The Problem

After the release of Debian 10 Buster, I installed it on my Dell Inspiron 3558 laptop which comes with onboard Intel HD Graphics. I am using Xfce desktop environment instead of the default Gnome desktop. After the installation, I would intermittently face the problem where the whole desktop would suddenly just freeze and stop responding to the mouse and the keyboard. Even after hours of waiting the system would never come back to the normal state and the only solution was to hard reboot the whole system. It seemed really weird as prior to installing Debian 10, I had Debian 9 running on it for more than a year and I never had any such issues.

If you have never heard of Alpine Linux before, it's a distribution of Linux, a very lightweight one . In fact it's so small, an empty container of Alpine Linux can be run with less than 8 MB of memory. And that's one of the reasons why it's extensively used in containers. Docker Hub has an official image of Alpine Linux. So it's fairly easy to run Alpine Linux as a docker container or build one on top of it.

Event though Debian is considered as one of the most stable Linux distributions out there, part of it's stability comes from the fact that a large portion of it's package base consists of well-tested but outdated packages. This should be a blessing most of the times but if you are a developer like me, some times you may need a latest or specific version of a package. In this case, I needed the latest version of the mysql-server package. Although official apt repository is available from MySQL to install the latest version of it on Debian, to be able to run something in containers has it's own advantages including having the ability to run multiple versions of the same package simultaneously and can be easily cleaned up after using.

Debian Stretch, the current stable release of Debian now comes with Firefox ESR 60. One strange issue I have noticed with the out of the box configuration of Firefox on Debian is that it does not correctly render the Indic fonts on the websites. Most notable issue is that it breaks the connected letters while showing. Here's how I fixed it.

1. Install the fonts-indic package.
   

   sudo apt install fonts-indic



2. Now open Firefox and go to Preferences > General > Language and Appearance > Fonts & Colors and click on Advanced. Select the language you want to set fonts for from the "Fonts for" dropdown and select fonts with your specific language support for Serif and Sans-serif fonts, click Ok.

   Here's how my settings looks like:

I am using Eclipse IDE (version 2018-12 at the time of writing) on Debian 9 Xfce and the issue with it is that the Eclipse editor windows would flicker around the edges. Sometimes so much so that it's impossible to type inside it. Here's how I fixed it:

First check the value of GTK_IM_MODULE in your environment by executing

echo $GTK_IM_MODULE

In my case the output was "xim". But Eclipse expect it to be "ibus". So enter the following command in a terminal session to set it to the value.