE is a community-based distribution these days), Debian seems to be the most stable one with respect to the mission and philosophy behind the distribution. It is also a great choice for a server OS and it has a very respectable track production quality. So Debian it is.

General requirements

The distribution I will use should have a sufficiently large number of packages. This doesn't mean, it should have every package under the sun, but it should have many. I have no problem building packages from scratch and I can understand if I have to do it for such esoteric packages as Maxima, STk, or SciLab, but that's pretty much it. Building packages from scratch negates the whole purpose of having a distribution (unless you have enough spare time on your hands and one of the "from scratch" distributions). This doesn't mean that the core distribution itself must be very large - I can live with one or two well established third-party package repositories as long as it is just one or two of them. Otherwise it would take too much time hunting for packages from various places, installing them, fighting incompatibilities and dependencies and crossing fingers in hope that none of those packages contains a trojan.

Critical requirements

In order for me to productively use a particular OS version, I need a number of things to work in a stable fashion. Each of these things is critical for me and if one of them doesn't work, I will not use this particular distribution.

So, without further ado...

  • VMware Workstation 4.5 - I use it for all things Windows that I cannot leave behind (with the exception of games), so it just must work.
  • Subversion 1.1.3 (or above) - That's my version control. Again, it should just work.
  • OpenOffice 2 - I have a number of personal documents in ODT format.
  • LaTeX - again, this should just work, with METAPOST, Cyrillic, bibliography tools, graphics packages etc.

Migration log

In migrating to a different distribution, one of the most annoying things is to learn the new way of getting things done. Different distribution historically have developed different sets of tools for system administration and configuration, so things done using a centralized GUI tool on one distribution might be done via editing of raw configuration files in another one. While I hope, it will be a one-time matter for me, I still want to keep track of all the tools and commands used in the system configuration. Hopefully, other people will find it helpful as well.

NVidia videocard support

There are plenty of resources on NVidia driver installation. I used Andrew E. Schulman's Debian-nVidia HOWTO, which is pretty clear on the process. One thing to remember is that you have to enable contrib and non-free sections of Debian repository in order to download NVidia stuff.

Switching to KDM

I am a KDE user (don't get me started). As such, I prefer a KDM as my login manager instead of default GDM. To switch, install KDM:

apt-get install kdm

You will be prompted to select the window manager to start upon the system boot, so you can set it to KDM.

Better theme for Gnome apps in KDE

No matter what theme you select in the Gnome control center, in KDE all Gnome applications show up with the default Gtk style, which is OK, if you compare it to Motif but sucks otherwise. To make Gnome apps look nicer install gtk2-engines-gtk-qt

apt-get install gtk2-engines-gtk-qt

Then go to KDE Control Center -> Appearances & Themes -> GTK Styles and Fonts and select an appropriate theme for the GTK applications.

Personal xmodmap table support

By default, Debian X configuration doesn't make an attempt to load user's xmodmap table. To make this work, as per Xsession(5), create a file /etc/X11/Xsession.d/40custom_load-xmodmap with the following contents:

       SYSMODMAP="/etc/X11/Xmodmap"
       USRMODMAP="$HOME/.Xmodmap"

       if [ -x /usr/bin/X11/xmodmap ]; then
           if [ -f "$SYSMODMAP" ]; then
               xmodmap "$SYSMODMAP"
           fi
       fi

       if [ -x /usr/bin/X11/xmodmap ]; then
           if [ -f "$USRMODMAP" ]; then
               xmodmap "$USRMODMAP"
           fi
       fi

Extended support for keyboard and mouse

In /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 set the following parameters in the appropriate sections:


    Option          "XkbModel"              "logicdp"
    ...
    Option          "Buttons"               "12"
    Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "6 7"

Then add to either system or user xmodmap table:

  pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5 8 9 10 11 12

Making multimedia keys work with Amarok

Once the extended keyboard keys generate appropriate keysyms (check by using xev), Open the Configure Shortcuts menu of Amarok to make it use those keysyms.

Configuring MTA

Using

  dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

allows setting most basic mail traffic parameters which was enough in my case.

  • Printer-friendly version