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.

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 And while Debian Stable provides a solid and stable base system, the libreoffice package becomes outdated with time.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.

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.

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.

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.