Top 5 Linux Distributions

As a Linux user, I am sure, you will be interested to know which is the most popular Linux distribution. Till recently, if you go by Distrowatch stats, Ubuntu ruled the roost as the most popular Linux distribution. However, after Ubuntu team made a switch to the Unity interface, its popularity has declined considerably.

Debian Is No Longer Just A Linux Distribution

Debian stable version 6.0 code named "Squeeze" has been released. After 24 months of arduous testing, the Debian team has finally released v 6.0 which brings many firsts among its features. They are -

Google portable device runs Debian Linux

The portable device I am talking about is the T-Mobile G1 Android cellphone. Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an Operating System, Middleware and key applications. Presumably, the T-Mobile G1 contains an ARM EABI architecture which is supported by Debian.

So a group of people (hackers) set out to install Debian on their T-Mobile G1 Android phone. The end result, at the least, is quite interesting. They have succeeded in running a full fledged Debian OS on their G1 Android cellphone at the same time, retain all the features which allow it to function as a cellphone such as receiving and making calls.

Read a detailed writeup on the steps needed to install Debian on a TMobile G1 Phone at the following website. AndroidFanatic.com has released a Debian installer script for your Android cellphone which you can download here.

Also watch the following video which shows Debian running on the Android G1 cellphone.

Using netselect-apt - Tip to select the fastest Debian mirror

Each time I install Debian - and I have done it scores of times on multiple machines, I get frustrated in choosing the right Debian mirror for updating the package database on my machine using 'apt-get update', or installing a new package for that matter.

Some of the questions that I had to find a solution for were ... Do I choose the Debian mirror in my country (India) or do I use one of the US servers ? Is there any way to find which of the two are the fastest for my geographic location ?

It might sound ironical, but experience tells me that the truism of choosing a Debian apt mirror closest to ones location does not hold true for me. Because at all times, when I have used a mirror from India, it is dead slow. And believe it or not, the responsiveness of the mirror will do a great deal of difference to how fast you are able to update your Debian machine.

Enter netselect-apt, a package which helps one to find and use the fastest Debian mirror for his region. What this script does in conjunction with 'netselect' command is, it first downloads a list of all the Debian apt mirrors from the official Debian website using wget. The list is saved in a file named 'mirrors_full' in your current directory. It then checks the responsiveness of each of the servers in the list and then selects the fastest among them. Finally it writes the necessary code in the sources.list file and saves it in your current directory. Considering that on last count there are a total of 248 Debian mirrors to choose from, that is a pretty tedious job.

In order to use netselect-apt, the first thing you have to do in your newly installed Debian machine is download and install the netselect-apt package. This can be done as follows :

# apt-get install netselect-apt

The netselect-apt package depends on the netselect package and so it will also be automatically installed.

You can pass a couple of options while invoking the netselect-apt command. For instance, I have Debian Etch installed on my machine. And if I want to find the fastest Debian Etch repository mirror for my geographic region, I run the netselect-apt command as follows :

# netselect-apt etch

If I want it to include non-free software section as well while creating the sources.list file, then I use the -n option :

# netselect-apt -n etch

You can also ask netselect-apt to select only ftp servers instead of http ones by passing the -f option.

# netselect-apt -n -f etch

Apart from etch, you can pass the following options - stable, testing, unstable, experimental, woody, sarge and sid. If you choose not to pass any options, then by default netselect-apt uses 'stable' as the option.

Once it finishes its work, you will find a newly created sources.list file in your current directory which will have the necessary code pointing to the fastest Debian server for your location. Now all you have to do is to copy the sources.list file to /etc/apt/ directory and do an apt-get update.

# cp ./sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list
# apt-get update

Please note that the speed of the servers change over a period of time and is dependent on a variety of external factors. So the server that netselect-apt chooses today need not be the fastest one for you say, a couple of weeks hence. So if you are in the habit of installing and updating software all the time, it will be prudent to run netselect-apt once every week or so and update your sources.list file to point to the fastest mirror.

Install multimedia codecs in Debian Linux

This guide will explain how to install in Debian all the media player codecs - which include multimedia codecs & libdvdcss which is necessary to play DVDs in Linux.

Because of licensing restrictions, Debian Linux does not ship with the multimedia  codecs necessary to play a variety of audio and video files. Instead, the users themselves have to download all the media player codecs and install it on their Debian Linux machine. Fortunately, Debian uses a fabulous package management system called apt-get which makes the end user's task in installing the codecs all the more easy.

Install Debian from within Windows

Debian has got itself a new Win32 installer. This new software is targeted at people who are not too tech savvy to know the steps needed to burn the Debian ISOs on to a CD/DVD. The first time I read the news, I wondered how it was any different from installing Linux on a UMSDOS filesystem ? It is very different it seems...

Steps to get Audio to work in Debian Etch

Debian Etch is a very good Linux distribution. It has all the latest versions of software - even more recent than those found in Ubuntu Dapper (though that is bound to change once Ubuntu releases its next version) and also a pretty GUI installer. Recently when I downloaded and installed the latest version of Debian Etch Beta 3, every thing went quite smoothly - Etch correctly detected all the hardware in my machine and I was booted into Linux in no time.

But... I ran into a problem. I have on-board sound on my Intel motherboard as I found out running the following command :

#lspci|grep Multimedia
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio (rev 05)

And the correct driver module 'snd_intel8x0' for this on-board sound was already loaded as was seen by running lsmod.

#lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
snd_intel8x0           29436  0
snd_ac97_codec         82784  1 snd_intel8x0
snd_ac97_bus            2048  1 snd_ac97_codec
snd_pcm_oss            43520  0
snd_mixer_oss          15584  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm                74408  3 snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer              20292  1 snd_pcm
snd                    46080  6 snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer
soundcore               8672  1 snd
snd_page_alloc          9800  2 snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm
...

Then I checked the volume control and I found it to be turned to full volume - so no problem there either. It seems, Debian requires the package libesd-alsa0 which was missing on my machine. This may be because I had installed a standard system install and then later downloaded and installed the desired packages thus avoiding unnecessary bloat. And I might have missed installing some of the necessary packages.

Anyway, once I downloaded the libesd-alsa0 package and installed it, I ran the alsaconf script which automatically removed the loaded sound drivers, detected the sound card, reloaded the relevant drivers and finally, reconfigured the sound to work correctly. And shortly after that, I started relishing the heavenly tunes emanating from the speaker.

So here is the deal to get sound working correctly in Debian Etch. That is, regardless of the version of the kernel, you need to have alsa-base, alsa-utils and libesd-alsa0 packages installed. You will also have to use the alsaconf command to configure and load the necessary sound modules.

While configuring, alsaconf will ask whether to modify the following two files:

/etc/modprobe.d/sound & /etc/modprobe.conf - if they are present. These files are used to tweak the settings of the sound card by passing additional parameters. Usually you won't have them on the system.

After the sound card is configured, it will load the ALSA sound driver and use amixer to raise the default volumes. It is also possible to change the volume later via a mixer program such as alsamixer or gamix.

Considering the number of hoops I had to loop in getting sound to work in Linux a couple of years back, this process is a piece of cake. In fact, I believe, if I had installed a default Desktop Environment, I wouldn't even have had to go through the above process. Anyway, it is nice to know what to do when things go wrong.

Is Ubuntu and Debian on ideological cross roads ? - Mark Shuttleworth clarifies

A couple of weeks ago, one of Debian's most active developer Matthew Garrett threw down the towel and called it quits protesting against the Debian's rather strong democratic culture of having a free for all discussion about any decision making pertaining to Debian making him intensely irritable and unhappy. He went on to compare Debian's lack of civility and slowness in decision-making with the more structured way in which decisions are taken at Ubuntu.

On the backdrop of Matthew's exit from Debian, Mark Shuttleworth himself has chosen to respond to and clarify Ubuntu's position in relation with Debian on his blog.

And his opinion is that Ubuntu (and many other Linux distributions based on Debian) can never survive without Debian.

He goes on to state that Debian's chief strengths is its uncompromising emphasis on free software. He dwells on some of the short comings of the way Debian is managed and believes that at the end of the day, some introspection is healthy and that Debian will benefit from the discussion.

A Tryst with Debian Etch Beta 3

When a Linux enthusiast hears the name Debian, it never fails to instill in him some awe and respect. After all, this is the one and only not-for-profit Linux distribution which has singularly built up a name synonymous with security, stability and freeness.

I recently downloaded the latest offering of Debian which goes in the garb of Debian Etch Beta 3. Ironically, I came across the correct link through a comment inserted in a prominent news site (I will come back to it later). There are 19 ISO images to download if you want all the packages which runs to more than 17000 and their sources. But Debian also provides a net install CD image roughly around 140 MB size and is the preferred option for people who have a very fast Internet connection. And it is possible to install the distribution entirely via the net.

Since I was severely constrained in the Internet speed department, I decided to download the first CD image of size 643 MB praying that it would be enough to install a full fledged desktop environment. After a couple of hours, I had the ISO image successfully downloaded and burned on to the CD and I was ready to install Debian on my machine.

The main reason for trying out this version of Debian was to check out the new GUI installer which is considered to be a huge improvement over the previous versions. I booted my PC using the CD and I was shown a boot prompt. Here I had the choice of either installing using the text based installer or using the new graphical installer. Also it is possible to install the distribution using the expert mode or the normal mode. If you opt for the normal mode, the installer takes most of the decisions at the cost of your relinquishing fine grained control. Since I like having more control of the installation process, I opted for the expert GUI mode and diligently typed the command :

boot: expertgui

In fact, the installer provides a plethora of choices which one can learn about by navigating using the function keys F1 to F8 prior to entering the command.

Fig: New GUI installer of Debian

In a short time, I was face to face with the new GUI installer which had a clean spartan look to it. The installer in itself has only three buttons. Them being "Continue", "Back" and "Screenshot". The "Screenshot" button will grab the current screen and save it as a PNG image in the /var/log/installer/ location which can be later accessed after the installation is complete. This imparts a nice touch to the whole process as it will, at a later time, aid in providing a visual walk-through of the installation steps to a first time user of Linux.

Debian Installation Walkthrough
The installation steps I had to go through are as follows :

1. Choose language
   • Choose a country or region
   • Choose locale
2. Select a keyboard layout
   • Type of keyboard
   • Keymap to use
3. Detect & mount the CD-ROM
   • Modules to load - like usb-storage, floppy and so on.
     
   • Start PCMCIA ? Yes/No
4. Load installer components from CD
5. Detect network hardware - automatic detection
6. Configure the network
   • DHCP or static IP
     
   • Set hostname
   • Set domain name
7. Choose a mirror of the Debian archive
   • Choose the country
   • Choose ftp location
   • Enter any HTTP proxy information
8. Detect disks - Automatic detection
9. Partition Disks - Would be nice to have a help button here for first time users. For others the whole process is intuitive.
10. Configure time zone
11. Configure clock
12. Setup users and passwords
    • Enable shadow passwords? Yes/No
    • Allow login as root ? Yes/No
    • Set root password
    • Create normal user account
13. Install the base system
    • Select the kernel image - There are 20 images including those with SMP support for 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.
    • Select tools used to generate boot initrd
14. Configure the package manager
    • Should the network mirror be chosen ? Yes/No
    • Use non-free software ? Yes/No - Really interesting!
      
15. Select and install the software
    • Participate in Debian popularity contest ? Yes/No - Cool!
      
    • Select your choice of packages
      • Desktop environment
      • Web Server
      • Print Server
      • DNS Server
      • File Server
      • Mail Server
      • SQL Server
      • Laptop
      • Standard System
16. Configure Exim v4 - Mail Transport Agent
17. Choose dictionaries to use (US, GB...)
18. Install Grub/Lilo Boot loader or continue without boot loader
19. Finish the installation

Even though there are a lot of steps involved in the Expert mode of installation (the number of steps are a lot less if you choose the normal mode), each of them are easy to understand. I found the installer to provide fine grained control over which modules to enable.

Usually most Linux distributions enable all the modules available even though many of them are not needed for the particular machine hardware. But Debian allows one to enable just those modules that are most suited for the machine. For example, my machine does not have infrared or wireless supported hardware so I can choose not to load the kernel modules related to these.

Another aspect which endeared me to the Debian way of installing Linux was the sheer number of kernel images available to choose from. The installer provided a choice of no less than 20 kernel images from the 2.4 kernel fit for installing on a 486 machine to the 2.6 kernel with SMP support for Pentium class of x86 machines.

Fig: Partitioning the hard disk

The Grub boot loader also correctly detected the WindowsXP and Ubuntu 6.06 OSes residing on the other partitions on my machine though it failed to detect the FreeBSD OS. But then none of the other Linux distributions I have installed till now have correctly detected the FreeBSD OS while installing the boot loader.

If one has a net connection, I recommend choosing the standard system install (while installing the software) which will install a base system sans X server. And then it is only a matter of installing just those software which are needed using apt-get. I installed the standard system and then with an additional 150 MB download, I was able to setup a desktop system with an editor (GVim 7.0), a web browser (Firefox 1.5.0), a window manager Xfce 4.0 (a very good alternative to the more common heavy weights Gnome and KDE) and two graphics software Gimp 2.2 and Inkscape 0.44. It is clear that the Debian team have upgraded the Etch repositories to mirror the most recent versions of the software. For example, the Inkscape build was compiled as recently as July 2006.

And after all this, my Debian partition utilized only 1.1 GB space which includes the space used by apt-get for storing the packages downloaded for installing. I have started liking the Debian way of installing only what is necessary which does away with a lot of bloat. And I am sure this will be the preferred way of installing Linux in the future when majority of the people have access to high speed internet.

I found the new graphical installer similar to the text installer of FreeBSD in that it is possible to jump around back and forth in the different categories of the main menu. And once a particular task is finished, you are placed back in the main menu.

Bootup times of Debian

The boot-up times are significantly faster than any of the other Linux distributions I have used barring say Vector Linux or Gentoo which are also equally quick to boot up. I dare say I found Debian Etch to boot up quicker than Ubuntu :).

The Pros of Debian Etch beta 3

• Comes with an easy to navigate graphical installer
• Has a choice of 20 Linux kernels suitable for a wide variety of x86 machines.
• Gives fine grained control over the installation with options to enable/disable specific modules.
• Installs the latest versions of software. A real surprise!!
• Quick boot up times.
• Stable and secure - you get the same unadulterated operating system which powers many of the high traffic servers around the world.
• Support for setting up encrypted partitions during installation .

The Cons of Debian Etch beta 3

• Internet access is mandatory to install Debian unless you are willing to shell out money to buy a set of CDs.
• No out of the box support for Flash, Sun's Java, proprietary audio formats, closed source graphics drivers and so on. And these have to be included by the users themselves.
  

Now for some rants ... ;-)

I had earlier noted that I got hold of the link to Debian Etch beta 3 from a prominent news site where a reader had graciously included it in his comment. Would I have succeeded in downloading the correct ISO (in my case the most recent one) if I had tried looking on the Debian website ? In all probability I would have ended up downloading the wrong version of Debian.

Agreed, Debian supports lots of architecture other than x86 and all these need to be given equal representation. But how much effort will it take to provide a download link to the latest version of Debian simultaneously recommending a specific version for desktop users (even if it is in beta stage) on the main page of debian.org site ? I would guess not much. The download link provided at present takes the visitor to Debian Sarge which is too outdated for use as a Desktop.

On this note, and with due respects, I feel Debian team seriously need to acquire some lessons in the ABC's of marketing. Just because it is a not-for-profit organisation doesn't mean that it has to refrain from marketing itself and rely exclusively on well wishers and enthusiasts to spread the word. It is high time that the Debian site is overhauled and made more user friendly (Read less cluttered) . For one, a new Linux user will not be able to make head or tail about Sarge, Etch or Sid. But if he is told which ISO image is most suited for a specific purpose, that will go a long way in making the end-user experience towards Debian much better.

I would love to see a forum hosted on the official site where users can post queries and help each other on Debian specific problems. If Debian has to regain the lost ground on the popularity front, then it has to take the desktop users (newbies ??) more seriously. While a system administrator is capable of taking care of problems he face with Debian himself, an ordinary user will need some directions. And Debian's capability in handling this section of users will decide how popular Debian gets in the coming future.

Having said all this, I eagerly await the final release of Debian Etch.

apt-pinning - Configuring Debian to run the latest packages

The first time I installed and tried out Debian Linux distribution, I was surprised by the different way of configuring it which included the placement of configuration files, the change in commands used and so on. Coming from a Red Hat background and tuned to the Red Hat way of doing things, I did have some learning curve to overcome.

But once I mastered how to configure things in Debian, I realised that I liked the Debian way of doing things much more than the Red Hat way. But one thing which really put me off was that Debian installed the antiquated packages of the software I use on a daily basis. And I needed something more recent. I explored how to install the cutting edge of software of my choice in Debian and I did get quite a few suggestions from various quarters including one of incorporating backports repository in the distribution.

But none told me about Apt-Pinning - the process of mixing and matching between stable, unstable and testing repositories to get a stable Debian distribution which also ran the latest version of ones software. And because I was largely unsuccessful in my endeavour of getting the latest version of software running on Debian stable, I switched to Ubuntu.

I recently came across this lucid tutorial written by John.H.Robinson called "Apt-Pinning for Beginners", which explains the process in very clear terms. If I had come across this tutorial earlier, I would still have been using Debian on my PC.

Why should someone use Debian over another distribution?

I think the reason I run Debian rather than anything else is because its as true to the Unix philosophy as it can get: each of the system components does what it should, does that as well as it can, and otherwise keeps out of your way. Nothing on the system happens without your consent. And because everything is designed with little pieces building on top of each other, it's easy to keep an overview. This directly translates into manageability and security. In other words, you control the system, and not the other way around"

.

This was the reply given by Martin.F.Krafft, the author of the best selling book "The Debian System" in an interview with Sal Cangeloso when this question was posed to him. The interview also touched on topics on various other aspects of the Debian system like the importance of Debian policy to the final product, the path the author would like to see Debian adopt in the future and many more.

The questions have been well thought out and the replies are quite insightful which makes reading the whole interview a worthwhile exercise.

A Short Apt-Get / Dpkg Tutorial For New Debian Users

This is a short tutorial (Primer) on using Apt-get and Dpkg tools to manage software packages in Debian and, Debian-based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu.

Installing linux on a Mac Mini

I have always been fascinated by the iMacs from Apple after I got to use an iMac at a friends place. But buying one was beyond my price range until Apple released the Mac Mini - widely touted as the budget Mac which could make the PC run for their money.

For people who doesn't know - Apple brings out the Mac series of machines running their own proprietary OS called OSX. This Operating system is built on a Unix base (more specifically the FreeBSD) and so can run most command line tools of Unix/Linux. Also unlike the PC which is built on Intel architecture, the Mac computers use the G5 Chipset (PowerPC Architecture). Frankly speaking, each Mac computer could be considered to be a piece of art considering the elegant look and latest technologies used in them.

Now my writing about this in the blog dedicated to linux takes significance because I have always wondered if Linux could be installed on a Mac computer. Recently, I came across this article which gives a detailed explanation on Installing Debian Linux on the Mac Mini. Those of you who are thinking of buying a Mac Mini might be interested to know that you can also dual boot between Linux and OSX in the Mac Mini just like you do in a PC.