Debian

Here’s a process for installing 64-bit Debian on a Pi4. I suspect this will get more obvious pretty soon.

When it asks for packages choose the MATE package and sanity will be preserved.

Or, just go with minimal Debian Desktop with no window manager and then choose the window manager. This can save time when you have to install from a lower version and dist-upgrade to a higher one after.

Or this if you want all the bells and whistles.

Even after doing this I still had a hard time getting it activated. Here is one plausible thing to explore.

For some reason that did not work at all for me. Eventually, I needed to install lightdm and then try update-alternatives. This changed the display manager and with lightdm there is a pull down at the top for choosing Mate. After doing that once, everything is fine.

Looking at an old system and curious about when it was installed? Try this.

Debian is very wholesome and usually does the right thing, but sometimes, normal systems have some cruft which can and should be disposed of immediately. Here is a nice review of what can and should be ditched in a Linux system.

One tiny thing to also get rid of if you’re weird like me and are competent with tar and gzip is sudo apt remove engrampa. I find this cures a lot of annoyances later where the system (mostly browsers) desperately wants to save you from knowing what’s really going on with archived files.

By being wholesome with respect to licenses, Debian is at odds with wifi manufacturers who are notoriously unfriendly to open source efforts. This is because they worry that they’ll get on the wrong side of the FCC with respect to radio transmission regulation if they let just anybody have complete control. Tricky problem. But once your Debian is installed and not happy with the wifi, you can go get the lesser of evils.

Here is a helpful list of Debian wifi driver packages.

Here’s how to see what kind of wifi device you have.

Looking through the list for "43225", I find that the driver I need is brcm80211. Following to the link I find that this cures it.

Then on reboot (you could load modules manually too) the networking icon in the bar should work.

If you’re installing and you have no other network, the installer will sometimes complain that it doesn’t have the proprietary drivers and ask if you want to supply them on removable media. It will list the exact files you need. Look those files up (you’ll need some computer/telephone somewhere for this) and find out what deb package they are part of. You need that whole deb package, not just the files it explicitly mentioned. Copy the suitable deb onto a normal person USB drive and put that in and it should find it and carry on with the install.

I just had luck with this again. Here is a good place to search for the stuff you need.

I find that Realtek wifi drivers are far away the most annoying deficiency for the install process. I had to hunt down this exact one.

You can imagine in the future it will be similar with some different date numbers.

I also was out of USB ports since the install drive was in one. I tried to put this stuff on the install drive itself, but didn’t have luck. I did have luck getting an SD card in a laptops built in SD reader to work.

Dang, don’t you hate it when you start a lengthy update and walk away only to come back in an hour and find that 2 minutes into the process it stopped to ask you to read some stupid thing (ahem Debian, why don’t you guys have a look at how Gentoo does it?).

I think this generally works.

But maybe you need this.

This looks interesting.

Then of course you have to do this.

Did you just move several timezones away? Easily fixed.

It’s an ncurses thing — choose your new zone. Done.

Go to System→Preferences→Keyboard→Layouts→Options→Ctrl key position Check "Caps Lock as Ctrl".

Amazingly the virtual console can also be cured with minimal fuss.

Takes effect after the next reboot.

During installation the user setup in Debian is not as helpful as I’d like it to be. I need a UID of a specific number to match everywhere else I use it and Debian doesn’t seem to think of that. Basically I just make a throwaway account during installation.

What is weird is that this account that is made during installation is not automatically (or even by setting an option) put in the sudo group. (Could this be the one thing that is better about Ubuntu?) So you either have to log in as root (avoiding that is the whole reason the install system insists you create a non-root user, right?) or do this from your bogus user’s account.

And because group changes are not especially good at taking effect in any Linux I know about, you have to log out of bogusaccount and then back in. Now bogusaccount has sudo privileges like it should have from the start. The other way is just to make your real account while you su into root.

Create the real account. (This might be in /usr/sbin/useradd on Raspbian.)

Exit out of the su, log out of the bogus user, and log back in as your real user which should be fine now. Get rid of the temporary account.

Use delgroup if the group lingers.

It can help to add your main user to groups that may help things. Here are some I’ve had to deal with.

Just add them with something like this.

Or all in one go.

Also if you’re ever adding your own user to groups you will very annoyingly find it does not seem to work. To get it to take effect, you either need to log out and log back in again or do this.

Of course this actually doesn’t necessarily work! But it is a hint on how to research it further.

Before you reboot to let the new groups settings take effect, might as well fix grub’s time out. When I’m trying to get the full power cycle round trip down around 20s I don’t need 5 seconds spent on the grub prompt. Here’s how to shorten that.

The bar at the bottom of the screen is absurdly redundant. It normally contains a Workspace Switcher which can sometimes be useful. Still, absolutely no need for two screen wasting bars.

Right click the top panel. Choose "Add To Panel" and find "Workspace Switcher" at the very bottom of the list. Feel free to add System Monitor if that makes sense. Now you can safely get rid of the bottom panel by right clicking on it and selecting "Delete this panel".

Right click on the top panel and choose "Properties". Orientation should be "Left" and check "Autohide".

Open a terminal with Applications→System Tools→MATE Terminal

On the menubar click Edit→Profiles and select "Default" and click Edit. Choose Colors tab and uncheck "Use colors from system theme". Choose "White on black" from the pull down. Choose Scrolling tab and choose "Scrollbar is: Disabled" and give a scrollback buffer of 5000. Close.

Create a new keyboard shortcut for this command.

Bind it to Ctrl+Shift+N.

The new Mate shows some very misleading icons when you alt-tab. These are derived from your actual windows which sounds good in theory but in practice it is confusing and annoying. Apparently it’s a bit slower too because the setting to change to cure it is this.

First install dconf-editor.

Run that as a normal user since these settings are done per user. If you run it as sudo it will apply the settings to the root account.

Go to org->mate->caja->desktop and change the following by sliding the "Use default value" switch to grey/left and then choosing "False" (until it is dark gray) as your "Custom value"; click the green checkbox in the lower right and you’re good. Scrub all of these dumb icons.

I’ll leave "volumes-visible" because I want to know if that kind of automounting ever happens. See below.

One time I was cleaning dumb stuff in my $HOME directory and I got rid of the empty Desktop directory. This put stupid icons for the entire contents of $HOME on the "Desktop". I like to have a completely blank desktop so this was very bad. I cured it by making an empty directory called ~/.Desktop and then making sure this file was this way.

You can also explore the xdg-user-dirs-update script whose reason to exist seems questionable.

I don’t need USB flash drives doing nefarious things behind my back; I’ll mount things explicitly, thanks.

Again use dconf-editor as previously mentioned look for this.

Also look at this.

Same deal. This seems to cure it if the first doesn’t.

After doing all this I still had automounting problems. What finally cured them was this.

I don’t know what is sufficient and necessary but these are good hints.

And if you’re like me and you don’t like automounting, you might like a comprehensive set of mount points.

Speaking of mounting, if you’re going to be handling that task personally, don’t forget to add some handy mountpoints.

Swaps being configured and enabled are completely nonsensical today. What they do mostly for most people is take a stupid problem where you’ve stupidly asked for too much memory and it prolongs it. So instead of having your Blender job fail after burning through all memory in a minute, it will fail in 2 hours after burning through all memory in a minute and flogging your delicate write limited SSD for an hour while you sit there thinking it has hung. In the ancient days there was a rule of thumb (which I can’t quite remember because it’s irrelevant today) of something like X% of RAM should be available in a swap partition. But that was back when we had 16 MEGA bytes of RAM and a little disk help could go a long way. But once we hit gigabytes of RAM, this whole strategy became absurd. But distros didn’t really amend their install processes to reflect that. And when SSDs came along, these swaps actively murder them committing the worst sin possible for a system: data loss. Who is using a mechanical drive for (mostly read-only) OS volumes these days? No one I hope. So — swaps = mostly bad unless you really know what you’re doing.

Check for swaps.

Turn it (-a = all) off.

Best to comment this out or remove it.

System→Preferences→Appearance In the Theme tab I like "TraditionalOkTest"; you can’t miss it which is the point.

Meddling with Firefox default CSS can be fun too. Power to the client where it belongs! Check this out.

Of course this will cause many stupid forms to show up black on black or white on white since dumb web devs will set one or the other. So it’s best to make these have some color and to know how to look for this file in the Shift-F7 style profiler or Inspect Element.

One thing I sometimes like to do, especially with portable computers, is to put my contact information on the login page. This way if someone finds my computer and wants to return it to me, they can (without leet hacker skills). I have done this by changing the default login background which is an SVG. Of course getting everything to line up on all monitors can be a pain.

If you want your own SVG image on the login screen investigate the lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings package. Once installed look under System->Control Center. Or maybe just play around with putting your own image at /usr/share/images/desktop-base/login-background.svg. Actually, that’s a nest of symlinks — I think the real one lives at /etc/alternatives/desktop-theme/login/background.svg. Don’t forget to make sure its mode is 644 or it won’t work.

Here’s one I use that can give you some ideas. Just cut and paste this to be the login-background.svg file somehow.

System→Preferences→Monitors Uncheck "Same image in all monitors".

Out of the box, the middle buttons on my Logitech Marble Mouse are not activated. Somewhat outdated Ubuntu chatter is possibly helpful here.

Some newer information is coming to light on the Amazon answer where I complained about it.

What worked was to put this in ${HOME}/.xsessionrc.

Check .Xsession-errors and /var/log/lightdm/* if there are errors, especially ones that prevent you from starting a session.

Do you have a proper microphone? Yes? And you have a web cam? Then your problem is that the web cam mic wants to aggressively be the audio input when it should not even exist. It turns out that modern Linux lets you disable that microphone while leaving the camera functional.

Use tools like this to figure out what the "idVendor" and "idProduct" are.

Then make a rule in a new file like "/etc/udev/rules.d/90-blacklist-webcam-sound.rules" containing something like this.

Note the last one is "ATTR" singular. Then try the new rules out.

I haven’t had this actually noticeably work but it does seem like the right strategy even if the details need refinement. This technique was discovered here.

Under System→Preferences→Screensaver, uncheck Screensaver and Locking. Click the Power Management button and from there set "Put display to sleep when inactive for:" to "Never".

Also if it’s not installed, install mate-power-manager and under System→Preferences→Power Management look for "Put display to sleep when in active for:" should be "Never" (since it takes so damn long for it to wake up).

Start browser for the first time with this.

Go ahead and add Self-Destructing Cookies, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, and JS free DDG.

Also don’t forget to clear the scandalous whitelist noscript allows by default.

Add this to .bashrc.

This may also be good in .bashrc

I understand not publishing a list of users at the login prompt but for a single user system, that’s just annoying. Strangely Debian seems to default to this.

The fix appears to be in the greeter-hide-users setting in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf. Uncomment the line that sets this to false (i.e. set it to false) and it should preserve the name of the last logged in user.

Note that in more recent Debian versions (bookworm for sure) just fixing this may not be necessary but it definitely is not sufficient. There is now a [Seat:*] section that also has these settings and it should be fixed too.

I’m not 100% sure about the greeter-show-manual-login setting but it has been recommended to cure this problem and didn’t seem to hurt.

The popular parasite distribution has a "guest" log in. That’s probably very bad for many situations. But it can make sense if you want to let trusted people use your computer. This can be accomplished in Debian by just making a new user whose home directory is in the /tmp directory.

No need to set a password, right? Hmm. Kind of sketchy if this host is on the real internet in any way!

Sometimes it can be very annoying to have 10 subsystems all trying intently to get you to save the pixels on your phosphorous CRT by causing the screen to go blank after inactivity. Sometimes you have something you want to watch untouched for an hour. How to stop this madness of screen blanking?

Here are some things to check.

Here’s my new system.

Or if you don’t want to type important passwords on random systems, push it out from the master copy on my server.

Also don’t forget that Docker containers can clone from the Docker host

Does your computer have a disc hole and would you sometimes like to watch DVDs on your computer? If so, you’ll likely need to decrypt most DVDs. And Debian doesn’t want anything to do with that. But they make it reasonably easy. This worked for me.

You can find full instructions and the code itself on the libdvdcss website.

Graphics stop working after a new install on an Nvidia system? Well, those Debian folks have mixed feelings about Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. On one hand they make it so it doesn’t work, but on the other hand you can fix that. Official help is here.

Try to log in some how and install

This may require appending the lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list with main contrib non-free instead of just main.

Run that program and install what is recommended. For my NVIDIA Corporation GK104 [GeForce GTX 760] I had to install

In old times it was sometimes required to have something like this in place.

But today I’ve successfully ignored it. Simply…

Reboot.

If you’re using real Nvidia hardware don’t forget this.

Need to use a computer like you’re serious about it? You’ll want a compiler. Debian has a shortcut for that kind of thing which is very helpful but I often forget it. Here it is.

Steam was pretty easy to install. First, add this to /etc/apt/sources.list. Replace jessie with the proper version (e.g. stretch) if needed. Actually just find this line and add contrib non-free to the main entry already there.

This seems to be necessary and probably can’t hurt on a Steam box.

Don’t forget to do this.

Then you can just do the obvious.

If you get the error an error like this…

I used to have luck with this.

Now on 9 (stretch) and 10 (buster), I’ve had luck with this.

Now on 10 I had to do this.

Needs a reboot because of the module situation.

To move the obese user directories to another volume, set up something like this.

How to move downloads from previous installations is an ongoing area of research, but it looks like you’ll want the manifest files as well as the directories actually containing the game.

This seems to work. Shut down Steam first. Copy the .acf manifest files into the steamapps directory. Then copy or move the directory containing the game (referred to in the manifest) to the steamapps/common directory. When Steam starts back up, it will find these things and assume they’re good to go. As normal, it does its update check and usually starts updating some of them.