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by ComputerBob
December 3, 2007
Last Updated May 19, 2008
December 3, 2007
December 7, 2007
My Debian To-Do List
December 8, 2007
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December 10, 2007
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May 19, 2008
Regular readers of this Journal know that I've been very happily using Mepis Linux full-time instead of Windows since September, 2006. Mepis is a very friendly Linux distro that's pretty easy for Windows users to get used to. The Mepis 6.5 that I've been using was based on the extremely popular Ubuntu Linux, which itself was based on Debian Linux. Debian is extremely powerful, extremely secure and rock-solid, but it's reportedly not very newbie-friendly. That's why Debian is "the father" of many popular, newbie-friendly Linux "offspring" distros.
Here's how I think of the relationships between the various operating systems: Windows is like a fancy, expensive bicycle. It gets a lot of people to their jobs faster and with a lot less effort than if they walked. Compared to Windows, Debian Linux is like an armor-plated, fully decked-out Harley-Davidson motorcycle — that's totally free. Ubuntu, Mepis, Kanotix and other newbie-friendly Debian-based Linux distros take that armor-plated Harley and add an automatic transmission and training wheels to it, to make it easier for bicycle riders to get used to riding a motorcycle. [By the way, I don't use the term "training wheels" to demean the many Linux users (both newbies and veterans) who use newbie-friendly Linux distros. I simply mean that many of us might never have been brave enough or knowledgable enough to try to "ride the motorcycle" at all if we hadn't found Linux distros that made it easier for us to get started.] And, as many of us have discovered, it takes time and practice to learn how to ride the motorcycle well, but people who make that effort rarely ever go back to riding the bicycle to work.
Everyone knows that an automatic transmission and training wheels change the way that the Harley handles, and that's just fine for many riders, but after riding awhile, some riders wonder if they could learn to ride without them. That's what I've been wondering, and that's why I've been lurking in several Linux support forums lately. I've been comparing several distros' "training wheels" and learning as much as I can about the underlying armored-plated Harley.
And now, I think maybe I'm finally ready to try to install and configure Debian.
Debian's newest stable release (Etch) has been out for several months, so its users and developers have had time to find and fix bugs and figure out solutions to problems. In contrast, the highly anticipated new Debian-based Mepis 7 is currently in RC2 release, with no release date for Mepis 7 Final.
Here's what I'm thinking: If I can get Debian installed and configured (with KDE, not Gnome) before Mepis 7 comes out, I'll be able to "take it around the block." If I think that I can "ride it well enough to get to work," then I'll probably switch from using Mepis full-time to using Debian full-time. If it turns out that Debian is too much for me to handle, I'll happily keep using Mepis 6.5, and I'll probably upgrade to Mepis 7 Final whenever it gets released. Either way, It'll be completely up to me to choose whatever I feel comfortable doing, based on my current skills and knowledge. Vive libre!
Stay tuned! I don't know how it's going to turn out, but I'll let you know how it goes.
Late yesterday morning, I began my first Debian installation. All together, it took a little over 2 hours, but that included about 45 minutes of downloading a package from the Debian repositories that added 735 things to the minimal, basic install that the Debian Etch i386 KDE CD#1 Installation CD provides. My DSL connection is 768 Kbps, the least expensive DSL connection that Verizon offers, so if your Internet connection is faster than that, you'll be able to download those 735 things in less than 45 minutes.
The default Debian Etch installation installs the Gnome desktop and then allows you to either connect to the Debian repositories — or use additional numbered Debian installation CDs — to also install the KDE desktop afterward, if you choose. Because I use KDE exclusively, I chose to download and install the newest debian-40r1-i386-kde-CD-1.iso from the Debian download site, so that I could install KDE right from CD #1 itself, without having to install Gnome first.
The installation CD includes lots and lots of documentation, too. If you mount the install CD and double-click on a file in its root directory called README.html, you'll find a gateway to just about anything you'll need to know to make sure you are ready to install Debian. Oddly enough, I checked afterward, and I didn't see any documentation that described how to start the installation in GUI mode, or to specify that you want to install KDE instead of Gnome. At least I was able to find that information by pressing the F1 after booting up the install CD (see the next paragraph).
When I booted the install CD, it gave me the option to either boot into the default text-based installation, or view information that described other installation options. I read through those options and chose to use the GUI installer, and to specify that I wanted to install KDE. All it took to specify those things was to change the boot: command from install to installgui tasks="kde-desktop, standard" (including the comma and quotation marks).
The Debian GUI installer was very clean, simple and attractive. Each screen provided choices, as well as information about what the choices were.
I had already created partitions with GParted beforehand, so I didn't have to create any new ones during the installation. When I got to the "Disk Partioning" section of the installation, it showed me a list of all of the partitions on both of my hard drives, and allowed me to simply click and double-click to specify which partitions I wanted Debian to use for separate root, home and swap.
When I finished specifying my partitions, I couldn't figure out how to "end" the partitioning section of the installation. After several seconds, I realized that I had to scroll down to see and click on the "Finish partitioning and write changes to disk" button.
Then it was time to create a root password, a user name, and a user-account name and pasword.
After accounts and passwords were done, the installer said Installing the base system... That took a little less than 2 minutes.
It asked me Use a network mirror? Explained that that meant connecting online to the Debian repositories, to download more software. It also warned me that if I didn't do that at the time, I could either connect to them later, use additional installation CDs at that time or later, or simply have a computer with a very minimal base installation from the CD. I told it "Yes" — use a network mirror.
It asked me to choose a nearby mirror. The United States of America was preselected, so I confirmed it.
It asked me to choose a Debian archive mirror. A list of mirrors in the U.S.A. appeared, and ftp.debian.org was preselected, so I confirmed it.
It gave me the option to specify an HTTP proxy. I don't use one, so I left that screen blank and continued.
It asked if I wanted to participate in "the package manager popularity contest," and it explained what that is. I chose not to participate.
My DSL modem flashed with activity for 1-2 minutes.
The install screen said Select and install software, and Retrieving 735 files... A progress bar appeared, and it started downloading things from the Debian repositories. Keep in mind that I never told it anything about my PC's network card, my router or my DSL connection, so obviously, it must have found and configured my Internet connection correctly all by itself.
(Looking back at my installation now, I wonder if it would have given me a choice of which files I wanted to download — and saved me a lot of downloading time — if I had answered "Yes" to the Debian installer's "popularity contest" question.) Maybe someone who knows the answer can write and tell me.
After about 45 minutes of downloading, it said Preparing filename (filename was the name of each file that flashed by as it was being prepared). I'm guessing that there were probably 735 of them. ;)
At one point, the installer displayed a screen that said Configuring uswsusp. The swap partition that was found in uswsusp's configuration file is not active. (Then it gave a lot more explanation of what that means, and asked me if I wanted to Continue without a valid swap partition? Since my computer is not a notebook, and I never put it into "suspend" mode, I answered "Yes" to continue the installation without a valid uswsusp swap partition.
The next screen displayed a list of possible screen resolutions, and said Configure only the resolutions you would like the XServer to use. A few were preselected. I unselected them and chose only 1680 x 1050, which is my 22" wide-screen LCD monitor's native resolution.
The next screen was the GRUB boot loader installation screen. It reported that it found my Mepis Linux installation and asked if I would like to install GRUB to the Master Boot Record (MBR) of my first hard drive. I told it "Yes." I figured that I might as well use the Debian GRUB menu, and then if it turns out that I don't like Debian, I could always delete Debian and easily use my Mepis LiveCD to reinstall the Mepis GRUB menu.
It popped out the installation CD, told me that installation was complete, and advised me to remove the CD so that Debian could boot from my hard drive.
On reboot, Debian's very plain text-on-a-black-background GRUB menu appeared. Before I had a chance to read its options, it auto-booted into Debian. I made a note to remind myself to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to change the timeout value to 12 seconds (I think it was 5 seconds by default).
After entering my username and password into Debian's clean, simple and attractive login screen, the "KPersonalizer wizard" appeared, and asked me to confirm my country, my language, and my preferred system behavior (I chose MS Windows because I like to double-click instead of single-click on icons to run them).
KPersonalizer's "Eye Candy O-Meter" window allowed me to choose how many screen effects I want my installation to have. There are 10 choices, ranging from "slow processor, fewer effects" to "fast processor, more effects." A drop-down box shows the details of each setting, and also allows you to pick and choose which specific effects you want. Setting 8 out of 10 was preselected, so I confirmed it without making any specific changes.
KPersonalizer's "Everybody Loves Themes" window gave me a choice of 6 themes, with previews showing how each one looks. I chose Plastik, because I like the "glow" feedback that it gives when I point at buttons and tabs.
KPersonalizer's "Time To Refine" window displayed instructions on how to restart the KPersonalizer wizard at any time, and how to go to the K menu's Control Center to refine my settings.
At that point, the Debian desktop loaded for the very first time, and the short startup song played, confirming that sound is working just fine. The default Debian desktop had a simple, attractive, multi-shade blue wallpaper, with a giant Debian "swirling vortex" logo" in the center of the screen.
After all the fear and stress that I had felt while anticipating my first Debian install, that default Debian desktop looked absolutely beautiful to me.
There were only three icons on the desktop: Home, System and Trash.
The kicker panel at the bottom of the screen came with the following icons:
I right-clicked on the desktop and chose Configure Desktop. My screen resolution was correctly set to 1680 x 1050 @ 60 Hz.
This is an extremely minor thing, but Debian's K menu has a white background, compared to Mepis's greyish-blue. I prefer Debian's menu, because I think it looks cleaner. YMMV.
Another very minor thing: Quanta Plus, KCron, KSysV and KGet were already installed. I always install those in Mepis, so it was nice to see them already in Debian.
For the past several years, I've used Mozilla's Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client. Debian comes with Iceweasel (a rebranded version of Firefox), but it doesn't come with any GUI email client. So, I opened a Konsole window, issued the command aptitude install icedove and about 30 seconds later, my computer had the rebranded version of Thunderbird, complete with its own menu item in the K menu.
To keep a promise to a friend, I then immediately went to GRC.com, where its Shields UP! test told me that all of my ports were "stealthed," but that my computer failed its "TruStealth Analysis" because it returned a reply to a ping. That's exactly the same results that I get in Mepis with the GuardDog firewall installed and configured (Debian comes with IPTables installed, but without any firewall GUI to make it easy to manage IPTables). Anyway, before I disabled my DSL router's routing abilities, my computer (running Mepis) used to pass GRC.com's "TruStealth" analysis, so I attribute the returned pings in both Mepis and Debian to a configuration issue with my DSL modem, not to either operating system. Maybe some day, I'll figure out how to tweak my DSL modem so that it will pass "TruStealth" analysis again, but for now, I'm satisfied that all of my PC's ports are "stealthed," even if it replies to pings. UPDATE: I did some research on the topic and found a forum posting that says, "To block pings (which breaks Line Quality Testing, Tweak Testing, and Line Monitoring) requires that you go into the Westell settings and set it to drop/ignore/block ICMP pings on its WAN Interface." Other posts in that same thread say that letting the Westell reply to pings does not represent a security threat. With that in mind, I decided to leave my Westell's settings the way they are, instead of trying to configure it to drop incoming pings.
I visited this site's home page. Everything looked good except the fonts looked too small, too thin and too jagged. Since then, I've enabled KDE's font anti-aliasing and experimented with the settings for sub-pixel hinting. Now my screen fonts look almost the same in Debian as they do in Mepis, but (for example) in the word "finish," the "f" and the "i" slighly overlap each other, which looks really bad. I guess I'll keep trying different combinations of sub-pixel hinting settings, to see if I can fix that.
Then I went into /etc/fstab and added a few lines to it, to make sure that my second hard drive's partitions would be recognized, but not automatically mounted, on each boot. After rebooting, I was able to mount and view those other partitions.
In Mepis, I've always had to download and install two .deb files from the Brother web site before I could print to my Brother HL-5240 laser printer. So I was very pleasantly surprised to find a driver for the slightly older Brother HL-5040 printer in Debian's K menu --> Printers. I chose it, and a minute later, I was able to use my printer.
Right before I left home to teach last night, I rebooted my PC and chose Mepis from the Debian GRUB menu. Almost immediately, I received a kernel panic error and had to power-off my PC. As I was driving to my teaching job, I figured out what had caused the problem: When I first installed Mepis over a year ago, I told it to write its GRUB information to the MBR of my primary hard drive. Yesterday, when I installed Debian, I told it to write it's GRUB information to that same MBR, and that overwrote the Mepis GRUB information. All of a sudden, I realized that it was going to be a simple matter to get Mepis to boot again. When I got home, I booted up from the Mepis LiveCD and used the Mepis System Assistant to write the Mepis GRUB information to the Mepis partition itself. On the next boot, I chose Mepis from the Debian GRUB menu, and Mepis booted up without any problems.
The following To-Do list shows what I've done so far, to get Debian set up and configured the way I want it. As I think of new tasks, I will add them to the "Left To Do" section, and as I complete each task, I will move it from the "Left To Do" section to the "Done" section.
THINGS I'VE DONE SO FAR
THINGS I HAVE LEFT TO DO
My very first Debian installation has confirmed what I suspected all along: Debian is like a fully decked-out Harley-Davidson motorcycle, while Mepis and other newbie-friendly Debian-based Linux distros "add an automatic transmission and training wheels" to that motorcycle, to make it easier to ride. Whether you're a Linux newbie or seasoned veteran, if you want to use Linux, but you're not very interested in tweaking, controlling, or learning about "what's under the hood," then I highly recommend that you run Mepis Linux, because that's pretty much exactly what it lets you do. On the other hand, if you meet the following requirements:
then I highly recommend that you try Debian Linux. In the past 30 hours, Debian forced me to probably learn more about Linux than I learned from using Mepis in the past 6 months, but that was my choice, and to me, it feels really good to know that I've learned enough about Linux to be able to run Debian now.
Vroom! Vroom! That's the sound of rolling thunder!
This morning, after I updated my Journal in Mepis Linux, I told Mepis to "Restart Computer," so that I could boot into Debian. Everything looked like a normal boot until the Debian login screen appeared. At that point, the Debian "vortex" logo was black instead of white, all of the text on the screen displayed as garbage characters, and the username and password input boxes were black instead of white. When I pointed at the onscreen menu options, they instantly changed back to English, but reverted to being garbage characters as soon as I stopped pointing at them.
After a few seconds of initial panic, I remembered that a few years ago, I had those same types of weird problems when I was dual-booting Windows 98 SE with various Linux distros that I was trying out at the time. Back then, a lot of trial-and-error had finally made me realize that the problems were caused by restarting my PC instead of powering it down when I switched from one OS to another. So this morning, I told Debian to "Turn off computer." About 10 seconds after it completely powered-down, I turned it back on, and when the Debian login screen appeared, it was completely back to normal. I hope that I never forget that lesson again.
If I have time later today, I hope to move my browser and email profiles off of my Mepis Linux partition and onto my shared data partition. If all goes well, that will allow me to do both tasks from both Mepis and Debian. As you can tell from My Debian To-Do List, I've already configured and tweaked Debian quite a bit. I still have several things that I want to do, but it's getting very close to the point where I will start trying to use Debian full-time instead of Mepis. And so far, that looks like a very real possibility.
If you've been following my progress in the past few days, you've seen my Debian To-Do list grow much, much larger than it was when I first started, but you've also seen most of the tasks move up into its "Done" section. That's because I've been working on Debian for several hours each day, and until after 2:00 AM for the past couple of nights.
At this point, I'm "riding the Harley to work." I'm doing all of my email, browsing, web development and other daily tasks in Debian. I'm almost completely finished configuring Debian to look and function exactly the way I want, and I haven't needed to use Mepis at all today. My Debian To-Do List no longer has any possible "deal-breakers."
I am a full-time Debian user.
If I someone had shown me my current Debian To-Do List a week ago, its length and my perception of how difficult it would be to do many of its tasks probably would have scared me away from even wanting to try Debian. Yes, it has been a lot of work, especially for a guy who's used to using only "point-and-click" GUI configuration tools, but I learned more than I ever thought I could, and now I have an incredible, overwhelming sense of accomplishment and exhilaration. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Followed by 2,639,999 more. The secret is to do it all step-by-step, a little at a time, and never worry about how many steps remain.
For the past several months, I used that same strategy to work toward my goal of losing 100 pounds. A few days ago, I achieved that goal. And now, I've surpassed it. I think that reaching my weight-loss goal probably gave me the boost in self-confidence that I needed to be willing to try installing Debian. In the same way, installing Debian gave me another boost in self-confidence that will probably help me get through the next difficult task in my life, whatever that turns out to be.
In the past several days, I found plenty of valuable help on the Debian site, in the Debian User Forums, and by doing Google searches. In fact, I now have several browser bookmarks to sites, tips, and articles that were helpful to me. One nice thing I discovered about Debian is that although configuring it took a lot more careful thought and execution than it does to configure one of the more "newbie-friendly" Linux distros, Debian has plenty of really great sources of information and support — it's been around a long time, it has many, many users, and no matter what problem I discover, it seems like "they've seen it all before." That makes it relatively pain-free to find all the answers that I need.
Now I'm going to catch up on my email and write today's Journal entry. After that, I know that there's a nice long nap with my name on it, just waiting for me.
I'm almost completely done! Last night, I stayed up until after 3:00 AM, working on Debian, and my Debian To-Do list reflects that fact. At this point, Debian looks great, it works great, and I couldn't be happier. Now I have a whole new appreciation for all the work that must go into making Mepis Linux "automatic," but at the same time, I also have a new feeling of independence from that user-friendliness! From now on, if I want to, I can keep using Debian, without ever having to feel scared of it. Or, if I want to, I can go back to using Mepis, without feeling like I have to use it because I don't know enough to be able to use a less-user-friendly distro. Learning how to install and configure Debian is one of the best things I've ever done on my computer. It has empowered me with freedom, confidence and choices.
I updated my Debian To-Do list to reflect the fact that I finished doing everything on it today, including two separate backups of my completely installed and configured Debian setup (see my To-Do List for details). Of course, I'll probably add new things to it as I continue to use Debian full-time, but for now, I'm ready to just use and enjoy my computer, instead of configuring it and documenting everything that I do on it.
Here are a couple of screenshots of my Debian desktop, showing my desktop icons and my mostly-transparent kicker-panel and non-transparent clock. As I described in my Debian To-Do List (see above) my desktop wallpaper changes every 16 hours. In the second screenshot, you can see how the Kmenu looks in Debian KDE, now that I increased its font size from 10-point to 11-point.
I'm feeling just as exhilarated about using Debian as I felt when I first installed Mepis Linux over a year ago, and realized that I was going to keep using it full-time, instead of Windows XP.
Yesterday, I spent several hours trying to get time synchronization to work correctly. It only took a minute to install the ntpdate client, allow "NTP time server" in my GuardDog firewall, and confirm that it was syncing to a public time server and setting my system clock (on my desktop) to the correct time. However, I discovered that I had exactly the same problem that I experienced a couple of weeks ago, when I first tried to use ntpdate, ntp, ntp-simple, and at least one other time synchronization tool:
I know, I know: everyone says that there are simple fixes for that problem. And there are — but they didn't work. Believe me when I tell you that I read and followed the instructions to fix that problem on at least 40 different web sites. I ran tzselect several times, created new configuration files, edited existing configuration files, and issued screenfuls of suggested date and hwclock commands, but nothing solved the problem. I don't know if it's caused by a bug in the Linux kernel or not, but even though Linux prefers to keep the hardware clock set to UTC time, it's supposed to allow you to keep it set to local time if you want. Unfortunately, this version of both the 486 and K7 Linux kernels (2.6.18-5) ignored every effort I made to switch the hardware clock from UTC to local time.
I finally decided that since my PC only gains or loses a couple of seconds each day, I can live without synchronizing it to a public time server, especially if doing that constantly sets its hardware clock to UTC time against my wishes. So I removed all of the time sync scripts and packages that I had installed, and manually set both clocks back to local time.
With that problem put on the back burner for the time being, I turned my attention to my ethernet connection. As you may remember, a few days ago, I removed the old Linksys ethernet NIC from my PC and began using my PC's onboard 3com NIC instead. Ever since then, even though my Internet connection seemed to work just fine, I'd see a string of 20-30 long messages flash by at each boot — I don't remember the exact messages, because each one was at least a couple of lines long, and they filled the entire screen for a second or so on each bootup, but I think they said something about ethernet IN eth0 xxxxxxxxxxx and IIRC, ethernet OUT eth0 xxxxxxxxxx. I tried to find them by looking in in dmesg after booting up, but they were never there. Plus, each time I shut down my PC, I'd see another 10-20 of those same messages flash by. I don't know what they were, but I didn't see them until I started using my onboard NIC. So, I tried to figure out what was causing them. Unfortunately, without knowing exactly what they said, I couldn't find any help about them. But I discovered that they didn't appear at all when I booted up from my Mepis Linux LiveCD, so that made me suspect that they were something I should probably try to get rid of. I really like having a LiveCD to help me troubleshoot things.
After trying to figure out what was causing all of those bootup and shutdown messages for a few hours, copying backups of configuration files, editing configuration files, and rebooting at least 30 or 40 times, I finally restored my backup from two days — the one that included my onboard NIC being all set up. As I had suspected, that didn't solve the problem, because the backup had the exact same ethernet setup.
So I restored the newest one of my earlier backups. Of course, that didn't solve the problem either, because it expected to see the Linksys NIC, and didn't know what to do with the onboard NIC. When I reinstalled the Linksys NIC and rebooted, it worked, but it gave the same "tulip_stop" errors on boot that had originally caused me to want to remove it and use my onboard NIC instead.
So I removed the Linksys NIC, expecting that Linux would then find my motherboard's NIC the way it had when I first pulled out that Linksys NIC a few days earlier. Instead, on bootup, I was greeted with countless eth0 errors and then dumped into a command prompt.
Over and over, I tried booting from a LiveCD and copying newer configuration files to various places, to try to get the old installation to recognize my motherboard's NIC. I tried every possible combination of enabling and disabling my motherboard's two NIC devices with and without the Linksys NIC installed. But no matter what I tried, every time I booted, I got screenfuls of errors and a command prompt, instead of a desktop.
That's when I decided to install Debian all over again, this time in a different partition, to see if a brand new Debian installation, with only my motherboard's NIC enabled at the time of installation, would display those same messages.
As I documented above, when I first installed Debian, I used the Debian KDE Installation CD #1, along with a command line that told it to install KDE along with the standard software package. Since then, a few people wrote to tell me that if I had not used that special command line, the installer would have given me a choice of what packages to install. So this time, I decided to just use the installgui command, to run the GUI installer without telling it to install the standard software package. What I discovered was that it made no difference: when I got the the screen that asked if I wanted to use a network mirror, I answered "Yes," and it still downloaded 741 files for over 48 minutes, without ever letting me choose what I wanted to install.
I just had to know if there was a way to get the installer to let me choose which packages I wanted. So, when it finished its downloads, I shut down my PC and rebooted with the installer CD again. Then I re-installed Debian onto that same partition a second time, using the GUI installer. That time, when it asked me if I wanted to use a network mirror, I answered "No." That option turned out to be faster than answering "Yes" had been, but it still downloaded 653 files for over 13 minutes — without ever letting me choose what I wanted it to install.
Have I ever told you that I'm a pit bull when it comes to troubleshooting?
I stopped the second installation in the middle of its downloads, by powering off my PC. Then I rebooted with the installation CD and re-installed Debian onto that same partition for the third time, but that time, I used the text-based installer. When it asked me if I wanted to use a network mirror, I answered "No." Exactly like the GUI installer, it downloaded 653 files for over 13 minutes — again without ever letting me choose what I wanted it to install.
All of that was very educational, but it still didn't answer my networking question. So, I went all the way through that third install. When it finished, and I rebooted, the "ethernet IN eth0 xxxxxxxxxxx and IIRC, ethernet OUT eth0 xxxxxxxxxx" messages were gone, and my Internet connection worked just fine.
So finally, there was the answer to my question: installing Debian with only my motherboard's NIC enabled had allowed it to somehow set up that onboard NIC differently than it had set it up when I had removed my Linksys NIC and switched to using the onboard motherboard NIC. And by doing it that way, I had eliminated those cryptic bootup and shutdown networking messages.
With knowledge comes power, and I'm the kind of person who's always looking to make a good thing better.
So, late, late, late last night, I reinstalled Debian a fourth time, right over the top of my first Debian installation — the one that I documented throughout this entire article. Using my Debian To-Do List as a "cookbook," Then I immediately configured my browser, email, and web development packages. Then I chose other "high-priority" things (out of order) from my To-Do List and started doing them all again. Right now, you'd never know by looking at my desktop that it's a totally brand new installation — it already looks exactly like my first installation did, and I've already reconfigured many things "under the hood" to work the same way, too.
And yes, I realize that my /home directory holds nearly all of my individual configuration settings, and if I had chosen to preserve my /home directory when I reinstalled Debian, I wouldn't have had to redo a lot of the tasks in my Debian To-Do List. But at the time I reinstalled Debian, I was trying to get rid of a networking problem and I didn't know if anything in my /home directory had contributed to that problem. So I chose to "start fresh" and reinstall Debian with a brand new /home directory, and then redo all of my individual configuration settings afterward. Of course, now that my networking is working the way I want, without any error messages, if I ever feel the need to reinstall Debian again, I'll probably preserve my /home directory to save myself the trouble of having to redo my entire To-Do List again.
So, this has been a ton of work, but My Debian Adventure is not only serving as an example to other people, it's also working perfectly to help me quickly reconfigure everything the way that I want.
And, now that I've done it five times, I'm not scared to install Debian any more.
In case you're wondering, despite all of this troubleshooting, installing and reinstalling, I'm still deliriously happy to be running Debian Linux.
Now I better get going — it's time for me to reinstall the nVidia drivers
the Debian way.
I'm completely done re-doing everything in my Debian To-Do List. Everything is updated, and everything is backed up again. It's time to relax again, to try to keep "My Debian Adventure" from becoming "My Debian Obsession."
UPDATE: This morning, the Adept Notifier (adept-notifier) told me that there were 3 updates available for my system. When I clicked on its icon, it automatically started Adept Manager. There doesn't appear to be any way to make it start Synaptic instead.
Adept Manager didn't provide anywhere near as much information about the updates as Synaptic does, and when I told it to install the updates, it didn't let me see the details or download progress of each update that it was downloading, either. I kind of felt like I was using a dumbed-down version of Synaptic, so I didn't like Adept Manager very much.
After that, I removed adept-notifier and adept-manager, and installed update-notifier and update-manager, as I described in my Debian To-Do List. There haven't been any updates for me to try out Update Manager with yet, so I'll have to wait until there are before I'll know whether I'm going to want to use it to install updates, or whether I'll want to manually start Synaptic whenever update-notifier tells me that there are updates available.
I haven't been able to confirm it, but I read one article that said that update-manager is based on Synaptic. I hope that ends up being true, because I really like Synaptic.
This morning, I installed
Xsnow, a free little toy that adds falling, blowing snowflakes and Santa in his sleigh to my desktop. If you click on the thumbnail, you can see what my desktop looks like right now. After living the vast majority of my life up north, including 17 1/2 years in the Frostbite State, Xsnow is about as close to real snow as I'm willing to be any more.
I just love using Linux full-time instead of Windows. I loved using Mepis Linux for 15 months, and I've loved using Debian Linux for the past three weeks.
For the past couple of days, I've been trying to solve a "mystery" that involves my OpenGL screensavers in Debian Linux. Since I never use a screensaver (I have Debian configured to power-down my monitor after 5 minutes of inactivity), it's not an important issue to solve, but it's one that I'm curious about. If you're interested in following my progress, as well as seeing the type of excellent help that I've received in the Debian support forums, take a look at
this forum thread.
The mystery of the past few days has been solved, thanks to a lot of excellent help from my new friends at the Debian User Forums. All of my over 70 OpenGL screensavers are working now, and it turned out that the only thing I had to do was install xscreensaver-gl. For the whole story, see
this forum thread.
Last night, I used Synaptic to install Yakuake, and it looks really good! You load it into memory at startup, and then any time you want a terminal, you just press F12 (or your chosen hot-key), and it instantly scrolls down onto your screen. With tabs (and split-screen, too, if you run the latest version). And if you want it to be transparent, you can make it so with only takes a couple of clicks. Press F12 again and it instantly scrolls back off the screen, but anything that's running in it, keeps running.
I tried Yakuake for more than a half-hour, and the only thing I didn't like about it was that it only had two choices for its active/inactive behavior:Neither of those choices work well with the way that I generally use a terminal, so I ended up uninstalling Yakuake.
After thinking about it a little, I did a search to see if there's a way to work around those default behaviors. I didn't find one, but I did find a site somewhere where Yakuake's author said that he plans to change its behavior in the future, to allow it to be inactive, still on the screen, and behind other windows. That's exactly what I would want it to do.
So, some day, when a version of Yakuake with that feature finds its way to the Debian Linux Stable branch (currently Etch), I'll probably reinstall it on my system, because it does a great job of providing convenient, instant access to a terminal.
Last night, following several people's recommendedations, I decided to finally check out the Debian Support IRC channel. Before I tried it, I thought that I had never used IRC before, but as I spent some time using it, I slowly remembered that I had visited IRC channels years and years ago, probably in the late 1980s, back when I was using MS-DOS. If you don't know how to access an IRC channel, each IRC client has its own way of doing it, but here's how I connected to the Debian Support IRC channel, using the KSirc IRC Client that was installed by default in Debian Etch KDE:
I spent a long time in that support IRC channel, reading the conversations that scrolled by. I even started one conversation of my own, to ask about why the Debian Etch KDE installation CD #1 hadn't given me any choices of which packages it would install. One person told me that it's because unlike the "normal" Debian install CD (the one that installs the Gnome desktop) the KDE install CD automatically runs the "install" command with the "standard" and "kde desktop" tasks, even when you don't specify those tasks. If that's true, then it would certainly explain why the installer never let me choose which packages I wanted, even after (as I described above) I re-installed Debian four different times, trying to find a way to get that choice.
It was very interesting and educational to "lurk" in that IRC channel for awhile, sometimes seeing several conversations crossing each other at the same time. Of course, I had to read each poster's name at the beginning of each post, to keep track of which conversation they were participating in. From the long list of online users that KSirc displayed, it was obvious that there are lots and lots of people "on" the Debian support IRC channel, but apparently nearly all of them were either silently reading, or they weren't "there" at the time, but were keeping their IRC clients running while they did other things, to allow them to read through the conversations later. One person advised me that sometimes, when you post a question in IRC, if there's either no one online at the time who knows the answer, or no one online who feels like answering, it can sometmes take hours or even days before someone replies. That's one reason why so many people keep their IRC client running all the time, and then read through the conversations at their convenience. "To each his own," but personally, I don't see "delayed chat" as a very useful or efficient way to find answers to questions. In fact, I think it removes the advantages that live chat has over normal forum postings, so if I ever feel the need to post questions to any IRC channel, I'm just going to hope that someone is online at the time who can interact with me about my question "in real time," because I have no interest in keeping my IRC client running for hours or days at a time, hoping that someone will reply to my questions later.
By the way, before I disconnected from the Debian Support IRC, I clicked on KSirc's small "Server Control" window, and selected Connections --> Do Autoconnect. That way, every time I start KSirc from now on, it will automatically connect me to that IRC channel.
Several years ago, I started looking for a Linux distro that could successfully replace Windows on my computer. About 18 months ago, I found that Ubuntu came very close. A few days later, Kubuntu became my first full-time Linux distro. About a month after that, Mepis Linux replaced Kubuntu and served me very well for about 16 months, "holding my hand" and providing a user-friendly, community-supported, "safe" way to learn the basics of Linux. Armed with the knowledge and confidence that Mepis had given me, I began My Debian Adventure earlier this month. And now, as I look back on this past year and forward into the new one, I know that I've graduated from being a Linux newbie, and the future holds many more exciting, challenging, educational, fulfilling adventures for me.
This afternoon, I received an email message that asked several follow-up questions about My Debian Adventure. Here are those questions, along with my answers to them:
The answer to this question is now a separate article, How I Lost More Than 100 Pounds.
Answer: No. I went around and around that whole issue, two separate times, but nothing I did and none of the many, many web sites that I found, ever solved the problem in Etch. As I described above, I had no problem getting time sync to work. The problem was that no matter which NTP client I used, it always set my hardware clock to UTC time, so even though my system clock read the correct time and the correct time zone, all of my email messages said that I had written them 5 hours in the future of when I actually wrote them, and every time I booted, fsck complained that my hard drives' "superblock last write time is in the future," and that it needed to fix them. I finally "solved" the problem by deciding that I don't really need my computer's clock to be accurate within a few milliseconds of the correct time. So, unless and until I learn something that I don't already know about that problem and its solution, I'm just going to live with the fact that it doesn't work for me.
UPDATE, January 5, 2008: I finally fixed the problem with my PC's hardware clock running UTC time! One of these days, I'll try reinstalling an NTP client — it should work fine now.
UPDATE, February 1, 2008: I finally fixed NTP! See my February 1, 2008 update (below) for details.
Answer: Well, my Linksys NIC was giving me error messages on boot, so I wouldn't exactly characterize it as "playing" between two different NICs, but other than that, yes, it appears that the act of pulling out the Linksys NIC and enabling the onboard motherboard NIC caused some sort of "self-inflicted wound," from which my PC wasn't able to recover. ;)
Answer: Yes and no. Someone who seemed to know what they were talking about in the Debian support IRC channel told me that, unlike the "normal" Debian installation CD #1 (the one that installs Gnome), the Debian KDE installation CD always runs the "install" command with the "standard" and "kde desktop" tasks, even when you don't specify those tasks. So, unless and until someone changes that behavior, it looks like that's my only choice, unless I learn how to use the netinst CD instead, to do a basic install, followed by separately installing KDE and my choice of additional apps.
Answer: To be fair, I wasn't trying to get Synaptic to automatically start whenever there was an available update. I was trying to see if the I could get the Adept package manager's "adept-notify" icon to start Synaptic when I clicked on it, instead of Adept. I couldn't find a way to do that, so I uninstalled adept-notify and installed "update-notifier" instead. Unfortunately, update-notifier has never appeared on my desktop to notify me of any updates, including the 23 security updates that I read about several days ago. I read about those online and manually installed them through Synaptic. I haven't been able to find any information to help me figure out if update-notifier is even running, or to troubleshoot why it never notifies me about any updates.
So that's the latest from this side of the screen. I hope that I've answered people's questions sufficiently, and/or helped them with their own Debian adventures. If anyone knows the solutions to any of the ongoing problems that I've mentioned, please write and let me know. But please keep in mind that I've already read scores of web sites' advice about the time-sync problem, and spent countless frustrating hours going around and around that problem without being able to solve it, so I already know "how it's supposed to work."
About 2:00 this morning, I finally fixed NTP! In my Guarddog firewall's configuration screen, I went to Protocol --> Internet --> Data Serve and enabled NTP - Network Time Protocol. Then, as root, I ran the command apt-get install ntpdate — Then I right-clicked on my system clock, chose Adjust Date & Time; checked the new check box to select Set date and time automatically. Then I selected the "north-america.pool.ntp.org" time server from the drop-down list of time servers. The clock in that dialog box became "greyed-out," (non-selectable) and now my PC synchronizes its time to an NTP time server automatically, and both its system clock and hardware clock are still correctly using my local time zone. I confirmed that ntpdate is working by running a few of the ntpdate commands that are described in the NTP Toolkit. By the way, while trying to get time synchronization to work, I had installed both ntpdate and ntp. In order to get ntpdate to finally work, I had to uninstall ntp — ntp's daemon had been using the ntp connection, which had prevented ntpdate from connecting to its time server. After I uninstalled ntp, ntpdate worked fine.
Because I have a full-time DSL Internet connection and I very rarely reboot my PC, the ntpdate time-synchronization package that I installed a few days ago didn't get to run very often, because it only runs once on each reboot. So I uninstalled ntpdate and installed ntp instead, because ntp updates continuously at random times while the PC is running. NTP worked perfectly, but even though the ntp service automatically restarted each time I rebooted, it wouldn't start synchronizing my PC's time after each reboot until after I manually restarted the ntp service by issuing the command (as root) service ntp restart. Then it would work perfectly until the next time I rebooted my PC. After studying my PC's /var/log/syslog file, I concluded that the problem appeared to be caused by the fact that the NTP service was starting so early in the boot process that my PC's Internet connection wasn't even working yet, and that was probably the reason that NTP was failing to automatically synchronize after bootups until I manually restarted the NTP service.
Very late last night, I solved the problem of the NTP service starting too early in the boot process. After doing a lot of searching, I found this Ubuntu Linux bug report, which finally confirmed that the problem is a known bug in Debian Linux. Then this thread in the Ubuntu Linux forums suggested several possible fixes, but provided no definitive solution. Finally, this debianHELP thread gave me the idea that solved the problem for me. I went to KMenu --> Settings --> Internet & Network --> Network Settings --> Administrator Mode --> eth0 --> Configure Interface... and changed its setting from Automatic and dhcp to Manual. I left my IP address the same as it already appeared in the selection box. I left the Netmask setting the way that it already appeared, and I selected the box marked Activate when the computer starts. Then I shut down my computer. When I booted it back up again, /var/log/syslog confirmed that the NTP service had started after my Internet connection was established, and by issuing the ntpq -p command in a root console, I was able to confirm that NTP was automatically and continuously synchronizing my PC's time to my chosen time servers. Just to make sure, I shut down and then restarted my computer four more times in the following hour, and every time, the NTP service started after my Internet connection was working, and NTP automatically and continuously synchronized my PC's time, exactly the way that it's supposed to. In addition, an unintentional side benefit of using a static IP address instead of DHCP is that although my DSL connection is the same speed that it was before, it is much more responsive now than it used to be — now when I click on a hyperlink, it loads immediately, with no lag time, and when I upload files to my web server, they transfer immediately, without any delays.
I'm feeling really, really good about the balance of challenge-reward that Debian keeps giving me. It gives me enough of a challenge to keep things interesting and teach me a lot about Linux, but not so much of a challenge that I get discouraged. And each time I solve a challenge, I get such a great sense of reward that I don't dread whatever the next challenge might turn out to be.
Two days ago, I switched from Debian Etch to Debian Lenny. You can find out why and how I did it by reading My Debian Adventure, Part 2: Lenny.