Note: This is a work in progress! Sorry about the mess. :P

For Part 1, please refer to the following tutorial: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/197

I'm going to start from where I left off last time. Boot into your new Debian installation, and login. I'm going to assume you installed the desktop environment of your choice during the installation process; if not, you now have the ability to “apt-get install” the DE/components of that DE. Using Gnome as an example, you can install the Gnome meta-package (simply “apt-get install gnome”), or you can install individual Gnome components if you're looking for a minimalist installation.

 

Anyway, once you have your DE of choice installed, login and open up a terminal.

 

The first thing you probably want to do is to give yourself sudo privileges, so you don't have to keep on using su to use administrative commands. Type the following in:

(In this tutorial, lines preceding with $ are meant to be pasted in a terminal, while lines preceding with # are meant to be pasted in a root terminal.)

$ su -

# usermod -a -G sudo your_username_here

(CTRL + D to exit the root shell)

You can now freely use sudo whenever you want. I'm going to assume you know how to handle root privileges properly and responsibly.

 

If you noticed that Grub didn't recognize all your installed operating systems during the installation process, now is the time to

 

$ sudo update-grub

 

Another critical thing: you may have noticed that, during the installation process, partman made you reformat your /swap partition (that happened to me). As such, the UUID of your /swap has changed and you're going to have to edit /etc/fstab on your original Mint installation to get it to recognize your swap. Either mount your Mint's / partition here in your Debian installation, or boot into Mint (and don't be surprised that your swap isn't recognized and you can't hibernate), and edit fstab from there.

 

(From Mint:)

$ gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

 

If you're doing this from Debian, figure out the mountpoint first. You want to edit Mint's fstab, not Debian's fstab. Use

 

$ sudo blkid

 

to figure out the new, correct UUID value for your swap partition, and change this in your fstab file. If you're having trouble with this, make a post on the forums and I'll get to you as soon as possible.

 

Reboot back into Debian, if you haven't done so already.

 

In a terminal:

 

$ gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

 

Edit your sources.list so that it looks like the following:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ testing main non-free

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import

 

Then run:

 

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring debian-multimedia-keyring linuxmint-keyring

 

You may as well update your Debian installation while you're at it, but since this was a netinst install with the latest packages fetched from the Internet, there shouldn't be many updates, if any at all.

$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

 

At this point, your next priority is making sure your hardware works. Is your laptop still tethered to that ethernet cable? Open up Synaptic and do a search for “firmware”; you'll see many packages (since you've enabled non-free repos as per above), hopefully there'll be a firmware package that applies for you. To get my Ralink wireless card to work, I had to

 

$ sudo apt-get install wireless-tools firmware-ralink

 

I also had to run a newer kernel for my Ralink rt2860 card to work, as it won't work properly on a vanilla 2.6.32 kernel, but that's an entirely different story and specific only to my wireless card. I'm assuming that you've used Linux (Mint) before, and thus you know what quirks and what series of arcane commands you have to run to get your wireless working, if any. If you have to compile any drivers or anything, then go ahead and get right to it. This guide will still be here after you're done.

 

If you have questions specific to your hardware, please refer to Debian's extensive documentation first (that's a more polite way of saying RTFM). I know, that's not all that helpful, but I don't know about every single wireless card in existence, so you're going to have to help yourself first. Then, if you can't figure it out, make a post at the Mint forums and provide detailed information about your wireless card, and what you've done to try to get it to work.

 

Now, onto other hardware...there's another tutorial here on the Community website, which you should go read, concerning Intel and Nvidia graphics cards: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/168

 

From Debian's own documentation:

Nvidia: http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Installation-1

ATI: http://wiki.debian.org/ATIProprietary

If you haven't noticed by now, the Hardware Drivers GUI (a.k.a. the “jockey-gtk” package) does not exist on Debian; it's only for Ubuntu and derivatives. So you're going to have to install it the manual way, as described above.

 

Now, let's proceed to “mintifying” our Debian installation. Here's the list of packages you'd want:

http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php?release=Debian

 

You have the Mint repos enabled in your sources.list, so you can apt-get install the packages you want (personally, the only thing I wanted from Mint's repository is mintMenu, since that's the only Mint tool I use on a day-to-day basis. You're free to install whatever you want). Note that Debian already has an Update Manager, so if you want mintUpdate instead of Debian's own, run the following command:

 

$ sudo apt-get purge update-manager-core

 

Also, if you're running a 64-bit version of Debian, do not install Firefox and Thunderbird from the Mint repositories. Both of them are 32-bit only. I repeat, they are 32-bit binary builds. I suppose this is one of the reasons why the Mint devs have delayed 64-bit LMDE; the fact is, Mozilla doesn't release 64-bit versions of their software, at least not release versions, and Mint had to rely on Ubuntu's own builds for 64-bit Firefox and Thunderbird. Ubuntuzilla only offers 32-bit builds, like Mozilla does. Swiftfox's builds are all 32-bit, even the ones that are claimed to be 64-bit (yes, it's true). Debian does not have Firefox and Thunderbird; it has Iceweasel and Icedove, both of which are outdated compared to the official upstream Mozilla versions. If you're happy with 64-bit, but outdated, Iceweasel and Icedove, then skip ahead a bit in this tutorial. If not, read on. (Why Debian has Iceweasel and Icedove instead of Firefox and Thunderbird, if you're curious...is out of the scope of this tutorial. Seriously, I think I've gotten a bit too off-topic already.)

 

If you want a native 64-bit Firefox, there is one place you can get it, without having to build from source code yourself.

 

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b6/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-4.0b6.tar.bz2

 

Yes, this is a beta version, Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 to be exact, but it's truly 64-bit native, and it's the only option for an up-to-date, 64-bit native, “Mozilla Firefox”. And for me, it works perfectly fine (caveat: some addons may not yet work with FF 4). Just run the “firefox” shell script in the untarred Firefox folder you get, and play around with all the new things FF 4 has to offer.

 

Thunderbird poses more of a problem, as I haven't found a single place where you can get up-to-date, native 64-bit, Thunderbird binaries. If you don't want an outdated Icedove, my advice for you is to use Evolution, which is up-to-date in Debian. If that's not an option, build Thunderbird from source.

 

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Simple_Thunderbird_build

 

While we're talking about browsers, we may as well raise the issue of Flash. All you'll get in Debian repos at the moment is 32-bit Flash, therefore go and grab Flash “Square” (the new 64-bit preview release of Flash) directly from Adobe.

 

http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer_square_p2_64bit_linux_092710.tar.gz

(Note: just updated link for Preview 2 of Flash square, released on Sept. 27)

 

Extract and move the libflashplayer.so file into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. You'll need root privileges for that, of course. You will need to restart any browser(s) you have open before Flash is recognized by your browser(s).

 

To continue the process of mintifying our Debian, we can't forget about Mint's out-of-the-box multimedia. Unfortunately, there is no ubuntu-restricted-extras in Debian, and I've sort of forgot about the exact packages you need to install to achieve the same level of multimedia functionality. Hehe, I'll boot into LMDE tomorrow, make a list of all installed packages there, and post it here. Sorry. :P

Update: I've uploaded the entire list of packages that are installed by default on LMDE onto a pastebin; it's a bit impractical at the moment for me to try to sift out everything multimedia-related at the moment without doing a re-install to see what actually needs to be installed, and besides, if you want a system as similar to LMDE as possible, this should guide you in the right direction.

 

http://pastebin.com/U1MWvHiC

Just download it (it's a text file), and then open Synaptic, go to File > Read Markings, and select that text file. Now, sift through the list of packages by going to the left column and clicking the "Custom Filters" button in Synaptic, then selecting "Marked Changes". This is your opportunity to add/remove what you want from the list of packages; once done, click the Apply button.

Update: There's now a "mint-meta-codecs" package in Linux Mint's romeo repository. Although it is currently not installable due to having dependencies on certain Ubuntu packages not found in Debian, it does provide a list of packages you should install to get a good multimedia experience. I'll reproduce it here in the form of an apt-get install command:

$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-esd gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly libdvdcss2 libdvdnav4 libdvdread4 cabextract totem-xine gecko-mediaplayer unrar unshield w64codecs

 

Important note: If you didn't make any changes, don't press the Apply button just yet. As that is a default list of packages to be found on Debian LMDE 32-bit, there's quite a few packages that need to be changed, to adapt the list for a 64-bit system. First of all, de-select all Firefox or Thunderbird packages; as mentionned earlier, they are 32-bit. Also de-select "flashplugin-nonfree", as it is also 32-bit, and use the method outlined earlier in this tutorial to install 64-bit Flash Square. Also de-select w32codecs in favour of w64codecs. You may also want to strip out ndiswrapper if you don't need it, and strip out any firmware packages as well if you don't need them, etc.

You might ask, why didn't I just remove the packages from the list above? Well, this is a do-it-yourself tutorial, and everybody has different needs, so I'm just trying to give you general guidelines and solutions to the most common issues you might face, trying to build your own 64-bit Debian edition based on LMDE.

Note that you can install Firefox and Thunderbird from Mint's repo if you really wanted to (or download them directly from Mozilla's website - Mint's packages don't seem to be any different from the tarballs provided by Mozilla, besides the fact that they're nicely packaged into easy-to-install .deb files). However, you'll need to install the "ia32-libs" and "ia32-libs-gtk" packages. Even then, you may have no luck getting FF and T-bird to run...I certainly haven't, but a commenter has mentionned that this works for him, so I think this is worth a mention.

However, if you choose this path, you'll also need to find 32-bit plugins...so yeah, you can't use openjdk or sun-java directly from the repos, because they're 64-bit. The various Totem multimedia plugins will probably also cause you a few problems. Flash would ironically be the least problematic because it's been a 32-bit plugin since forever, and it's the 64-bit version that still needs to be worked on. 

 

I've run out of time today, so I'll continue this tutorial tomorrow. Consider this a work in progress. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Skype

As per request, I'm going to devote this small section here to Skype users. As you may know, Skype is a 32-bit application, so just like in Ubuntu or Mint, we're going to have to install ia32-libs (32-bit compatibility libraries) and associated libraries. However, even after doing so, and after installing Skype, you may find that you are unable to login into your Skype account and when run from a terminal, Skype outputs this message before crashing:

Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-open.c: 643: _dl_open: Assertion `_dl_debug_initialize (0, args.nsid)->r_state == RT_CONSISTENT' failed!

To the average user, that's not any more helpful than a bunch of gibberish. Heck, even I don't know what it means...what I do know is that this is a documented problem with a documented solution on Debian's wiki.

 

<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type" />

http://wiki.debian.org/skype

Basically, if you don't want to read the entire thing, this is what you'll need to do to install Skype, from the very beginning:

 

Firewall

To set up a firewall quickly without having to know anything about iptables, just run the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get install ufw

$ sudo ufw enable

If you want a GUI to go along with ufw, there's gufw which is also available in the repos.

$ sudo apt-get install gufw

$ gksudo gufw

 

Fonts

 

<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type" />

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=55896

The thread above explains it all. Just run Ikey's script and your fonts should look much nicer. :)

 

Compiz

$ sudo apt-get install compiz compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-fusion-plugins-main compiz-fusion-plugins-extra

$ ccsm

Tweak to your heart's content. ;)

Note that "simple-ccsm" is an Ubuntu package and has yet to be ported to Debian. However, Compiz is something that everybody enjoys tweaking, so simple-ccsm isn't really necessary at all. ccsm gives you more control anyways.

 

Note that, if you want to load Compiz as your WIndow manager by default instead of Metacity, you should NOT add "compiz --replace" to your startup scripts. This ends up loading Metacity first, then killing it and loading Compiz...which extends the time it takes to log in, especially on a cold boot. Rather, you should execute the following commands:

$ touch .gnomerc

$ echo "export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/bin/compiz" > .gnomerc 

<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type" /> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type" />

Want a beautiful boot screen? Or at least something more than text sprawling over your screen during boot? 

$ sudo apt-get install plymouth plymouth-themes-all

$ sudo plymouth-set-default-theme solar

(We'll use the "solar" Plymouth theme as an example. There are other themes, of course...although the plymouth-themes package doesn't really contain all that many themes.)

Of course, I'm sure some of you have experienced problems with Plymouth due to KMS and proprietary ATI/Nvidia drivers. This still applies to Debian, unfortunately. But there is a way (that works in Ubuntu/Mint as well) to have both a working Plymouth and proprietary drivers (basically involves the use of a vesa framebuffer to get Plymouth working).

 

<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type" />

http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Fix-the-Big-and-Ugly-Plymouth-Logo-in-Ubuntu-10-04-140810.shtml

Just follow "Alternative One". Do make a backup of /etc/default/grub if you aren't sure of what you're doing though.

 

Smxi

What is smxi? It's basically a set of shell scripts that makes a lot of package management tasks in Debian-based distros a lot easier. Originally designed for Sidux (now Aptosid), it works on any distro directly derived from Debian (including Aptosid, MEPIS, LMDE, Debian itself...not Ubuntu however, and not Ubuntu/Mint). To install and run it...

$ sudo -i

# cd /usr/local/bin && wget -Nc smxi.org/smxi.zip && unzip smxi.zip && smxi

Please read the documentation first though. It's impossible for me to explain all the features of smxi in a concise fashion...it's definitely worth a tutorial of its own. ;)

 

<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type" />

http://smxi.org/docs/

 

Liquorix

I also want to point out Liquorix. It's a kernel built upon the Zen Kernel sources, designed for desktop usage over server usage. You'll notice that Debian's default kernels are optimized for servers (basically, they're optimized for thoroughput over latency), and you want a kernel that feels more responsive and faster. The Liquorix kernels are also more up-to-date than the kernels you'll find in Debian Testing, so it's a lazy but effective way of running a new kernel but not having the patience or time to compile a newer kernel yourself. :P

$ gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Append "deb http://liquorix.net/debian sid main" (yes, "sid") at the bottom of your sources.list. Save and close Gedit.

$ sudo apt-get install '^liquorix-([^-]+-)?keyring.?'

(Fetch Liquorix's keyrings)

$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6-liquorix-amd64 linux-image-2.6-liquorix-amd64

And reboot into your new kernel after you're done to give it a try.

 

Terminal Fortunes

Self explanatory. Debian by default doesn't come with fortunes in the terminal...if you like those fortunes, here's how to enable them:

$ sudo apt-get install fortunes cowsay

$ gksudo gedit /etc/bash.bashrc

Add this at the very end of the file:

 

if [ -x /usr/games/fortune ]; then

/usr/games/fortune | /usr/games/cowsay -n; echo

fi

 

BURG - Brand new Universal loadeR from Grub

Note that I haven't actually tried out BURG yet, but a commenter has asked for instructions on installing Burg...so I've found this. http://code.google.com/p/burg/wiki/ManualInstall

 

 

# Use a specific background

/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /usr/share/backgrounds/linuxmint/Talento-1.jpg

/desktop/gnome/background/picture_options stretched

 

# Theming options

/desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme Shiki-Wise

#/desktop/gnome/interface/icon_theme gnome-wise

 

# Greeter options

#/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/logo_icon_name debian-swirl

 

# Some other possible options

#/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/banner_message_enable true

#/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/banner_message_text Welcome

#/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_restart_buttons false

#/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list false

 

# The lower panel doesn't work with the compositor

/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager false

 

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