Debian on Subhadip's Blog

Upgrading to Debian 11 Bullseye

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Although Debian 11 codenamed Bullseye was released almost 7 months back on 14th August, 2021, it was only in January, 2022 that I upgraded all my computers running Debian 10 to Debian 11. Admittedly a little late to the party, I like to take a cautious approach to upgrading my systems, which is not very difficult to predict given my Linux distribution of choice! In this post, I am going to share my experience and the steps I used while doing the actual upgrade.

Functional Global Menu with Xfce Appmenu plugin

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

After tinkering with it for a while now I finally have got a very much functional global menu working on my Xfce4 desktop running on Debian 10. I will list down the steps I followed to get the global menu configured on my Debian Xfce box in this post.

For those of you who might be wondering what a global menu is, it is a way of displaying the application menus on the top of the screen like the way MacOS does. By default the Xfce4 desktop displays the menus right below the Window title bar separately in each Window.

The easiest way to stay always connected on IRC

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Connecting to an IRC room may not be a difficult task but if you communicate with a group of members connecting from different locations across the globe and are in different timezones and if you don’t want to miss out messages from them while you are offline, you may find yourself in a tricky situation. In this post I am going to share the easiest and the most cost-effective way to always stay connected on IRC using Matrix.

My list of things to do after installing Debian on the PC

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I like the fact that Debian does not do a lot of customizations over the upstream packages by default but this also means extra work for you for setting up things after installing Debian on the PC. The upside is that you get to customize things exactly the way you like it. It definitely helps to have a list to start with and this post lists down some of the customizations I make after installing a fresh copy of Debian.

Fix for Debian Buster System Freeze

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Run MySQL as Docker Container on Debian

Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Fix for incorrect rendering of Indic fonts in Firefox on Debian

Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Install the fonts-indic package.
```
sudo apt install fonts-indic
```

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:

How to fix Eclipse IDE flickering issue on Debian

Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Format USB drive after installing Debian from it

Sat, 01 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

If you have used an USB drive to write iso images to before installing Debian or recent versions of Ubuntu, here are the steps to reclaim it after installation is over.

Open a terminal and list the available device names using the following command:
```
lsblk
```
which should show you an output like the one below:
Identify the device name of your USB drive. Extreme caution should be taken while at it because wrong device names can potentially wipe your entire hard disk. In this case, the USB drive that we want to format is sdb.
Writing the iso image to the USB drive has made it a read-only device. To change it back, the partition table needs to broken. Issue the below command after replacing sdb with the device name identified in the previous step:
```
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M && sync
```
This step might take some time to complete depending upon the size of the USB drive. So be patient. When it is over, you should see an output like the below:

Creating an unpriviledged lxc container on Debian Stretch

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

After a few earlier failed attempts, today I was successfully able to create an unprivileged LXC container on Debian Stretch for the first time. I had experience of using LXC's more user friendly cousin LXD before I moved to Debian but unfortunately LXD is not available on Debian yet. While LXC is more low level compared to LXD, if you just need a basic container, it's still pretty solid. The Debian wiki on LXC container is fairly straight forward and easy to follow, but still for someone who is a novice to both Debian and LXC, it is very easy to get lost. So I am writing this post so that it can be a good place to start if you need a very basic setup.

Assigning volume up/down shortcut keys for secondary speaker in Linux

Sun, 30 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I have a wireless Bluetooth speaker that I use with my laptop running Debian 9 with Xfce. My laptop also has a primary speaker. So when I connect my Bluetooth speaker to my laptop, my laptop is actually connected to both the primary and secondary speaker at the same time. The laptop volume up/down keys will still be mapped to the primary speaker and if I wish to control the volume of the secondary speaker, I needed to open the Volume Control window from the Panel volume plugin, which was a pain if you had to do it every time.

Installing the latest Libreoffice on Debian stable

Sun, 23 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

One of the few software that I like to keep always updated to the latest version on my system is Libreoffice, because of the compatibility improvements with the other office suite each new version brings. And while Debian Stable provides a solid and stable base system, the libreoffice package becomes outdated with time. A lot of the guides on updating Libreoffice in Debian on the Internet speak about installing the latest binaries from the Libreoffice website. But the main shortcoming with this approach is that updating to the next version is again a manual task.

Install Debian on an unclean target

Thu, 13 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I had to downgrade my main laptop from Debian testing to Debian stable (Stretch at the time of writing). Since I did not have a separate home partition, re-installation meant formatting the entire partition that would erase all my personal data and settings. But this time I did not want go over the pain of configuring everything from scratch, so I went ahead without formatting my root partition. After a few times of failures and analyzing the installation logs, I learnt the trick.

Installing Debian Testing

Sat, 07 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

After my previous post about why I chose Debian Testing as my current distribution, I wanted to share how I installed and configured Debian Testing. So that somebody out there looking for a guide to install their own Debian rolling system, will have at least a starting point.

Before I proceed with the post, please know that although I am a long time Linux user, with Debian, I just started my journey a couple of months back. And by no mean I am a seasoned Debian user. So whatever steps I am going to list in this post are the ones that I thought would be best suited for my requirement when I installed it on my system.

My Rolling Debian System

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks back, I switched my home laptop to Debian and I wanted to write about my reasons behind choosing Debian and my experience with it for the first few days. But before I dive into that, here's a little background about myself. I have been using Ubuntu and later Xubuntu at home and later at office on my Desktop and on my Laptop for more than 7 years now and on the server front, I have worked on both Redhat/Centos and Ubuntu based systems. So I am not new to Linux at all.

Debian on Subhadip's Blog

Upgrading to Debian 11 Bullseye

Introduction

Functional Global Menu with Xfce Appmenu plugin

Introduction

Global menu vs Local menu

The easiest way to stay always connected on IRC

Introduction

My list of things to do after installing Debian on the PC

Introduction

Fix for Debian Buster System Freeze

The Problem

Run MySQL as Docker Container on Debian

Fix for incorrect rendering of Indic fonts in Firefox on Debian

How to fix Eclipse IDE flickering issue on Debian

Format USB drive after installing Debian from it

Creating an unpriviledged lxc container on Debian Stretch

Assigning volume up/down shortcut keys for secondary speaker in Linux

Installing the latest Libreoffice on Debian stable

Install Debian on an unclean target

Installing Debian Testing

My Rolling Debian System