Category: Debian

some tweaks to my debian installation

whbeebe

Dock

I moved the dock from the bottom edge to the left side. I’ve done this on macOS and Windows 10 and Windows 11. Having the dock run across the bottom takes up too much screen real estate, especially for very large landscape screens. I don’t keep that much in the dock anyway, so I don’t have to worry about having too many application icons.

Sudo and root access

Unlike Chris Titus’ directions, I did enable root and gave it a password. As I’ve noted in the past I like to have sudo capability, especially in my VMs or in my machines I physically control. Anywhere else, such as in production, I don’t do this and I recommend you don’t do it either.

In the folder /etc/sudoers.d I place a single line text file. I name this file something memorable. In this instance I’ve named it 010_debian-nopasswd. Here’s what’s in that file:

debian ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

That allows the account named debian to perform sudo without typing in the account’s password. This is how Ubuntu handled sudo back in the “good old days.” All of this was done as I was logged in as root. Once this was all set up then I work in the debian account.

PowerLine

I use PowerLine in all my Linux systems, both within vim as well as the shell prompt. These are the steps to install PowerLine and then set it up:

  • Install pip — sudo apt install python3-pip
  • Install fonts used by PowerLine — sudo apt install fonts-powerline
  • Install support for PowerLine in vim — sudo apt install vim-gui-common
  • Install PowerLine — sudo apt install python3-powerline

I won’t go into how to get PowerLine running in vim, there’re enough howtos on the web for that. For the shell prompt I add the following two lines to the file .bash_aliases:

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin
source $HOME/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/powerline/bindings/bash/powerline.sh

You want to have .local/bin in the path so that the shell script powerline.sh will successfully execute. The screen capture at the top of the post shows PowerLine successfully running in both vim and my bash shell.

installing linux the chris titus way

whbeebe1 Comment

I’ve been spending this Sunday sifting through YouTube watching various technology videos. Some of them were posted by Chris Titus. I’ve included one of them in this post below. It was this post that I followed to install, in yet another virtual machine, Debian. But not just bog standard Debian. I followed Chris Titus’ directions mostly and in the process installed a version of Debian (bookworm/sid) with the Cinnamon desktop and managed to create a version of Debian that looks nearly identical to regular Linux Mint. What makes this VM of Debian so interesting is that it’s almost indistinguishable from regular Linux Mint, especially after I installed Papirus and selected the Papirus-Dark icons, and selected and activated the Adapta-Nokto theme. These icons and theme are what I have on my regular Linux Mint system.

After installation and setup, I checked the tools I care about that were installed and found them to be up-to-date with Fedora 36 and 37, even more up-to-date than the latest Ubuntu. In fact the Linux kernel is at version 6, which is just a few minor revisions behind Fedora’s kernel version 6.0.8. Close enough. In fact I’m going to keep an eye on this particular Debian VM for the foreseeable future to determine if I should switch (yet again) to this.

This isn’t the first time I’ve followed a Chris Titus YouTube video. It was his video on how good KVM/QEMU that got me to using it on my Linux Mint system. And his videos on what he thinks is happening at Twitter are informative and hilarious. And I happen to agree with his opinions on Twitter.

It was a lot of fun following along and I learned a bit in the process. Frankly, this is one of the clearest and best explained, and one of the best looking, customization installations based on Debian.
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Links

Link to Debian ISO used in the video: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-cd/

Link to Papirus: https://github.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/papirus-icon-theme#debian-and-derivatives

Note about Papirus. Their GitHub site has directions for installing on Debian. Follow those directions, not the ones available on obscure web pages claiming to be Linux technical sources.