Linux Saga

KDE 4 is in Debian Squeeze and Unstable now. Now you do not have to use the old pinning method to install it (which was here: KDE 4.2 in Debian Testing (Lenny)

Now you can install KDE 4.2 by downloading the Debian Testing DVD. Every week there’s a new build that comes out so this DVD is always update: Debian Weekly builds
When you run the DVD, at the first screen, where you can choose graphical install, or standard install, go down to the third option in the list, and go through the menus until you find an option that lets you change the default environment you will install. You have the option of Gnome, KDE, LXDE, and a couple others. Choose KDE and start the install by choosing graphical install or standard install. The installation menu will look the same, but when you finish installing and you boot your machine, it will have installed the environment that you chose.

Or if you have already have an installed system and it is Testing or Unstable, just use

sudo apt-get install kde-minimal kdm

for a basic install or

sudo apt-get install kde-full kdm

for all of it

The 3d desktop effects in KDE 4 are cool and all, but to me they just dont yet come close to the power of compiz-fusion. They seem a little bit too….stiff. The cube desktop seems a little bit too two dimensional and stiff. So i installed Compiz-fusion on my KDE 4.2 desktop.

The rumors arent true, compiz-fusion CAN be installed in KDE 4 easily and without many problems. I heard some places that the two would conflict but thats just not true.

I simply added the repository that I wanted (I used SID because I have more SID stuff in my PC than Lenny)

Etch:
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/debian-etch/desktopfx/stable/ ./

Lenny
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/debian-lenny/desktopfx/unstable/ ./

Sid
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/debian-sid/desktopfx/unstable/ ./

Add this to prevent apt-get warning :

wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/A42A6CF5.gpg -O- | apt-key add -

run

apt-get update

apt-get install compiz-fusion-kde

If you use apt-pinning simply add the pin version you need(i.e apt-get install -t unstable compiz-fusion-kde)

Then run

apt-get install fusion-icon

logout and log back in

Then go to System Settings > Advanced >AutoStart. Hit add Program and type in fusion-icon in the box.

Then simply run fusion-icon and choose Compiz under Select Window Manager

Enjoy

Yea i know, this is a post title that has been used in about a billion different blogs out there, every time I see a blog with that title I want to shoot the writer (like “hyuk hyuk dah i haven’t written anything in a while so i guess u guys think im dead hyuk hyuk im so funny”).

Anyways I have to use this title right now because at the moment I am scrapped for time and cant think of anything, maybe later I will change the title to something more imaginative(probably not, oh well).

Anyways guys the reason I was down was because of that annoying little libdrm2 update that broke fglrx for a lot of people. I did not know what the reason was for the break at first and so I did a lot of things in my annoyance that harmed my setup more than helped. In the end I decided that I got tired of ATI and their stupid drivers and got an NVIDIA card.

I love it

This card was so easy to configure and install it wasn’t even funny. I dont even think you guys will need me to write a blog about how to install it because its so damn simple. Just google it and click on the first link and it should work fine.

The only thing is that I decided not to go for the debian way of installing the driver, for some reason every time I use the debian way to install the NVIDIA driver and tried to install the Nvidia-glx driver it told me to uninstall all of xserver-xorg.

I was like “ummmmm no”

So i looked it up and they got this little bug with some setups but thats no biggie because you can just use the install script from the NVIDIA website that should work fine. Just make sure that you dont have Nvidia framebuffer in your kernel or Nvidia vesa or it won’t install. If you do just make a simple custom kernel and remove them, just copy the .config file and take out the two things, dont even make them modules, I hear just being able to support them can mess it up  for you( besides you wont need it ever again).

Aaaaand…..thats basically it.Im back

DO NOT USE THIS CODE, KDE 4.2 HAS BEEN MOVED TO DEBIAN TESTING AND UNSTABLE, SO THIS IS NO LONGER NECCESARY.

KDE 4.2 is the new release for KDE that has been code names “the answer”(that will shut up most whiny babies who doubted KDE4 would ever be any good)

I managed to install KDE 4.2 in my recently installed Debian Lenny. I couldn’t wait until Lenny released since 4.2 seemed to be just ripe for the picking.

It was a simple process of apt-pinning

I added the following repositories to my /etc/apt/sources.list

#SID(needed because several dependencies are here)
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ sid main
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ sid main

#Experimental(the KDE4 repo)
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ experimental main
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ experimental main

and then added this to /etc/apt/preferences , (create it if you don’t have it)

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=lenny
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=sid
Pin-Priority: 300

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=experimental
Pin-Priority: 250

MAKE SURE THAT THERE ARE NO SPACES BEFORE THE “P”’s in Package, Pin, and Pin-Priority!! Gedit added them when i wrote it and i’t took me a while before i figured out what was wrong.

What this does is make sure that when you do an update, the Sid or experimental repos aren’t used. They will only be used when u call on them specifically.

To install KDE 4 run

aptitude -t experimental install kde4

To update KDE 4.2, simply do what the KDE 4.2 on Debian website says, aptitude (or apt-get) dist-upgrade

This is KDE 4.2 only a few minutes after installation, already working fast, no extra configuration needed!

(note, this should work on most debian based systems, etch, lenny,  ubuntu,etc)

Well, thanks to Fedora 10 i recently learned that if I wanted to install the (recently released for linux) driver for my Debian Lenny computer. I would need a better kernel. Unfortunately, Lenny is on a freeze right now, and neither Debian testing nor unstable have a newer kernel on stock other than 2.6.26

I decided to install the 2.6.28 kernel from source, and decided to do it the debian way, since i run debian so it makes sense, and also because word on the street is that the debian way is easier on most distros. It involves making a .deb package from the source code and then installing it, and it works wonders :).

After googling around for a little bit, I found a guide to compile a kernel the debian way (http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_debian_etch), but it was a little bit out off date and i had to tweak some things here and there to optimize it for my needs

First of all,

Install these packages

apt-get install kernel-package libncurses5-dev fakeroot wget bzip2 build-essential

this is the directory we will compile our kernel in

cd /usr/src

i went over to http://www.kernel.org/ to download the latest stable kernel, which at the moment is 2.6.28. Find the kernel and get it into /usr/src. I used wget to download it, but you could just download it by clicking on the link and then just moving it into /usr/src if you are unable to use wget.  If you can, just copy the link for the kernel and paste it after wget.

wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.28.2.tar.bz2

then we unpack the downloaded file.

tar xjf linux-2.6.28.2.tar.bz2
ln -s linux-2.6.28.2 linux
cd /usr/src/linux

Now we can configure our new kernel. I liked the idea the guy in the “howtoforge” link above had, to use the configuration file from your previous kernel in your new kernel. This insures that any options or settings that your old kernel had still apply in your new kernel. Of course we can also edit this configuration file to personalize it to our needs

make clean && make mrproper
cp /boot/config-`uname -r` ./.config

this will create a menu to config your kernel

make menuconfig

Go down the list to  “Load an Alternate Configuration File” and choose .config. After you do that you can edit and tweak this file to personalize it better, but unless you dramatically change it, it should work fine with your distribution; unless, you are trying to install a new kernel in a hopelessly out of date system, of course.

Make sure you save your work, or it wont use your settings (i’ve heard of some people do this, how?      i dont know)

We are almost done with the hard part, now its time to build the kernel!

make-kpkg clean
fakeroot make-kpkg –initrd –append-to-version=-custom kernel_image kernel_headers

(note: wordpress is condensing the two minus signs before the initrd and append into one giant one, making it so that if you just copy and paste this code it won’t work, if this happens to you just delete the giant minus sign before initrd and append and type two minus signs, now it should work)

After –append-to-version= you can write any string that helps you identify the kernel, but it must begin with a minus (-) and must not contain whitespace( i just kept custom kernel_image because it fit right, i had made several tweaks to my kernel.)

you’ll find two .deb packages in /usr/src. Now this is a tip for everyone out there who is like me and likes to reinstall their computers a lot: that took some time so far right? especially the building right? you wouldn’t want to go trought that again now would ya? Well the good news is that these .deb packages can be copied and pasted into other Debian based systems and install them there just by double clicking on them, saves you some time huh? i got copies on my FAT32 partition is use to save things i think i may reuse if i reinstall.)

Anyways, run these commands

cd /usr/src
ls -l

now to install the kernel, you can either opt to do this the easy but geeky looking way

dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.28.2-custom_2.6.28.2-custom-10.00.Custom_amd64.deb
dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.28.2-custom_2.6.28.2-custom-10.00.Custom_amd64.deb

or do it the less cool looking, simple way, just double clicking the .deb packages and installing them with something like gdeb.

now just reboot the pc

grub should automatically add your kernel and make it the default kernel