To Do List After & installing Debian Squeeze 6

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential Linux distribution. It is distributed with access to repositories containing thousands of software packages ready for installation and use. Debian is known for relatively strict adherence to the Unix and free software philosophies as well as using collaborative software development and testing processes. Debian can be used on a variety of hardware, from NAS devices to phones, laptops, desktops and servers. It focuses on stability and security and is used as a base for many other distributions.

Debian is under continual development. The latest release is Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.3. It is also (currently) known as stable or by its codename “Squeeze”.

Dubbed Squeeze, Debian 6.0 includes lots of updated applications, new features and improvements. Among these, we can mention the inclusion of four important desktop environments, KDE, GNOME, Xfce and LXDE), compatibility with FHS 2.3, support for nine architectures (32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), Intel Itanium (ia64), 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), Sun/Oracle SPARC (sparc), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), MIPS mipsel (little-endian) and (mips (big-endian)), IBM S/390 (s390) and ARM EABI (armel).

Highlights of Debian 6.0:

· Linux kernel 2.6.32;
· X.Org 7.5;
· KDE Software Compilation 4.4.5;
· GNOME 2.30;
· Xfce 4.6;
· LXDE 0.5.0;
· OpenOffice.org 3.2.1;
· GIMP 2.6.11;
· Iceweasel 3.5.16;
· Icedove 3.0.11;
· PostgreSQL 8.4.6;
· MySQL 5.1.49;
· GCC 4.4.5;
· Apache 2.2.16;
· Samba 3.5.6;
· Python 2.6.6, 2.5.5 and 3.1.3;
· Perl 5.10.1;
· PHP 5.3.3;
· Asterisk 1.6.2.9;
· Nagios 3.2.3;
· Xen Hypervisor 4.0.1 (with support for dom0 and domU);
· OpenJDK 6b18;
· Tomcat 6.0.18;
· and more than 29,000 various applications, built from about 15,000 source packages.

Download:

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/debian-installer/

http://www.debian.org/CD/http-ftp/#stable

http://live.debian.net/

Debian 6.0 also includes over 10,000 new packages such as the Chromium web browser, the Icinga open source monitoring solution, the Software Center package management front-end, the wicd network manager, the Corosync cluster framework and the lxc Linux container utilities.



With this broad selection of packages, Debian once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system. It is suitable for many different use cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from development servers to cluster systems; and for database, web or storage servers.

At the same time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic installation and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian’s archive ensure that Debian 6.0 fulfils the high expectations that users have of a stable Debian release. It is rock solid and rigorously tested.

Last but not least, the installation process of Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) has been greatly improved in various ways. For example, it now includes easier selection of keyboard settings and language, partitioning of logical volumes, support for encrypted systems and RAID.

Debian 6.0 also brings support for the popular and modern EXT4 and Btrfs filesystems, and support for the ZFS (Zettabyte) filesystem on the kFreeBSD architecture. The installation system for Debian 6.0 has been translated in 70 languages.



Edit the repositories:

The first thing to do after (assuming you have no trouble connecting to the internet) installing Debian Squeeze is to edit our repositories.

Open a terminal and drop to root login:

su

enter your password and then

gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

delete everything listed and copy the following:

## Debian – Stable
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
## Security Updates
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
## Multimedia stable
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable main non-free
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main

If you want to install the latest version of Firefox from Linux Mint Debian [LMDE] repository also add (btw – it is a “branded” version of Firefox):

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import

After doing this save the changes and close out of gedit.

If you are outside the US you can build your local list of repositories here:

http://debgen.simplylinux.ch/

Update your repositories

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude update

we get an error like the following:

W: GPG error: http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable Release: The following signatures could not be verified because the public key is not available : NO_PUBKEY 07DC563D1F41B907

Do not worry, as in some versions of Ubuntu that happens not to be locked up Debian-Multimedia, which escrbiendo installed in a terminal (logged as root):

gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key 1F41B907

After that the following appears:

gpg: requesting key 1F41B907 of hkp server keys.gnupg.net
gpg: /root/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: has created trusted database
gpg: clave 1F41B907: public key "Christian Marillat " imported
gpg: keys are not absolutely trusted
gpg: Total amount processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1

After this step we wrote the following in Terminal:

gpg --export --armor 1F41B907 | apt-key add -

By applying this step we must give an OK. return to update the information repositories:

aptitude update
aptitude upgrade

Install basic packages for the compilation of packages:

Sometimes it is necessary to have basic compilation tools to install packages from source code, for that we need the package build-essential.

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude install build-essential

Install basic multimedia codecs:

After configuring the repositories, you can install the basic multimedia codecs for playback of audio and video formats.

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

For 32-bit

aptitude install w32codecs libdvdcss2 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 ffmpeg sox twolame vorbis-tools lame faad gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad avifile-divx-plugin libfacc0

For 64-bit

aptitude install w64codecs libdvdcss2 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 ffmpeg sox twolame vorbis-tools lame faad gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad avifile-divx-plugin libfacc0

Other major codecs (Java and Flash, Rar, 7z)

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude install sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-bin sun-java6-sources

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree

Sometimes we have to deal with compressed files, especially with the format .rar is proprietary, to compress/unzip files in this format should install the packages rar, unrar, p7zip-full and p7zip-rar.

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude install rar unrar p7zip-full p7zip-rar

Profit “core” is left out of the first installation CD of Debian Squeeze:

There are some “core”utilities to install that are typically left out like gnome calculator, screenshot maker, system monitor, and disk utility.

Utility to capture gnome desktop:

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude install gnome-screenshot

System Monitor

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude install gnome-system-monitor

Disk Utility

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude install gnome-disk-utility

Calculator

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude install gcalctool

GDebi Package Installer

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude install gdebi

Nautilus Utilities and terminal root:

There are times when you need to work with graphic files but with administrative rights (such as copying and pasting a wallpaper in /usr/share/backgrounds, for example), for this we use the extension nautilus-gksu. When you install this extension also installs the package gksu, Which is a graphical interface su and opens an entry in the gnome menu with a program called Terminal “Root”, which is useful when you want to perform administrative tasks from the console and install packages, install it by typing in a console:

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude install nautilus-gksu

Theme engines gtk+ 2.0 and core themes gnome:

When you install Debian Squeeze it comes with the Clearlooks theme and few alternative options, for more gtk themes you can install the following packages, typing in a terminal (logged as root):

aptitude install gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-murrine murrine-themes gnome-themes-more

Working with Windows NTFS partitions:

If you have NTFS partitions on your computer, it is likely that at some point you will want to copy a file or create a file in them.

aptitude install ntfs-3g

then restart your computer.

Media Players:

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude install vlc mozilla-plugin-vlc guayadeque radiotray

Office Suite

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

aptitude install abiword abiword-plugin-grammar abiword-plugin-mathview gnumeric gnumeric-plugins-extra

To install LibreOffice from the Squeeze backports:

Open a terminal and type (logged as root):

apt-get –t squeeze-backports install libreoffice

[to be continued... work in progress...]

Feel free to mix and match some commands from my other Ubuntu To Do Lists to see if those packages are available in Debian for your system.  PPAs will not work in Debian. If you need to add a repository it is done in Synaptic Package Manager.

Sources:

http://packages.debian.org/stable/

http://wiki.debian.org/MultimediaCodecs