TOPIC: GNEWSENSE
A little look at Debian 7.0
12th May 2013Having a virtual machine with Debian 6 on there, I was interested to hear that Debian 7.0 is out. In another VM, I decided to give it a go. Installing it on there using the Net Install CD image took a little while but proved fairly standard with my choice of the GUI-based option. GNOME was the desktop environment with which I went and all started up without any real fuss after the installation was complete; it even disconnected the CD image from the VM before rebooting, a common failing in many Linux operating installations that lands into the installation cycle again unless you kill the virtual machine.
Though the GNOME desktop looked familiar, a certain amount of conservatism reigned too, since the version was 3.4.2. That was no bad thing, since raiding the GNOME Extension site for a set of mature extensions was made easier. In fact, a certain number of these were included in the standard installation anyway and the omission of a power off entry on the user menu was corrected as a matter of course without needing any intervention from this user. Adding to what already was there made for a more friendly desktop experience in a short period of time.
Debian's variant of Firefox, IceWeasel, is version 10 so a bit of tweaking is needed to get the latest version. LibreOffice is there now too, and it's version 3.5 rather than 4. Shotwell too is the older 0.12 and not the 0.14 that is found in the likes of Ubuntu 13.04. As it happens, GIMP is about the only software with a current version and that is 2.8; a slower release cycle may be the cause of that, though. All in all, the general sense is that older versions of current software are being included for the sake of stability and that is sensible too, so I am not complaining very much about this at all.
The reason for not complaining is that the very reason for having a virtual machine with Debian 6 on there is to have Zinio and Dropbox available too. Adobe's curtailment of support for Linux means that any application needing Adobe Air may not work on a more current Linux distribution. That affects Zinio, so I'll be retaining a Debian 6 instance for a while yet, unless a bout of testing reveals that a move to the newer version is possible. As for Dropbox, I am sure that I can recall why I moved it onto Debian, but it's working well on there so I am in no hurry to move it over either. There are times when slower software development cycles are better...
Using a variant of Debian's Iceweasel that keeps pace with Firefox
5th February 2013Left to its own devices, Debian will leave you with an ever ageing re-branded version of Firefox that was installed at the same time as the rest of the operating system. From what I have found, the main cause of this was that Mozilla's wanting to retain control of its branding and trademarks in a manner not in keeping with Debian's Free Software rules. This didn't affect just Firefox but also Thunderbird, Sunbird and Seamonkey with Debian's equivalents for these being IceDove, IceOwl and IceApe, respectively.
While you can download a tarball of Firefox from the web and use that, it'd be nice to get a variant that updated through Debian's normal apt-get channels. In fact, IceWeasel does get updated whenever there is a new release of Firefox, even if these updates never find their way into the usual repositories. While I have been known to take advantage of the more frozen state of Debian compared with other Linux distributions, I don't mind getting IceWeasel updated so it isn't a security worry.
The first step in so doing is to add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list using root access (using one of sudo, gksu or su to assume root privileges) since the file normally cannot be edited by normal users:
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main
deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports iceweasel-release
With the file updated and saved, the next step is to update the repositories on your machine using the following command:
sudo apt-get update
With the above complete, it is time to overwrite the existing IceWeasel installation with the latest one using an apt-get command that specifies the squeeze-backports repository as its source using the -t switch. While IceWeasel is installed from the iceweasel-release squeeze-backports repository, there are dependencies that need to be satisfied and these come from the main squeeze-backports one. The actual command used is below:
sudo apt-get install -t squeeze-backports iceweasel
While that was all that I needed to do to get IceWeasel 18.0.1 in place, some may need the pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring package installed too. For those needing extra information beyond what's here, there's always the Debian Mozilla team.