Why Debian?

There are a few distributions out there, such as Puppy or Damn Small Linux which focus almost entirely on this niche. Why not use one of them? You certainly can, but Debian’s characteristics make it ideal as a platform for building up your software stack the way you want it. Debian’s greatest strength (though some might call it a weakness) is that it is not a unified, cohesive whole in the way that Windows, OSX, and even Ubuntu are. Instead, Debian is more like a box of Legos, where you’re provided with a solid base and access to all the pieces you need. This is what makes it such a popular starting point for custom Linux systems, and why it’s the core behind many of today’s most popular desktop Linux distributions.

Installing the Core System

Before we begin installing, it’s important to note that Debian install CDs are strictly composed of 100% free software. That means it does not contain any non-free hardware drivers, so there is a good chance that your laptop’s wireless network device will not function from the install media. Therefore it is highly recommended that you proceed with the installation using cabled Ethernet.

For many reasons, I suggest using the tiny Network Install CD instead of the full 700MB ISO. This will likely end up saving you a lot of time that would otherwise be wasted downloading and upgrading packages that you don’t want or need.

We’ve previously covered the process of performing a Debian network install, so I won’t go into detail here, but there is one important suggestion. Once the Software Selection screen comes up (after partitioning and such), I strongly recommend that you uncheck the box for Desktop Environment, and check Laptop.

You certainly can leave Desktop Environment checked if you wish, which will install a vanilla Gnome 2 desktop. I suggest removing it because that will add a LOT of weight to your install, and will most likely include several packages and services you do not need.

Post-Install Configuration

Getting the OS installed is only the first step. Now, let’s include some packages. Once you’ve booted up and logged in, you’ll probably want to start by installing your own graphical environment to replace Gnome. First, however, we’ll need to add a few core pieces that will be needed by any desktop software. Run the following command (as root) to add these core utilities.

apt-get install xorg sudo iceweasel pulseaudio

• X.org is the backend graphical system used by all major desktop environments
• sudo allows you to run individual commands as root
• Iceweasel is Debian’s 100% free rebranding of Firefox
• PulseAudio is one of the sound systems most commonly used in Linux*

* Some people have had a lot of trouble with PulseAudio, which can be difficult to get working properly. If you have trouble, try installing alsa-base and alsa-utils instead, which will make your system use the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.

Once finished, make sure your username has sudo rights and you’re ready to install your desktop.

Option 1: LXDE

Based on OpenBox, LXDE is a very small and fast desktop environment. It includes several small applications such as a file manager terminal, and music player designed specifically for use in LXDE.

LXDE is well suited to those who want to get up and running right away, or those who are used to the Windows-style desktop and Start menu interface.

It can be installed easily from the command line with

sudo apt-get install lxde

Option 2: Window Maker

If you’re a little more adventurous, or a little more willing to tinker with settings, I very highly recommend Window Maker. It’s a bit old, it’s a bit ugly, but with a few tweaks, it becomes quite possibly the most productivity-oriented desktop around.

And it’s fast. Blazing fast. This entire article was written on an old HP laptop running Debian and Window Maker as described, and my desktop is more responsive than most of the higher-end Windows 7 and even Linux desktop running larger, fatter environments.

(This is, of course, a completely subjective statement and depends on a lot of variables)

Like LXDE, it’s easily installed from the command line with

sudo apt-get install wmaker

Software Suite

Presumably, by this point, you’ve got your lean and mean Debian system running with little more than a window manager and a web browser. I recommend the following applications for keeping productivity high and resource usage low.

• NDISWrapper Driver Tool – Allows you to use many Windows drivers to run devices on Linux (extremely handy for WiFi)
• PCManFM File Manager – Even if you’re not using LXDE, this is a great lightweight file manager that stays out of your way.
• Geany Code Editor – If you do software development, Geany is an excellent editor that has many useful features, but manages to remain small and fast.
• VLC Media Player – It doesn’t matter the distro or even the OS, VLC is just a great player.
• Audacious Music Player – This is one of the last remaining WinAmp style players, and still does a great job.
• LightDM – A desktop login manager intended as an alternative to large ones like GDM and KDM

Conclusion

Hopefully, by the time you’re done reading this, you’re well on your way to a custom Debian setup that allows your old laptop to run fast and smooth. I’ve toyed with many a Linux distribution and desktop environment, yet time after time I come back to Debian and Window Maker, with a few lightweight utilities. Together they make for fantastically productive and useful computing with minimal clutter. This laptop, for one, is never going to have to try to run Linux Mint again.

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Basic Settings

Click here to open the Web Image Builder. By default it will only show the basic options for building your CD.

binary-images specifies the type of image you wish to generate. Under most circumstances, you’ll want to leave that at the standard ISO CD format.

Under distribution, you choose which release of Debian to use for the install. In short, Debian always has three releases available – stable, testing, and unstable. The current stable release is codenamed Lenny and the current testing is Squeeze. Unstable is always Sid. For maximum dependability choose Lenny (stable), but historically the testing branch functions quite well as a desktop.

The packages-lists option provides a simple way to select from a predefined group of packages. For example, if you want to run a home studio in KDE, there just so happens to be a studio-kde package.

Presumably, the tasks section allows you to specify certain tasks for the build, however this feature seems to be almost entirely undocumented, which is rare with Debian tools.

packages is a list of the packages you wish to include in your CD that are not part of the lists you selected previously. This can include anything in the Debian repositories, from media players like VLC to recovery tools like gparted.

Advanced Bootstrap Options

If all we could set was the basic options, this utility wouldn’t be especially useful. The next section of config, which can be accessed by clicking Advanced Bootstrap Options, gives us a few more important settings.

Currently the architecture option only provides 386 style processors. This is a broad architecture, as compared to the likes of SPARC or PowerPC. You’ll set more a specific CPU type (686, 64-bit, etc) in a later section.

bootstrap-flavour is referring to the packages that will be involved in building the base system. Unless you’re trying to make your CD image particularly tiny, you’ll probably want to leave this at standard.

Leave mirror-bootstrap alone, as that will grab packages right from the build server, but you may want to set mirror-binary to your region. Users in the Unites States, for example, may wish to change http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ to http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/.

mirror-binary-security can be safely left alone, but if you intend to use non-open software (Flash, Skype, etc) you’ll want to change archive-areas to include “contrib” and “non-free”.

Advanced Chroot Options

As promised, this is the section where you can define a more specific CPU architecture, as well as some other handy options.

When chroot-filesystem is set to squashfs, the files on your live CD will be compressed, giving you more space for applications. Generally this is what you want.

linux-flavours is where you can define your CPU architecture in more detail. Listed in the combo box are all supported 386-style CPU types, including images designed for virtual machines.

Strangely, security and symlinks seem to be two more largely undocumented features. Some limited testing indicates security may be related to SELinux configuration.

With sysvinit, you can decide whether or not you want to use the somewhat deprecated SysV Init system. Unless you have a particular reason to use it, and you’d probably know if you did, leave this setting at False.

Advanced Binary Options

As most of the options here are on the more technical side and do not require adjustment under normal circumstances, this section will focus most on the options a user is most likely to wish to change.

bootloader will let you choose between syslinux and GRUB. Syslinux is simpler and is the standard bootloader for Live CDs, but GRUB can provide more options. Unless you have a reason to use GRUB, Syslinux is the safest and simplest choice.

The debian-installer option is where you decide whether or not you’d like to support installation from your live media. According to the Debian Live team, this isn’t exactly in the spirit of the system (an official Debian install CD may be a better choice), but is supported nonetheless.

If you want the contents of your CD encrypted, you can simply set the encryption flag to the desired level of encryption.

Advanced Source Options

There are only two options here, source and source-images. The former is the decision on whether or not to include source code in your CD, and the latter is the format in which it will be stored.

Conclusion

When you’ve finished your CD, the server will take a few minutes to build your image and notify you via email when it’s ready for download. As usual, the Debian developers have come up with a useful tool to get the job done. Will it win any Beautiful Web Site awards? Probably not. Will it build a custom Debian live CD to your specifications? Absolutely.

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Truthfully, GoogleCL provides a feature-rich command line tool set that will be useful to Linux geeks and regular users alike. With it, users can perform tasks quickly and efficiently.

GoogleCL is a cross-platform python application that includes tools for the following Google services: Picasa, Blogger, YouTube, Google Docs, Contacts, and Calendar.

Download and Install

You can download GoogleCL at the project’s Google Code page.  There are two available package formats: deb (for debian, ubuntu, etc.) or tar.gz (for other non-Debian distros). On an Ubuntu machine, double-click on the file after it finishes downloading, and follow the on-screen instructions to install.

1. For the tar.gz file, extract the contents with:

tar zxvf googlecl-0.9.7.tar.gz

2. Next, change to the googlecl directory:

cd googlecl-0.9.7

3. Make sure you have python 2.5 or 2.6 and python gdata installed.

4. As root, run the following command:

python setup.py install

Running Commands

There are two ways to execute GoogleCL commands:

1. type “google” followed by the necessary arguments and options,

2. type “google” by itself to run the program and then enter commands from the google prompt.

To get general help with GoogleCL, type “google help”. To get help with a specific service, type “google help services”. For example, you can type “google help docs” for help with Google Docs.

Run “google” once to allow GoogleCL to create the config file. There are a few options to configure to make GoogleCL work well for you. The configuration file will be located at ~/.googlecl/config. Make sure you specify the editors you want to use for the available file types.

To run a command, you should include the service, task, options, and arguments. The services will be picasa, docs, contacts, etc. The task will be terms like post, edit, delete, upload, etc. Options will use terms like title, query, name. Finally, arguments will include specific references to items like the names of documents or path to a video.

Examples

To create a blog post in Blogger, enter:

google blogger post –title ‘Test CLI Blog Post’ ‘This is a test post for my new command line Blogger client’

To list your Google contacts, enter:

google contacts list name,email

To post a video file you have created to YouTube, type:

google youtube post –category Education My-First-Command-Line-Movie.avi

When you attempt to use the google command for a service for the first time, it will open your web browser and ask you to authenticate it. Click “grant access” and then press Enter back in the terminal window.

GoogleCLI will even let you edit documents from your computer (In order to use it, you will need the latest version of python-gdata). For example, to edit a document called “Cool Ideas”, type the following:

google docs edit –title ‘Cool Ideas’ –editor nano

You can choose the editor of your choice for your actual editing or leave off the editor argument if you have already configured it in your “config” file.

GoogleCLI provides users who love the power of the command line with a very useful tool to perform basic or advanced tasks from any computer. Best of all, GoogleCLI is free and open source. Download it, contribute, and enjoy.

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Today, we’re going to be using chroot to treat certain parts of your Linux filesystem as (almost) completely isolated systems. This can let you do all kinds of interesting things, like run a full Gentoo system from inside your Ubuntu system with little to no performance loss.

How it works

Before we get started, it would be a good idea to go over exactly what we’re doing and how it all works. When you start up your Linux computer, you go through a series of steps to boot up. GRUB, your bootloader, loads the kernel that’s specified in GRUB’s config file, attaches it to your root partition, and runs the init scripts stored there. From then on, your system is running from within that root partition.

We’re going to be using a host Linux system (I’ll be doing it from Debian but the steps should be pretty much identical regardless of distribution) that goes through that normal boot process, but then treating a certain portion of your filesystem (like /mnt/guest) as its own isolated installation. That guest system won’t go through the boot process, won’t load a kernel, and won’t run init scripts. You’ll just tell your host “connect to this directory as if it’s the new root partition”. The diagram below should help demonstrate what I mean.

This is approximately how the files will be laid out on your system, just sitting there as normal files on a normal partition, treated the same as any other files until we use “chroot” to make them into something special.

But once we use chroot (CHange ROOT) and point it to /mnt/guest (or wherever we put the files in the next step), that directory is now its own root filesystem. It becomes completely oblivious to the host system. All programs and commands run from within that new root are run based on the software inside that new branch.

For example, if you’re chrooted into /mnt/guest and type “ls”, it’s reading the “ls” command from inside that chrooted environment, completely unaware of the “ls” command on the host system. If you type “firefox”, it runs the Firefox from inside the new root, whether or not you’ve got Firefox installed on the host.

Getting and Using the Guest Distro

To make this work, you just need the base filesystem of a Linux distro, whatever distro that may be. Debian has a great tool for just this purpose called debbootstrap which downloads the base files and places them wherever you like. To keep things interesting, and to demonstrate what chroot can do, we’re going to use a Gentoo filesystem for our guest. To keep things simple and direct, I’m going to include the download of the tarball as one of the steps we’ll do at the command line.

These steps are going to download all the base files for a Gentoo system, extract them into our target directory (I’ll be using /mnt/guest but you can use anything you like) and then chroot into that directory so it’s treated as the new root (/) directory. You may need root (sudo) permissions for some of the following commands.

mkdir /mnt/guest
cd /mnt/guest
wget http://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/x86/2008.0/stages/stage3-x86-2008.0.tar.bz2
tar -jxvf stage3-x86-2008.0.tar.bz2
chroot /mnt/guest

Those commands take the following steps, in order of line number:

1. Create the space for our guest system to live
2. Move into that space
3. Download the Gentoo system files
4. Extract them
5. Treat this new space as the root (/) directory

The following screenshot should help demonstrate that once we’ve used chroot to connect our new directory as root, it is now isolated from the previous branches in the filesystem tree.

To explain the screenshot, we’re starting at a normal command prompt on the host system. I’m using pwd to display my current directory, where all Gentoo’s files are sitting as plain old files with no special meaning. I then use chroot to treat this directory as the new root, and you can now see visually that my prompt has changed because the command line is now pulling all its info (including how to draw the prompt) from within Gentoo’s root environment. ALL commands and actions I take while chrooted in depend on those commands existing within that new file tree. When I type pwd again, it no longer says /mnt/guest, because as far as that shell knows, nothing exists other than what it sees inside that tree.

Things to Keep In Mind

As I hinted above, this isn’t 100% isolated from the host system. The chrooted environment was never “booted up”, so it never loaded its own kernel, and never ran its own init scripts. In our example, we’ve got Gentoo running on the kernel that the host (in my case Debian) booted up with.

This method is certainly not a replacement for virtualization, and can not do everything VM software can do. The guest system never actually “boots” or runs init scripts, and it’s possible your guest OS may require some features your host kernel does not offer.

What for?

In the times I’ve mentioned this technique to people in the past, they’ve often said something along the lines of “That’s cool, but what would you use it for?”. Personally I’ve found several uses for chroot:

• Test developing software in a pristine environment
• Run software meant for another distribution
• Run software that requires an older or newer version of your current distro
• Access a Linux installation on a different partition without having to reboot
• Boot a Live CD and use chroot to repair your installation or GRUB
• Access a drive where you’ve forgotten the user/pass
• Run a 32-bit app in a 64-bit environment

And I’m sure there are plenty more that I’ve never though of. Have you ever used chroot to run multiple distros? How about to repair a Linux system from a Live CD? Let us know in the comments.

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Nearly all Linux variants use a startup routing modeled after the one found in UNIX System V. Ubuntu uses a system called Upstart which is meant to be backward-compatible with the normal SysV Init. These all run based on the concept of runlevels. A runlevel is simply a set of instructions for bootup/shutdown. If your Linux is set to use, for example, runlevel 5 by default, then every time you boot up you’re going to run all the startup scripts for runlevel 5. The following example shows how the runlevels are set up on a standard Debian installation.

• 0 – Halt
• 1 – Single User
• 2 – Full Multi-User
• 3 – Full Multi-User
• 4 – Full Multi-User
• 5 – Full Multi-User
• 6 – Reboot

These can be customized by the makers of each distro, so some may default to different runlevels than others. Debian typically defaults to runlevel 2.

To find out your default runlevel, open a console and enter:

cat /etc/inittab | grep initdefault

Or just open /etc/inittab in your text editor of choice and look toward the top for the “initdefault” line.

Now that we know which runlevel our system is using, we can begin trimming out the unneeded parts. Each runlevel has a directory on the system with all the startup scripts. Right now, we’re only worried about the scripts for runlevel 2. Open your file manager or command prompt to /etc/rc2.d. In that directory are all the links to your startup programs for that runlevel.

You’ll see that each starts with a letter (S or K) followed by a two digit number (00-99). Those scripts that begin with S are started when that runlevel is entered, those beginning with K are killed when the runlevel is entered. The numbers represent the order to run those scripts. For example, S05Foo would start before S80Bar.

There’s a pretty good chance you won’t recognize some of the items listed in that directory. Some of them are pretty clear like “network-manager” while others are more cryptic. If you’re not sure what you can safely remove, look for a man page on that item. For example, if you’re not sure what “acpid” is, enter

man acpid

into your terminal. If man has no entry, there’s always Google.

Now, to begin removing unneeded items. You COULD simply delete the scripts in the rc2.d directory (they’re actually just links to the real scripts) but I wouldn’t recommend that method. It would work in that it would prevent the script from being run on startup, but it could leave open “K” scripts in other runlevels, and it makes it more difficult to restore that item should you need it later. As usual, Debian has a better way.

The command update-rc.d can be used to cleanly add and remove startup items from your runlevel. I have no bluetooth capability on this computer, so I’m going to remove the bluetooth startup item.

update-rc.d -f bluetooth remove

The same method can be used for each item in your default runlevel that you want to remove. If in doubt, leave it there.

If you find yourself wanting to restore that startup item later, the same tool can be used to add services to runlevels. If I later add bluetooth capability to this computer, I can restore that service with

update-rc.d bluetooth defaults

Once you’ve removed all the unnecessary items for your startup, you’ll find your machine boots much more quickly and takes up fewer system resources.

There are other methods from controlling your startup routine, some include graphical utilities to make it easier. If you use a graphical tool for managing your startup, leave a comment and tell me which one and what you like about it.

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Elive is a Debian-based Linux distro, customized with Enlightenment e17 desktop manager. It is designed with the aim of providing a stable, fully functional and beautiful operating system that can run with minimal hardware requirement.

The current stable version is based on Debian-etch while the version that is under development is based on the recently released Lenny. Knowing the stability and versatility of Debian and the elegant and simplicity of Enlightenment, there are little things that Elive can go wrong.

Testing it out

As the same as any other distros, Elive comes with a live CD that you can use to boot up (and test) in your computer. When you first boot up the Live CD, it automatically detects your hardware and auto-configures it for optimum setting.

If you are using hardware that requires the restricted driver, such as broadcom wireless card and nVidia graphics card, Elive will also prompt you to install the necessary drivers so you can use your hardware straight away. I was happy that it is able to configure my Broadcom wireless card correctly during the boot up. This is one of the few distros that I can boot it up and connect to the Internet straight away, without any configuration or driver installation.

In addition, if you are dualbooting with a Windows partition, or are testing out Elive on your Windows-only computer, Elive will ask if you want to mount the NTFS partition on boot up.

The Frontend

Once you reach the desktop, you will be greeted with the familiar Enlightenment desktop environment (or unfamiliar if you are used to Gnome or KDE). The first thing that you will find missing is the panel (aka as menu or application bar). In case you don’t know, there is no application bar in Enlightenment. You simply click your mouse anywhere on the desktop to access the menu and applications. In my opinion, this is a much cleaner and faster way to manage your applications.

The layout of the desktop is well designed, with clever use of the various corners.

At the bottom of the screen is the e17 iconbar (also known as IBar) that serves as a dock for your frequently used applications.

The left bottom corner is the Xpad where you can quickly fire up to input a short note or access your todo list.

The right bottom is where all the gadgets reside. You are free to add/remove any of the gadgets from the shelf. I particularly like the Internet Configurator that cleverly detect my wireless network without much configuration.

The top right corner is where you can access any of the 12 virtual desktops in Elive. Note that you can easily move an active window to any of the virtual desktop by dragging it to the edges, including the corner. The transition from a desktop to another is seamless. You don’t even notice the differences. Also, one of the best thing that I find it difficult to implement in Gnome is that you can set a different wallpaper for each virtual desktop.

Accessing minimized windows

As mentioned above, there is no menu bar in Enlightenment. When you minimize a window, it will turn into an icon on the desktop instead. To retrieve the window, simply click on the icon and it will maxmize back to its original size.

The following screenshot shows the iconify windows, Xpad todo list, active windows in different virtual desktop and accessing the menu by mouse-clicking on the desktop.

On the application side, some of you (especially me) might be disappointed by the exclusion of OpenOffice. Abiword is used as the default office suite instead. Luckily this distro is Debian-based, so installing OpenOffice on it is just a breeze. The file manager used is Thundar, which is a great replacement for the commonly used Nautilus. Other applications include:

• XMMS
• Mplayer
• Iceweasal (a Debian rebrand of Firefox)
• GIMP
• aMSN
• Skype
• Transmission torrent client
• Avidemux
• Acidrip
• xine
• poedit
• scite text editor
• and many more

On the gaming side, I am surprise to find a collection of several good and interesting games. The Torus Trooper and Tuxpack are two great games that I have wasted countless hours playing. Yes, if you are missing your old console games, the ZSNES Nintendo Emulator, ScummVm and Dosbox emulator are also included.

The backend

On the configuration side, Elive has created beautiful and user-friendly GUI for its user to configure and change any of the system setting. It might take some exploration to find out where all the configuration options are, but once you got that sorted out, everything is just a simple click and select.

On the IBar, there is the Elive Panel where you can access and configure most of the system stuffs. The configuration options are categoried into three main areas:

• Look and feel setting – the place where you customize the desktop theme and overall look and feel.
• Personal settings – the place to personalize your settings, like which applications to load on startup.
• Systems settings – This is where you configure the system setting.

All the configuration options are nicely laid out and there are little chance that you need to hit the terminal to fix things up.

Installation

There are three mode of installation that you can select from: Novice, Normal and Advanced. I must admit that even the Novice mode is not as straight forward as Ubuntu. There are several things that Elive do before installing: partition your hard disk, download the installer file, verifying the system, verifying the installer source. At times, it will prompt you to enter information such as the security code, your username, password etc, which can be quite a hassle.

Various version of Elive

There are currently two version of Elive that are under development: standard Elive and Elive Ecomorph.

The Ecomorph version is a special version that is coupled with Compiz. If you think that Debian + e17 is great, then Debian + e17 + Compiz is even better.

Here is a video on Ecomorph:

Both the development versions are free to download, but are not stable enough for daily usage.

For the existing stable version of Elive, it is more of a donation-ware rather than a freeware. You have to donate (any amount) before you can download the LiveCD.

Invite

Alternatively, you can get invitation codes from your friends who used Elive. For MakeTechEasier readers, on courtesy of EliveTeam, we have 5 invites ready to be given away. If you are interested to try out and install Elive (stable), be among the first to leave your comment below. Remember to include your name and email address.

Conclusion

Elive is a great distro that gives you functionality, stability and beauty. While there are a few other distros that are based on the Enlightenement desktop manager, this is so far the most elegant distro that I have ever encountered. I am pretty impressed by it and I guess it will remain on my computer for a much longer time than any other OS.

For those who want to try out Elive, here are the links:

Elive (stable)

standard Elive (development)

Elive Ecomorph (Compiz)

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Introduction

Before we begin, I’d like to put in a quick word about Debian.

Most operating systems these days come in pre-arranged all-in-one packages. This is true of systems like OSX, Windows, and most Linux distributions like Ubuntu. The analogy I prefer to use is to liken these systems to a toy house. It comes pre-assembled in a ready-to-use package.

Debian, on the other hand, is more like a box of Legos. You get all the pieces you need to build your own toy house any way you like.  This can mean more work, and your finished product might not be as shiny as a pre-built toy house, but you get complete control over the end product.  You choose the size, number of rooms, the furniture, etc.  It’s quite likely that when you’re finished with the setup, your “house” might not look much like the next guy’s. To me, having that flexibility right from the start is one of Debian’s major advantages over pre-built systems.  Before I stretch this analogy to the breaking point, let’s get started.

Hard drive installation

There are LOTS of ways to install Debian. The normal would probably be downloading the full 700MB CD and installing everything at once. For this guide, we’re going to do things a little differently and install from a minimal boot CD and download all the packages as needed.

Get it

Doing your install from the minimal CD has a few advantages over using the full installation CD/DVD. For starters, you don’t have to wait to download the whole CD, burn the whole CD, then install all the packages, just to download their updates a few minutes later. Instead, you just pull everything as needed from the repositories.

That brings me to the next advantage, you only have to download what you’ll actually use. Personally I don’t use Gnome or KDE, so I see no reason to wait for them to download/burn/install/update. You can get the minimal Lenny iso from here and burn it as an image file to a CD. Reboot onto the CD and you’ll get the standard boot screen. As we’re running this install from the minimal CD, it won’t be nearly as pretty as, for example, a graphical Ubuntu install.

Choose Install and move on to the next screen. Go ahead and pick your language and region. The installer will attempt to detect your hardware, including network interfaces.

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