Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Debian 4.0 Etch

I am basically a Ubuntu user. Since Ubuntu is based on Debian, I've tried to install Debian Etch from the 4.0r1 single Gnome CD but somehow it refused to boot and this only happens to Debian.

Since I've tried the Ubuntu 6.10/7.04 Installation from Ubuntu 6.06,
(http://mcuee.blogspot.com/2007/12/installing-ubuntu-from-unixlinux-system.html), I managed to install Debian Etch from Ubuntu 6.06 using the same method. One thing I need to mention is that I need to manually set up the timezone by changing the file /etc//default/rcS (UTC=no instead of the original UTC=yes).

Debian Etch (current stable) is said to be very stable and so far it works fine for me except one thing. I am not able to use Swiftfox or Mozilla Firefox to replace the stock Iceweasel (at 2.0.0.3). Stock Firefox under Ubuntu versions are not so stable with my desktop (NForce 3 motherboard with ATI9800SE AGP graphics card, AMD64 3000+ CPU, 1GB DDR RAM). Most likely it is a problem with the Xorg X server and Ubuntu version of Firefox. And this happens to Debian as well: it sometims crashes without warning. Swiftfox in general works better for me. Somehow even after I uninstalled Iceweasel and remove all things Iceweasel related, when I run Swiftfox or Firefox from Mozilla and check the version, it always shows Iceweasel 2.0.0.3. I am not so sure why. Hopefully I can figure it out in the near future.

Edit three hours after posting:
After enable the security updating, now it is at 2.0.0.10 and hopefully this will be better than the old 2.0.0.3. And I can install Swiftfox (the default version of 3.0b3-pre3 is not usable but the older version 2.0.0.12pre is ok). I can also run the original Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11.

One more problem is that the flash plugin does not work under Opera. I installed Opera before I found the solution to the above-mentioned problem.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"I've tried to install Debian Etch from the 4.0r1 single Gnome CD"

What do you mean by "single Gnome CD"? You could have installed Etch eg. from netinst CD. Netinst-CD is wery small CD which contains only installer and all other stuff nesessary to start installation. netinst willthen fetch and install everything from the Debian mirror.

http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst

Here is a good /etc/apt/sources.list which activates all Debian repositories (main, non-free and contrib), and debian-multimedia.org repository which contains lots of multimedia codecs etc. This sources.list uses Finnish Debian-mirror (.fi) you could use any other mirror.

deb http://ftp.fi.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.fi.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free contrib
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main non-free contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main non-free contrib
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main
deb-src http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main

After you have changed the sources.list do this:
# apt-get update && apt-get install debian-multimedia-keyring

If you want to install skype ad this line to sources.list too:
deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free

Now you can do
# apt-get install skype

If you want Beryl add these lines too:
deb http://debian.beryl-project.org etch main
deb-src http://debian.beryl-project.org etch main

if you want Google Picasa etc. add this line
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free

Anonymous said...

By the way, just a small sidenote:

Debian Etch was updated couple of days ago.
Debian Etch 4.0r2 CD-images should be available for download now.

Xiaofan said...

Thanks for the suggestion. I forgot where I downloaded the Gnome Live CD. But I tried the other KDE Live CD as well from my favorite Linux mirror:
ftp://mirror.pacific.net.au/linux/debian-cd/4.0_r1/i386/iso-cd. I prefer Ubuntu style single CD installation to Netinst CD. IMHO Ubuntu Installation is much easier than Debian.

Anyway, this is only an experiment and I just want to try it out. My main Linux installation is still Ubuntu 6.06 and 7.10.