It's been over a week now, and my wife is settling in to her new Debian system with no further problems. There were a few extras I needed to install when I first brought Debian up, and a few more I've needed during the last week.

Installed from the repository:

icedove - Debian's rebranding of Thunderbird, which my wife uses for email. The Debian KDE install does not include this by default.
msttcorefonts - the Microsoft TrueType core fonts; needed to make some web pages and some documents render correctly. These are in the Debian "Lenny" contrib repository, which is not enabled by default; I had to edit /etc/apt/sources.list to add it.
java - She needs this to visit some web pages. I was surprised to find the Sun Java Run-time Environment in the repository.
gftp - Our customary FTP program, for maintaining web sites.
beagle - She really likes this search engine for her desktop documents.
bum - The Boot-Up Manager, which I use to configure the system.
ssh and rsync - Her computer needs these in order for me to back up her hard drive remotely. (I was surprised that ssh is not installed by default.)

Some programs need to be downloaded and installed manually, not from the repository:

Acrobat Reader 9 - This is "non-free" software and thus not in the Debian repository; since she uses PDFs a lot, and the open-source PDF readers have problems with some documents, I installed this from the Adobe site.
hplip 3.9.12 - The older version in the repository does not include the drivers for her new HP multifunction printer, so I downloaded the latest version directly from HP.

I'll probably be installing GIMP for graphics editing -- from the Debian repository -- in the near future.

Worthy of note is one program I did not install: her old copy of Microsoft Word. She's been using this under CrossOver Linux, as a matter of habit, for all of her writing. On the new system I have added a shortcut for OpenOffice Writer instead. I've installed the MS fonts, and have OO Writer configured to save in .doc format by default, since she so often has to send documents to other people. If it becomes an issue, I can reinstall CrossOver and Word, but as of now, she's happy. (She said some of the changes have taken some getting used to, but it's mostly that accustomed functions appear in different places.)

Static Network Assignments. Well, my research has revealed that the static IP problem is a known bug in Debian 5 "Lenny," and has been known for a year. And isn't going to be fixed. Instead, it has been fixed in the experimental version of Debian, so the bug report has been marked as "closed."

Thanks a bunch, guys. It's still a bug in the current version.

The problem appears to be in Network Manager, which was added to make life easier for wireless users. The problem is, as long as it is running, it overrides the manual configuration in the /etc/network/interfaces file. Fortunately, I've previously learned about the Boot-Up Manager program, which controls which services get started at boot time. So for anyone else in this predicament, here are the relevant steps:

1. Edit (as root) the text file /etc/network/interfaces, and change the Ethernet interface (typically eth0) to static addressing. Something like this:


where, of course, the numbers will be different depending on your local network.

2. Edit (as root) the text file /etc/resolv.conf, and add "nameserver" lines like this (these are for OpenDNS):


3. Use Boot-Up Manager (bum) to disable network-manager and network-manager-dispatcher (both listed as "network manager framework daemon"). If you don't have this, you can install it from Synaptic or with "apt-get install bum".

Sound. A serendipitous find: I decided to get a minimal set of KDE configuration files by adding a new user to the system. When I logged in as that new user, it didn't have sound either! At this point a bell rang in the back of my mind, and I decided to check if access to the sound system is restricted by user group.

It is. The group is called "audio", and for some inexplicable reason, only the first user gets added to that group. To fix this, go to System->User Manager, click on the user name, click Edit, click the Groups tab, check the "audio" box, and click OK. (Damned if I know why this isn't the default for all new users.)

Once again I learn the lesson that Debian is not a distro for the newbie.

I should mention that the installation of Debian 5 "Lenny" on my wife's computer went smoothly. It started right up, and had no problem connecting to the Internet for updates. And I was able to add a new user account and install some needed packages (about which I shall report later). But then, wham! Two brick walls.

Static Network Assignments. Like every other desktop OS, by default Debian uses dynamic configuration (via DHCP) for networking. But I need to assign this machine a static IP address, and I want to manually select DNS servers (OpenDNS). So, I went into the KDE Control Center, under "Internet and Network", "Network Settings." Under the "Network Interfaces" tab I specified the static IP address (and netmask and gateway), and under the "Domain Name System" tab I specified the DNS servers. All worked fine.

That is, until the next time I rebooted. It seems that Debian remembered the static IP address, but failed to remember the gateway and DNS servers. I tried specifying those directly in /etc/network/interfaces, and doing "/etc/init.d/networking restart", and that worked. Until the next reboot.

To summarize a few hours of experimentation, I can either
(a) use DHCP, or
(b) manually type "/etc/init.d/networking restart" every time I reboot.
The latter is not a requirement I want to impose on my wife. She will quite rightly ask, "why doesn't my computer just work?"

I should note that I was able to make these very changes on my own desktop when I installed Debian. I can think of only two differences: (a) I originally installed Debian 4, and upgraded to 5; and (b) because I installed the Gnome CD-ROM by mistake, and later switched to KDE, I used the Gnome Network Manager instead of the KDE Control Center to set my configuration.

(As an aside, I note that on my own machine the KDE Control Center now reports "Your platform is not supported" and requires me to specify my distro. I guess this happened since I upgraded from Debian 4 to Debian 5. I can specify Debian 5, but it doesn't remember the choice.)

I may try loading the Gnome Network Manager (with a lot of added baggage!) to see if that makes a difference. And I'll do some Internet research. But if I can't get this straightened out, I'll yank Debian from this computer and switch to something else.

Sound. Sound cards are often a weak point for Linux distros, so I was relieved when the sound worked right away after I installed Debian.

Then, the next day, my wife reported that the sound wasn't working. And I confirmed this -- it wasn't working at all.

This morning I discovered, quite by accident, that when I log in on her machine using my account, the sound works. When I log in as her, there's no sound. This leads me to think there's a problem with the KDE configuration files. I just moved her home directory over to Debian, without regenerating those files; so it's likely that some configuration switch from her previous distro (Xandros 4/KDE 3) is failing in the new distro (with KDE 3.5).

I should be able to find this by comparing her KDE configuration to mine. But once again, this is not something that a new user would be able -- or should be required -- to do. C'mon, people: it needs to "just work."

Our satellite Internet service has a download cap during "normal" day and evening hours, but downloads are unlimited from midnight to 7 am. So when I was up in the early morning hours, I decided it was time to install all the latest updates to my Debian Lenny desktop.

To do this, I launched the Synaptic package manager, clicked Mark All Upgrades, and then clicked Apply. It was well that I waited until the wee hours, since this modest update of only 23 packages required 88.4 MB of downloads. Most of that was two packages: 20.2 MB for linux-image-2.6.26-1-486 -- I presume that's a kernel upgrade -- and 49.2 MB for Xulrunner, which is part of the Mozilla Gecko engine. (I speculate that this is used by Firefox and Thunderbird.)

While those were installing, I decided to fix "netatalk". This is a Linux implementation of the AppleTalk protocol, which might be useful if I had some older Apples on my network. But I don't, and it annoys me that netatalk takes 30 seconds, every time I boot, to discover that there are no Apples connected.

I know that programs like netatalk, that are launched at bootup, are started by entries in the /etc/rc?.D directories. Fiddling with those directories is a chore. So I was pleased to learn that there is a program, BUM (Boot-Up Manager), which manages these files for Debian-derived distros. After I installed BUM from the repository, I ran it and saw a helpful list of all the start-up applications, with short descriptions. Clearing the check-box by "netatalk," and then clicking "Apply," was all I needed to do.

P.S. Even in the early morning, the download took a few hours. I really began to appreciate how convenient it is to be able to do other work while a system upgrade is being installed!

Well, that was an ordeal. Like VirtualBox, VMware is tied rather intimately to the Linux kernel, so when the kernel is upgraded with the new Debian release, VMware needs to be upgraded as well.

I learned this when I clicked on my VMware desktop shortcut, and nothing happened. Here's a handy tip for new Linux users: when you launch a program and just get the "busy" icon for a few seconds, and then nothing -- no windows opening, no hard disk access -- try running the program from a console window. In this case, I opened a console window, typed "vmware", and saw

Well, that was easy. When I upgraded to Debian 5.0 "Lenny," I received a warning that the VirtualBox kernel module doesn't support the new Linux kernel. I figured the easiest solution would be to uninstall the old version of VirtualBox, and download and install the current "Lenny" version. Thus:

1. Download the Debian package from the VirtualBox Linux page.

2. Back up my current /Virtualbox directory (it contains the 3 GB hard disk image used by the installed Windows system).

3. As superuser, remove the old VirtualBox. Note that this is removed by the package name (virtualbox-2.0) and not the name of the .deb file:

4. And then install the new VirtualBox. This does need the name of the .deb file:

VirtualBox 2.1.4 automatically converted my settings from the previous version. Thus it knew where my Windows 2000 image was located, and of course, all my installed Windows software was still present there. That's all there was to it. No reboot required.

This really was an adventure. In my previous three Linux upgrades -- Red Hat 8 to Xandros 2, Xandros 2 to Xandros 4, and Xandros 4 to Debian 4.0 -- I've simply done a fresh install of the new operating system, copied my user files over, and then reinstalled all the applications I use. This time I decided to try Debian's vaunted ability to automatically upgrade a working Debian system from one version to the next.

The good news: the upgrade from Debian 4.0 "Etch" to Debian 5.0 "Lenny" worked. The bad news: it needed lots of knowledgable intervention. The process reinforced my belief that Debian is not for newcomers to Linux. Also, this approach is not for those with limited Internet bandwidth. If you have dial-up service, you'd probably be better off obtaining a Debian 5.0 CD and doing a completely fresh install.

Skip the rest if you're not interested in the details of my upgrade.

SeaMonkey

One of the applications I had yet to migrate to my new Debian desktop is the SeaMonkey Internet Suite. This is the current incarnation of the famous Mozilla suite, with integrated browser, email, newsgroups, and chat. None of which I need, because I have Opera, Firefox, and Thunderbird. The reason I want SeaMonkey is the excellent SeaMonkey Composer, a WYSIWYG web page editor that I use for HTML files. (I do occasionally use the browser to test web pages.)

So, I downloaded the Linux file, and I followed the instructions, and I got this error message from the installer:
error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5

Okay, it needs a library file which isn't included in the standard Debian distribution. That's why there are repositories. Launching Synaptic, the Debian package manager, and searching for "libstdc++" revealed that I have libstdc++6 installed. The instructions say "libstdc++-3.3" is required, but the only thing I see listed with "3.3" is "libstdc++5-3.3-dev" and -dbg and -doc and -pic. So I'm guessing what I really need is "libstdc++5"

"5" and "6" should peacefully coexist. So, two clicks to request libstdc++5, and then the SeaMonkey installer ran.

One bit of information that does not appear in the installation instructions is that SeaMonkey will attempt to install to /usr/local/seamonkey. Normally this is only writable by the root user; and the SeaMonkey installation instructions say not to install as root. So I added myself to the "staff" group (which can also write this directory) with the command "adduser brad staff", logged out and back in (so the new group assignment takes effect), and continued with step 3 of the installation instructions. I opted for the "Complete" installation. The installer's "readme" -- but not the online instructions! -- says that it is then necessary to change to the installed directory (/usr/local/seamonkey) and run the program once as root to create some needed files.

Finally I used the menu editor to add the following two items to my Internet launch menu:
SeaMonkey Browser (command: /usr/local/seamonkey/seamonkey)
SeaMonkey Composer (command: /usr/local/seamonkey/seamonkey --edit)

Whew!

KompoZer

While I was puzzling my way through SeaMonkey's prerequisites, I recalled our friends the Millers recommending KompoZer. (According to Wikipedia, KompoZer is based on Nvu, which in turn was based on Mozilla Composer. All one big family.)

To my delight, KompoZer had a precompiled .deb package for Debian Etch. Downloading this file in Opera, I was able to right-click and open it with Kpackage to install it. A few clicks, and presto! KompoZer is installed and in my launch menu.

The moral: always try to install packaged Linux software when you can.

Email Time Stamps

Shortly after I switched completely over to Debian Linux, I noticed that email in my Thunderbird in-box had peculiar time stamps...sometimes in the future. I finally realized that my email was being time stamped in UTC (a.k.a. Greenwich Mean Time) instead of my local Eastern time zone. This perplexed me, since at installation time I had told Debian I was in the Eastern zone.

A few minutes' work with Google turned up this article from MozillaZine, with this advice:


In my case, the command was

and now my emails are correctly time-stamped.

Core Fonts

A few days ago I found myself editing a document which is going to be sent to some Windows users. Which means that if I use the standard open-source fonts that come with Debian Linux, it won't render quite right. I need this document to use the real Microsoft fonts...to be specific, Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web (which include Arial, Courier New, and Times New Roman).

A quick search for "core fonts" in the Debian package manager revealed the program "msttcorefonts", which fetches those fonts from the Internet and installs them.

Two clicks to install "msttcorefonts", and then a long wait while many files were downloaded...and I now have all of the "common" fonts in OpenOffice. (And also in Opera and Firefox.)

Scdbackup, fixed. You may recall that my reinstallation of scdbackup split my files strangely over multiple DVDs. It turns out that there are two "magic numbers" used by sdvdbackup_afio. The first, sdvdbackup_max_size_value, is used by the backup planner to decide how many megabytes' worth of files to put on the first disk. The second, sdvdbackup_media_cap_value, specifies to the archive program afio how many bytes will fit on a DVD-R. For a normal single layer DVD this is 4480 MB (4.7 GB).

Because afio will add some overhead, the first number must be smaller than the second. The default for the first was 4250 MB, which caused the second limit to be exceeded by 68 MB. So it wrote a whole new DVD to save 68 MB. I've reduced the first limit to 4150 MB. In the directory scdbackup-0.8.8/conf/, I issued the command

and now it splits DVDs efficiently.

Printer sharing. This has been something of a chore. In my previous distro (Xandros) I was able to share a printer by simply right-clicking on it in the file manager and enabling sharing. Likewise for folders. Samba (for Windows networking) was already configured, and the PC was visible on the network. But when I tried to share my printers and folders from Debian Linux, they did not appear on the network.