Notes about the installation and maintenance of Debian

This chapter contains notes of things I discover while I work with Debian, nothing very constructed but it should allow me, and perhaps some of you, to avoid doing twice the same errors.

• dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 to add the option compose:menu to the XkbOptions of the keyboard section. Allows to type any kind of letter (look at /usr/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose).
• Read and apply /usr/share/doc/konsole/README.linux.console
• Read and apply /usr/share/doc/xprt-xprintorg/README.printing-problems.gz
• If something like kdecore (KIconLoader): WARNING: Icon directory /foo group bar is not valid appears in file ~/.xsession-errors a lot of times, follow these instructions:

  run in a shell (I cannot find this on any menu): kdebugdialog --fullmode
  select: debug area: 264 kdecore (KIconLoader)
  Change the Warning Output to "None"
  select: OK
  

  (from bug number Bug#253127)
• If, with some Sound Blaster cards and ALSA driver snd-ens1371, you get some horrible noises when starting KDE, start the Sound Mixer (kmix); hack the advanced option, and shut-off IEC958. Do it for each user. (see Bug#239575).
• Recently, when trying to use Marillat's depots, I got an error 'W: GPG error: ftp://ftp.nerim.net etch Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 07DC563D1F41B907'. I just called two commands, and the problem was over:

          gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --recv-keys 1F41B907
  (or "gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring trustedkeys.gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --recv-keys 1F41B907" but I don't think it's necessary.)
          gpg --armor --export 1F41B907 | sudo apt-key add -
  

• In order to get your computer registered in Dynamic DNS when getting an address from the DHCP server (we have this one at work), add a line like send host-name "hostname"; to /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf. A short hostname (without DNS domain) seems to be sufficient to get it working after a hearty /etc/init.d/networking restart.
  After this manipulation, host hostname should return your IP address (this can be useful to setup a small server).
• Mozilla started to hang repeatedly, it looks like it was due to IPv6. I edited /etc/modprobe.d/aliases and replaced alias net-pf-10 ipv6 through alias net-pf-10 off. End of the problems!

Debian Repositories

I have two Debian repositories, one unstable and one experimental, which you can use by adding following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://eric.lavar.de/comp/linux/debian/ unstable/
deb-src http://eric.lavar.de/comp/linux/debian/ unstable/
deb http://eric.lavar.de/comp/linux/debian/ experimental/
deb-src http://eric.lavar.de/comp/linux/debian/ experimental/

Debian links

Beside the official ones:

• Debian Administration
• Unofficial APT repositories
• Debian Unofficial
• Debian Backports (for Sarge).

I also described the installation of Debian on an HP nc6000.

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