On Keryx, Xfce and Puppeee
Posted: November 1, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: debian, gnome, keryx, puppy linux, xfce Leave a comment »I have mentioned Keryx before. In case you’re late to the party, Keryx is a cross-platform application meant to ease offline installation of packages for Debian systems (that includes Ubuntu).
It’s marvellous. It’s wonderful. It’s manna from heaven.
Provided it works, of course, which it didn’t on Maverick. First, I found out that Maverick mounts FAT32 partitions with the noexec flag. Meaning you can’t run applications from them. So I had to copy the whole keryx/ folder from my USB drive to the desktop, then do my work, and then merge the 2 folders. Fortunately, it was relatively quick.
Now I just have to
dpkg -i --force-depends /mnt/usb0/keryx/projects/eee0/packages/*.deb
and all will be right with the Debian world. Hopefully.
“But what are you trying to do?” you ask. Well, I’m giving up on Puppeee and installing Debian on the Eee PC. I’m too enamoured with apt-get to give up on it and use plain “./configure && make && make install”. Yes, Puppeee has PetGet, but it doesn’t really cut it.
I’ve also switched back to GNOME on the main laptop. Why? Because GNOME Just Works (TM). Xfce has a few integration problems that I can’t seem to get past. I’ve also switched to the classic Human look (think Intrepid Ibex) and I have to say it doesn’t look bad at all.
To some of you, that’s ugly and/or evil. To me, it’s a memory of the good old times when I first experienced Ubuntu. Well, actually, the second time; the first time I destroyed a fakeRAID array with Vista and a lot of personal files on it. Thank goodness for backups.
So now I have Debian installed on the Eee PC. Tomorrow: setting up ~/.bashrc, /etc/sudoers and X. Probably with IceWM or Awesome, depending on what I dream tonight.
A day of failure with Debian
Posted: August 30, 2010 Filed under: Broadcom, Debian, HP ProBook 4510s, Keryx | Tags: broadband, broadcom, debian, framebuffer, hp probook, keryx, zte 12 Comments »Today, I tried installing Debian on my HP ProBook 4510S. Three times.
Obviously, I failed. On the first try, I got the wrong CD image (Lenny instead of Squeeze) and only realized that after I installed it. On the second try, I assigned the 500MB /dev/sda1 to / instead of /boot, which resulted in a cataclysmic Debian-style out-of-space dpkg error. Something I got about four times with Ubuntu on my Eee PC, but that’s another story. And on the third try, I almost got it done and even did an offline install of the Broadcom STA driver using Keryx, dpkg and module-assistant. However, it failed to detect any networks, citing a read error 
Then I gave up and decided to install Linux Mint 9 LXDE. I just burnt it on a CD-RW and I’ll install it as soon as I finish this post 
Anyway, here’s my “detailed report” on installing Debian Squeeze:
- You don’t get an Internet connection during the install, so you have to download the 600+ MB CD1 image instead of the 180 MB netinst one.
- The first CD image for Squeeze doesn’t even come with wireless-tools packaged.
- You absolutely need Keryx to do any kind of offline Debian install. And the guide here.
- It’s probably easier to do all this if you install GNOME. But it’s a pain to remove in my experience, so I didn’t even try that.
- The framebuffer made my eyes bleed. 800×600 on a widescreen display? No thank you.
- Doing an offline install of the Broadcom STA driver on Debian-based distros is mostly impossible.
The Broadcom driver has been annoying me since I got the ProBook. The only distro on which I managed to manually install it is Fedora. On Ubuntu, I now connect to the Internet using my ZTE MF110 modem and use Hardware Drivers (jockey?) to automatically install it. On a side note, I couldn’t do that with Kubuntu, because KNetworkManager is too buggy to let me connect to networks that do not support 2G data (which Digi Mobil Romania is).
The conclusion? I probably won’t install Debian on this machine again too soon.
