I finally decided to upgrade my work desktop to Debian Squeeze:

Preparing for the Upgrade

I manually removed all but the official lenny repositories (and removed the Debian Volatile repository which is no longer used), and updated them to “squeeze”:

$ sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://91.121.125.139/debian/ squeeze main non-free contrib
deb-src http://91.121.125.139/debian/ squeeze main non-free contrib

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

Next, in order to minimise download time, I reviewed my installed packages:

$ sudo dpkg -l | grep "ii " | less

And I removed all the unnecessary packages. In particular I decided to remove all of KDE, as I am now using pekwm. When removing packages I found apt-get kept trying to upgrade large numbers of packages. Aptitude was much better, as instead of just trying to install a load of packages, it reported the problem (e.g. package XYZ will be broken by this change) and let me choose the solution. I just added the packages that would be broken to the list of packages to be removed.

Upgrade apt and dpkg

Then I installed apt and dpkg, to save these from having to be upgraded during the upgrade process:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install apt dpkg

Upgrade to Squeeze

Lastly, I ran the upgrade to squeeze with:

$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

During the upgrade I receive warnings about /lib/firmware/e100 missing. Mindful of the Debian’s much touted removal of non-free drivers, I did an apt-file search e100 which revealed that I needed to install the firmware-linux-nonfree package. This done, I rebooted.

First Boot

It booted fine to the command prompt, but of course without a login manager it got no further. I simply typed startx to get into pekwm and it all worked perfectly.

Installing KDE

I decided to install KDE again, although I would struggle to explain why, curiosity perhaps. I installed kde-core and it all just worked perfectly, with a neat first time wizard to handle the migration of configuration from KDE3.5 to KDE4, excellent work.

I used KDE4 for a few hours before returning to pekwm.

Conclusions

So far Squeeze has been flawless and yet another Debian dist-upgrade without a hitch. Well done Debian.

KDE looks great and seemed to work exactly as it ought. Over the few hours I encountered no problems whatsoever. But I do wish KDE would learn from some of the features of PekWM - I just love the left-mouse-click on the screen edge to move to the next window, I love the ability to group windows and I love the fact that you can resize windows to fill the available space.

I am not saying that all those features should be made the default in KDE, such matters are subjective, but they ought to at least be possible in KDE and as far as I can tell they are not. There is a screen edge option, but it works poorly, relying on you holding the mouse at the screen edge for a definable period of time.

• Virtualization With KVM On A Debian Squeeze Server

I have used KVM, but never with libvirt.  I understand that libvirt is a standard api for managing various virtualisation technologies, e.g. KVM, QEMU, Xen and others, giving you a common way of managing your guests regardless of the technology in use.

For more information please visit:

• Virtualization With KVM On A Debian Squeeze Server

I went to look for an article on fcheck, that I originally found on http://debaday.debian.net, only to find the site down, there is a related bug, but no news on where it has gone nor why.  The debaday service was fantastic for finding out about useful packages, in fact that was how I learned about fcheck.

Then I ended up at http://news.debian.net/, and what do I see but:

news.debian.net is closing. In the next days, the website will become a static copy.

Thank you for following all this 19 months!

No explanation, just that.  If it was coming back soon, one would have expected the announcement to state that, so the assumption has to be that these valuable services have both come to an end.

This makes me sad.  The answer is for the community to leap in, and I hope this time that the work can be distributed; so that it is not reliant on any one person.

I’ve just bought a new HP N36L Microserver, for £210 with £100 cashback.  It came with a 250gb SATA, so I added a second 250gb SATA; so that I could have a simple software RAID array.  I also added 2gb of Crucial RAM.

When the server arrived, I was surprised to find it had RAID built into it, but my understanding is that this is FakeRAID and thus should be avoided at all costs.  If you were particularly interested in that  option, with particular reference to Windows Home Server (yikes) then this page may be helpful.

I plugged in my wonderful IODD ISO drive and selected Debian Squeeze AMD64 netinstall, and off I went.  When it came to the partitioning, you need to carry this out manually, in the following order:

• Partition both disks as follows:
  • Create boot primary partition (about 500mb)
    • Set mount as /boot and make bootable
  • Create partition using most of the rest of the first drive (e.g. 247gb)
    • Set partition as Use as physical volume for RAID
• Configure software RAID
  • Create MD Device, RAID1, 2 devices, 0 spare devices
  • Select the RAID partition on each drive
• Create Physical Volumes for LVM
  • Create volume group
  • Create suitable volumes for your systems, e.g. swap (2 x RAM, root (10GB or so), home (to your taste), usr (2gb+), var (2gb+), tmp (1gb+).
    • it is a good idea not to use the whole space, as the whole benefit to LVM is being able to then add available space into any volume
  • I also created a large volume for /var/lib/vz/private, as this will be an openvz server.
• Partition disks
  • Set each LVM volume to use the appropriate file system type, e.g. ext3 or ext4, and set the appropriate mountpoint, e.g. home should be /home etc, swap should be allocated to swap space etc

I found this howto on LVM + RAID for debian-installer most useful but, providing you follow the logical progression, it really is not as difficult as it seems.

After the partitioning, I continued with the installation, removing all options including “Standard System” from the software profiles; so that I basically installed a base system, which is how I prefer it.

Next I installed: sudo, GNU Screen, openssh-server, vim, fcheck, locales, localepurge, apt-file,  apt-show-versions and nullmailer (ssmtp is  better if your mailserver requires secure authentication).  Doubtless you have your own favourite packages to install!

Next step will be to configure as a small openvz server, and migrate the virtual machines off my old server (which I will be commissioning as a storage server).

The mystery is that, at one of our branches, it reduces size to 0, but is never actually removed; after which time the file cannot be edited until that lock file is manually removed.

Both servers have the same davfs2.conf and I have done a diff between the two servers:

# for file in `find /usr/lib/openoffice/ -name *.xcs -type f`; \
  do echo "=== $file ==="; \
  ssh root@other-server "cat $file" | diff $file - ; \
  done

But there are no differences.  I have checked users’ davfs2.conf files, but these are all commented out entirely.

Previously I had “fixed” this problem, by setting UseDocumentOOoLockFile to false in:

/usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.2/share/registry/schema/org/openoffice/Office/Common.xcs

This doesn’t stop the lock files being created, but it does tell Openoffice not to worry about them.  Unfortunately this no longer seems to be working, and I really can’t understand why.

Currently I have “fixed” the problem by setting davfs2.conf to:

use_locks 0

This is now allowing the lock files to be removed properly.  I believe that actually this will work quite well, with the UseDocumentOOoLockFile set to true, given that 99.9% of our documents are Openoffice documents.  Always assuming I can persuade Openoffice to obey its own registry!

Apparently I am not the only one that thinks that the Debian graphics are appalling:

Debian did have a design contest of sorts, well a brief mailing list thread that had the impossible task of voting the best out of just a handful of rubbish themes.  Given the choices, personally I would have opted for the upstream themes, or just to stick with the Debian Lenny theme which was perfectly okay.

I do wonder how easy or difficult it is to submit themes - do you have to be a Debian developer?  If so, then they should really think about lowering the bar.  I’m sure that I could produce something better, although my last attempt does not appear to be getting widespread approval.

Anyhow, we don’t love Debian for how pretty is looks - we can soon change the theme if it bothers us.

Just installed Etherpad on our openvz server. Having created an openvz guest for the purpose, running Debian Squeeze, installing Etherpad proved no more difficult than adding the Etherpad repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

$ sudo su
# echo "deb http://apt.etherpad.org all ." >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# apt-get update
# apt-get install etherpad

All the requisite dependencies were brought in. Unfortunately the etherpad server did not start after installation, and I had to do the following commands:

# sed -i.orig 's/local/share/' /etc/init.d/etherpad

Then it started perfectly simply with /etc/init.d/etherpad start.

To make this happen automatically on boot:

# update-rc.d etherpad defaults

If you would prefer to use openjdk than sun-java (and you should), then google for “etherpad openjdk”. Sorry to say I was in too much of a hurry on this occasion.

References

• Etherpad
• http://sis.bthstudent.se/2011/525/how-to-install-etherpad-on-debian-lenny/

Skype is important, though, for new Linux users. It is no good telling them to use SIP, as their friends have Skype and most people do not want to make the sacrifices that some of us feel are necessary.

Feeling a little guilty, I decided to give it a go. I was expecting to download the 32-bit version of Skype, and the 32-bit libraries, but was surprised to see a 64-bit version for Ubuntu. Given that Ubuntu is based on Debian, it was worth a try:

• Download Skype for Linux

I installed it with:

$ sudo dpkg -i skype-ubuntu-intrepid_2.1.0.81-1_amd64.deb

And, erm, it seems to work. Well at least the test call worked perfectly.

So we seem to be able to tick the Skype 64-bit box as “job done”, now how about iTunes…

I know nothing about Ruby on Rails, but this is how I ended up successfully (I think!) installing it. There may be better ways.

Download and Compile Ruby

At the time of writing, the current version is 1.9.2

• http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

I tend to use checkinstall wherever possible, so that I can manage the package via apt-get and dpkg.

$ sudo apt-get install checkinstall

$ wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org//pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.2-p0.tar.gz
$ tar -xvvzf ruby-1.9.2-p0.tar.gz
$ cd ruby-1.9.2-p0

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo checkinstall

Set the version number to 1.9.2

Install Rails

$ sudo gem install rails

Install Passenger

This assumes you are using apache2.

$ sudo gem install passenger
$ sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

Please read thoroughly the output from this the last command, as it will give you the information you require for the next section.

Enable Passenger

$ cd /etc/apache2/mods-available

Create or edit the following files, using the output from passenger-install-apache2-module above.

passenger.conf

<IfModule mod_passenger.c>
    PassengerRoot /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/passenger-2.2.15
    PassengerRuby /usr/local/bin/ruby
</IfModule>

passenger.load

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/passenger-2.2.15/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so

Enable in Apache

You should now be able to enable the apache module with:

$ sudo a2enmod passenger

Update Vhosts

This will vary depending on your system, but you are aiming to have a vhost configuration similar to the following:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.yourhost.com
    DocumentRoot /somewhere/public    # <-- be sure to point to 'public'!
    RailsEnv development              # <-- change to testing/production as appropriate (see note below)
    RackEnv development               # <-- change to testing/production as appropriate (see note below)
    <Directory /somewhere/public>
       AllowOverride all              # <-- relax Apache security settings
       Options -MultiViews            # <-- MultiViews must be turned off
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

By default, passenger uses the Ruby on Rails production database, which may or may not be appropriate, depending on where you are in the development process. If you are still developing your rails app, then you may want to set in the above:

RailsEnv development
RackEnv development

In theory you only need the former, but the presence of the file config.ru in your application directory makes passenger require RackEnv instead.

Otherwise, when making changes to your database, do remember to:

# db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
# touch tmp/restart.txt

Otherwise your application will not work.

ISPConfig

If you are using ISPConfig, then I currently have this working by adding the following to the sites Apache Directives in the admin control panel:

DocumentRoot /var/www/web11/web/blog/public
<Directory /var/www/web11/web/blog/public>
    AllowOverride all
    Options -MultiViews
</Directory>

And then edit /etc/apache2/vhosts/Vhosts_ispconfig.conf and remove the old DocumentRoot line from the relevant vhost section. Unfortunately you will have to do this everytime you change your site configuration. This is very poor, there has to be a better way.

Installing JQuery

These are rather poor notes, you are probably better looking elsewhere, but the key thing is that the long and complex instructions for installing jquery that abound on the Internet should be avoided. The installation should be a mere couple of commands.

Either type:

$ gem install jquery-rails

Or as I preferred, edit your Gemfile (in the root of your rails project) and add:

gem 'jquery-rails'

My handwritten notes don’t say this, but I believe you would then need to run:

$ bundle install

And then (add “–ui” on the end of the following command to include the jquery UI):

$ rails generate jquery:install

First I removed OpenOffice:

$ sudo apt-get --purge remove ".*openoffice.*"

Then I visited the Document Foundation LibreOffice website and downloaded:

• LibO_3.3.0_beta2_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
• LibO_3.3.0_beta2_Linux_x86_langpack-deb_en-GB.tar.gz

Then, having checked that the md5sums matched, I extracted both with tar -xvvzf and changed to the DEBS directory in each and ran:

$ sudo dpkg -i *.deb

All very clumsy, but this was only my work PC, which isn’t mission critical, as I generally use NX client to log into my desktop on our LTSP Server.

So what are my first impressions? Sadly these will have to wait for another day, apart from the obvious branding change, I couldn’t see much different, but the good news is that it does all appear to be working.

I am not sure whether LibreOffice yet has the Go-OO Patches patches, which I believe were included by default in Debian and Ubuntu, but the fact that they are being combined into the core must be good news.

I am really hoping that LibreOffice improves quickly on OpenOffice, which still falls considerably short of Microsoft Office for power users. In particular Macros, Pivot Tables, Conditional Formatting, and Mailmerge all need a lot of work. Not to speak of the appalling performance, it really is a system hog. I can’t help feeling that it really needs to be re-written from scratch, but I appreciate that is unrealistic.

In the meantime I have hopes that KOffice will soon step up to the mark - KWord’s mailmerge feature is a lesson in simplicity that OpenOffice/LibreOffice would do well to learn.

Install Ruby on Rails3 on Debian Lenny

Warning

I know nothing about Ruby on Rails, but this is how I ended up successfully (I think!) installing it. There may be better ways.

Download and Compile Ruby

At the time of writing, the current version is 1.9.2

• http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

I tend to use checkinstall wherever possible, so that I can manage the package via apt-get and dpkg.

$ sudo apt-get install checkinstall

$ wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org//pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.2-p0.tar.gz
$ tar -xvvzf ruby-1.9.2-p0.tar.gz
$ cd ruby-1.9.2-p0

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo checkinstall

Set the version number to 1.9.2

Install Rails

$ sudo gem install rails

Install Passenger

N.B. This assumes you are using apache2.

$ sudo gem install passenger
$ sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

Please read thoroughly the output from this the last command, as it will give you the information you require for the next section.

Enable Passenger

$ cd /etc/apache2/mods-available

Create or edit the following files, using the output from passenger-install-apache2-module above.

passenger.conf

<IfModule mod_passenger.c>
PassengerRoot /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/passenger-2.2.15
PassengerRuby /usr/local/bin/ruby
</IfModule>

passenger.load

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/passenger-2.2.15/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so

Enable in Apache

You should now be able to enable the apache module with:

$ sudo a2enmod passenger

Update Vhosts

This will vary depending on your system, but you are aiming to have a vhost configuration similar to the following:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.yourhost.com
    DocumentRoot /somewhere/public    # <-- be sure to point to 'public'!
    RailsEnv development              # <-- change to testing/production as appropriate (see note below)
    RackEnv development               # <-- change to testing/production as appropriate (see note below)
    <Directory /somewhere/public>
        AllowOverride all             # <-- relax Apache security settings
        Options -MultiViews           # <-- MultiViews must be turned off
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

By default, passenger uses the Ruby on Rails production database, which may or may not be appropriate, depending on where you are in the development process. If you are still developing your rails app, then you may want to set in the above:

RailsEnv development
RackEnv development

In theory you only need the former, but the presence of the file config.ru in your application directory makes passenger require RackEnv instead.

Otherwise, when making changes to your database, do remember to:

# db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
# touch tmp/restart.txt

Otherwise your application will not work.

ISPConfig

If you are using ISPConfig, then I currently have this working by adding the following to the sites Apache Directives in the admin control panel:

DocumentRoot /var/www/web11/web/blog/public
<Directory /var/www/web11/web/blog/public>
    AllowOverride all
    Options -MultiViews
</Directory>

And then edit /etc/apache2/vhosts/Vhosts_ispconfig.conf and remove the old DocumentRoot line from the relevant vhost section. Unfortunately you will have to do this everytime you change your site configuration. This is very poor, there has to be a better way.

Installing JQuery

These are rather poor notes, you are probably better looking elsewhere, but the key thing is that the long and complex instructions for installing jquery that abound on the Internet should be avoided. The installation should be a mere couple of commands.

Either type:

$ gem install jquery-rails

Or as I preferred, edit your Gemfile (in the root of your rails project) and add:

gem 'jquery-rails'

My handwritten notes don’t say this, but I believe you would then need to run:

$ bundle install

And then (add --ui on the end of the following command to include the jquery UI):

$ rails generate jquery:install

After a considerable time spent googling without any success, I decided to upgrade the Kernel from 2.6.26 to the backports 2.6.32 and normal operation was restored. I mention this only in the hope that the next person who googles qemu-kvm black screen might be saved a considerable time searching for the solution!

Installing from Ubuntu onto Debian Lenny seems sub-optimal, but is quick and dirty.

Step 1 - Add sources

# deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/freenx-team/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
# deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/freenx-team/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Step 2 - Install FreeNX in Debian

# aptitude update
# aptitude install freenx

Step 3 - Connecting

To connect, you need to download the NoMachine client. If you have issues with the arrow/cursor keys, please see:

• Fix nxclient arrow keys

References

• FreeNX
• FreeNX on Debian Wiki ← Read this
• FreeNX on DebianHelp
• FreeNX on LTSP
  • FreeNX
• NoMachine

I have run through these notes again and corrected the odd mistake and they do seem to work. At least until something changes!!

I have not yet got the init.d script working, but am able to successfully start adempiere and reach the login page.

I need to review the postgresql security settings as “trust” for all is probably unsafe.

Lastly, I am an adempiere newbie, so please take everything I say with a pinch of salt.

Good luck!

Install a Debian system

Please visit Debian for guidance on how to do this. Personally I like to install an absolutely bare system as my starting point (I even uncheck the option for “standard system”).

It is possible, I believe, to do a headless (non-GUI) installation, but these instructions do require a desktop environment, as some of the setup screens require a GUI.

For example to install a minimal KDE on a Debian base system:

# apt-get install kdm kde-core

Install tofrodos

Required for the database migration.

# apt-get install tofrodos

Install Postgresql > 8.2

Fortunately Debian includes version 8.3, so a simple apt-get should do the trick:

# apt-get install postgresql postgresql-doc oidentd

And a ton of dependencies will also be installed.

Once installed, you should have a functional postgresql database installed and running. Debian places the database in /var/lib/postgresql/version the default database is named main and is located in /var/lib/postgresql/version/main. We assume in this guide that Adempiere’s database will be created in the default cluster.

Install Java

sun-java6 is the version to install, unless you are using the ajax interface in which case you can even use openjdk. To do add contrib non-free to /etc/apt/sources.list repositories.

# apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-fonts sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin

Configure postgresql for java

Now we must add the JAVA_HOME variable to the /etc/postgresql/8.3/main/environment so postgresql can find the java virtual machine:

JAVA_HOME = '/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun'

Authorise users for postgres

Now we must enable users to access the database as the postgres user, which is the system user of the database and will be used by the RUN_ImportAdempiere.sh script to import the database data.

Add the following lines to /etc/postgresql/8.3/main/pg_hba.conf:

You may wish to change the IP address to the external IP

# Database administrative login by UNIX sockets
#local   all         postgres                          ident sameuser

# TYPE  DATABASE    USER        CIDR-ADDRESS          METHOD

# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local   all         all                                 trust

# IPv4 local connections for user postgres:
host    all         postgres       127.0.0.1/32         trust
# IPv4 local connections for user adempiere:
host    all         all            127.0.0.1/32         trust
# IPv6 local connections:
host    all         all            ::1/128              trust

trust or md5 - trust is probably wrong

Configure postgresql listen address

Running the database configured in localhost isn’t probably what you want, as all the clients will need access to this database and the address you tell the script the database runs from will be remembered in the future (but it can be altered). So you should probably put you server external IP address (the address of the eth0 interface i.e.) instead of the 127.0.0.1 address of the previous line.

If this is a test server and you will only be accessing it locally, then leaving it as 127.0.0.1 is fine.

Restart Postgresql

We must now restart the postgresql server to active the changes in the configuration files:

# /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 restart

Install Subversion

# apt-get install subversion

Download Adempiere from SVN Head

This could take a very long time, depending on your Internet bandwidth

$ svn co https://adempiere.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/adempiere/trunk */svnworkdir/adempiere

Build Adempiere

Open a terminal window.

$ export JAVA_HOME='/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun'
$ cd */svnworkdir/adempiere/utils_dev
$ ./RUN_build.sh

Install Adempiere

# unzip */svnworkdir/adempiere/install/build/Adempiere_354a.zip -d /opt

Now the extracted folder /opt/Adempiere exists in /opt:

$ cd /opt
$ sudo mv Adempiere adempiere-3.54a
$ sudo ln -sf adempiere-3.54a adempiere

Now it looks like this:

$ ls -l /opt
$ total 4
$ lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   15 Oct 18 19:22 adempiere -> adempiere-3.54a
$ drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 Oct 18 19:11 adempiere-3.54a

Create the database

Switch to the postgres user:

debian:/opt$ sudo su - postgres
postgres@debian:*$ export ADEMPIERE_HOME="/opt/adempiere"
postgres@debian:*$ /usr/bin/createdb adempiere
postgres@debian:*$ /usr/bin/createuser adempiere
Shall the new role be a superuser? (y/n) y

Set database password

postgres@debian:*$ echo "ALTER USER adempiere WITH PASSWORD 'your-chosen-password';" | psql
ALTER ROLE

Check database

postgres@debian:*$ echo "select * from pg_user; select * from pg_roles;" | psql
  usename  | usesysid | usecreatedb | usesuper | usecatupd |  passwd  | valuntil | useconfig
-----------+----------+-------------+----------+-----------+----------+----------+-----------
 postgres  |       10 | t           | t        | t         | ******** |          |
 adempiere |    16385 | t           | t        | t         | ******** |          |
(2 rows)

  rolname  | rolsuper | rolinherit | rolcreaterole | rolcreatedb | rolcatupdate | rolcanlogin | rolconnlimit | rolpassword | rolvaliduntil | rolconfig |  oid
-----------+----------+------------+---------------+-------------+--------------+-------------+--------------+-------------+---------------+-----------+-------
 postgres  | t        | t          | t             | t           | t            | t           |           -1 | ********    |               |           |    10
 adempiere | t        | t          | t             | t           | t            | t           |           -1 | ********    |               |           | 16385
(2 rows)
postgres@debian:*$ exit

Load database

$ export ADEMPIERE_HOME="/opt/adempiere"
$ psql -h localhost -d adempiere -U adempiere < $ADEMPIERE_HOME/data/Adempiere_pg.dmp

Set-up Adempiere

$ export ADEMPIERE_HOME="/opt/adempiere"
$ cd $ADEMPIERE_HOME
$ sudo chmod +x *.sh
$ export JAVA_HOME='/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun'
$ sudo ./RUN_setup.sh

Please note that this section must be able to write to the display, so either the desktop session needs to be root, or use sudo. If you get an error about connecting to DISPLAY then try using sudo.

The following screen should now be displayed. Change the database name to adempiere, database type to postgresql, set your mailserver settings. You may need to set the database server to localhost, if the hostname does not work.

Migrate to Head

$ cd */svnworkdir/adempiere/migration
$ chmod +x *.sh
$ ./migrate_postgresql.sh 354a-trunk commit | psql -U adempiere -d adempiere > 354a-trunk.lst
NOTICE:  ALTER TABLE / ADD PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index "ad_document_action_access_key" for table "ad_document_action_access"
NOTICE:  ALTER TABLE / ADD PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index "r_contactinterest_key" for table "r_contactinterest"
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE / PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index "c_ordersource_pkey" for table "c_ordersource"
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE / UNIQUE will create implicit index "c_ordersource_ad_client_id_key" for table "c_ordersource"
WARNING:  there is no transaction in progress

Start Server

$ cd $ADEMPIERE_HOME/utils
$ sudo nohup ./RUN_Server2.sh &
$ sudo tail -f nohup.out

The output of nohub.out will indicate that the server started in only a few seconds, this is only the JBoss server, the site will not be accessible for several minutes.

Client Login

On the server, open a browser and go to: http://hostname.yourdomain/admin/ and follow the Adempiere ZK Webui

http://localhost/admin/ will not work.

For guidance visit http://www.adempiere.com/index.php/InstallClient.

Optional: Install init.d script

Not essential for a test server (and I have not yet got this working, I suspect because I am not using user = adempiere.

# ./RUN_Server2Stop.sh
# sudo cp unix/adempiere_Debian.sh /etc/init.d/adempiere
# /etc/init.d/adempiere start 

Read the Functional User Manual

• http://www.adempiere.com/index.php/Functional_User_Manual

References

• http://www.adempiere.com/index.php/Debian_and_PostgreSQL_Install
• http://www.adempiere.com/index.php/Adempiere/Libero_Linux_install_from_subversion_head
• http://www.adempiere.com/index.php/Manual_Installation_From_Trunk
• http://www.adempiere.com/index.php/ADempiere_Install_Linux&PostgreSQL
• http://www.adempiere.com/index.php/ADempiere_Install#JDBC_Connection_Error
  • http://www.adempiere.com/index.php/CreateDatabase
  • http://www.adempiere.com/index.php/InstallComplete
• http://www.adempiere.com/index.php/ADempiere_with_Postgresql_on_Ubuntu_9.04_Jaunty

Our Debian Lenny LTSP5 Install has hit a road block: currently the site are using a Citrix server at another location over a 256k connection to pick up their emails. I really didn’t feel that I could ask them all to collect their emails over a 256k connection, so what are the alternatives?

Well I could upgrade the bandwidth by creating an inter-site VPN, but that will still only provide perhaps 600k (that being the upload bandwidth of the host site). The solution is to move the mailserver onto the ‘net, so that they can benefit from a full 8mb ADSL download.

After seeking advice, I choose Bytemark as a trusted Debian VPS supplier, a day later I had my login to my new virtual server. But what to install? Advice pointed me in the direction of Postfix and Dovecot, which were not much more than an apt-get install:

• Debian Admin Mailserver

Great, a working mailserver, but the problem with the installation was that the users were local system accounts, which made it more cumbersome to administer. The best solution seemed to be LDAP, and I duly followed the guide Debuntu to install, and I managed to integrate LDAP with PAM thus giving me the ability to allow users to login with an LDAP account; but in a nutshell that was exactly what was wrong with this solution - the users had to login to the server, before their system account would be created, and if that was the case I might as well have stuck with local system accounts in the first place. What I needed was a true virtual mail host. To that end, I was pointed in the direction of a Ubuntu howto on Howtoforge.

Okay but this was for Ubuntu not Debian and for one reason and another I simply could not get it working. After starting from scratch a couple of times, but ending up in the same place, I found that I had to combine the howto with this one for 8.10.

Even then it took a fair amount of battling to get it working on Debian Lenny. The key to most of my problems was in reading the comments on every page, as these include invaluable corrections and suggestions.

So after a week of pain, I now have a working virtual mail host, now I just need to set-up the domains, users and mailgroups.

1. Check for existing infection
2. Protect against future infection

If you are unsure what a Rootkit is, then please read the Rootkit Wikipedia page before continuing.

Warning

This is how I checked and protected against rootkits and is not how I would recommend that anyone else should do so.

Step 1: rkhunter

I suggest you visit the rkhunter website at: http://rkhunter.sourceforge.net/

$ sudo apt-get install rkhunter
$ sudo rkhunter --upgrade
$ sudo rkhunter --checkall --createlogfile

Read the output and take corrective action as required.

Step 2: chkrootkit

I suggest you visit the chkrootkit website at:

• http://www.chkrootkit.org

In particular, the FAQS would suggest that you shouldn’t trust the chkrootkit to use the commands on your system, bearing in mind that you suspect that they might be compromised; I chose not to take this additional precaution - you should make your decision based on the exposure of your server to the Internet and your assessment of the likelihood of your having a rootkit.

$ sudo apt-get install chkrootkit
$ sudo chkrootkit

Step 4: tripwire

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/tripwire/

Tripwire creates a database of your system files and then tracks any changes to them.

$ sudo apt-get install tripwire

Follow all the prompts, which will require you to create a Site Key Pass-phrase and a Local key Pass-phrase. Next we need to create the database:

$ sudo tripwire --init
Wrote database file: /var/lib/tripwire/hostname.domain.com.twd
The database was successfully generated.

Next we run a first check:

$ sudo tripwire --check

This will doubtless come back with far more information than you really want. For example I received loads of lines about “/proc/PIDNO/”.

References

• Implementing Tripwire
• Howto Linux - Tripwire

A better way

• Combining AIDE and Tripwire

KeePassX cannot be installed on Debian Etch, because of some dependency issues:

Version: 0.3.1-1
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7-1), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1-21), libqt4-core (>= 4.3.4), libqt4-gui (>= 4.3.4), libstdc++6 (>= 4.2.1-4), libx11-6, libxtst6

The Solution

The solution is to install from source. These instructions were borrowed from the following comment (thank you “John”):

• http://www.keepassx.org/howto/setup/inst_source_tar#comment-15355

Install recent version of qt4

I installed from lenny, which is not ideal. The above instructions do not say to do this, but I had already done it to resolve stability problems (see Install italc notes).

$ sudo apt-get install qt4-dev qt4-dev-tools qt4-designer

Install Source Repositories

You may need to add the lenny source repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib

Download Source

$ cd
$ mkdir keepassx
$ cd keepassx
$ apt-get source keepassx

Make

$ cd keepass*
$ qmake-qt4
Project MESSAGE: See 'INSTALL' for configuration options.
Project MESSAGE: Install Prefix: /usr
Project MESSAGE: *** Makefile successfully generated.
Project MESSAGE: *** Start make now.
$ make

If you downloaded the source from KeePassX itself, then you will probably need to cd into the src directory, delete the Makefile that was created and run qmake-qt4 again from there (ie: qmake-qt4; cd src; rm Makefile ; qmake-qt4 ; cd ..

Errors

If the above still gives an error about libXtst (and mind didn’t), you can either fix the source code, or simply:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libXtst.so.6 /usr/lib/libXtst.so
$ make

This section has not been tested by the author

Install

$ sudo make install

Test

You should see it installed under your Utilities menu, but you may need to log off/on for this to appear. Alternatively I usually find editing the menu and resaving has the same effect.

References

• KeePassX
  • Forum post detailing install method

You should be able to install from Backports:

$ apt-get -t "etch-backports" install flashplugin-nonfree

If this fails, then leave it installed and manually download from Adobe:

• http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&P2_Platform=Linux

Then extract contents and copy libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/. The failed install should have created all the necessary symlinks.

Just do an sudo apt-get jigdo-file and read the following:

• Debian Jigdo

Where to get downloads

Download the appropriate .jigdo and .template file into a suitable directory on your system.

• Jigdo Releases

Reducing your download

Pretty much the raison-d’etre of Jigdo is the ability to re-use an existing CD to reduce the number of files to be downloaded. But if you’re anything like me it’s much easier to use an ISO:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/cdrom
$ sudo mount -o loop debian-LennyBeta2-i386-kde-CD-1.iso /mnt/cdrom

Now just enter /mnt/cdrom as the path to the CD to use

References

• Debian Jigdo
• How to use Jigdo Lite

Sound is one of those things in Linux which either works out-of-the-box, or drives you berserk. The following instructions did not solve my problems, but I leave them here for future reference.

The gospel for sound according to Debian:

• http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/sound.htm

Step 1: Make sure you have the sound system fully installed

# apt-get install alsa-base alsa-oss alsa-source alsa-utils
# apt-get install alsamixergui alsaplayer alsaplayer-common alsaplayer-gtk alsaplayer-jack
# apt-get install alsaplayer-oss snd-gtk-alsa vlc-plugin-alsa alsaplayer-jack jack jackd

Step 2: Determine your sound card

# lspci -v | grep -A 6 Audio
00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 Azalia
        Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Unknown device 7297
        Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 64, IRQ 22
        Memory at fe020000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

Step 3: Run module-assistant

# apt-get install module-assistant
# module-assistant

If this fails stating cannot find config.h, then:

# cd /usr/src/linux-headers/linux-headers-2.6.21-2-k7/include/linux
# ln -s autoconf.h config.h

Next run:

# alsaconf

The solution to the problem is often as simple as adding a line at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base along the lines of:

$ options snd-hda-intel model=xyz

To determine sound chip model:

# aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: ALC861VD Analog [ALC861VD Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

# cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [SB             ]: HDA-Intel - HDA ATI SB
                    HDA ATI SB at 0xfe020000 irq 22

Then gunzip /usr/share/doc/alsa-base/driver/ALSA-Configuration.txt.gz. Open with nano and search for your soundcard chip as shown above.

options snd-hda-intel model=3stack works for many motherboard integrated chips with shared surrounds. Sometimes it is also possible to use the more generic options snd-hda-intel model=ref, which the hda driver uses to load manufacturer specfic presets (SigmaTel, Realtek, etc.). The full list is available in ALSA-Configuration.txt in the driver tarball under alsa-kernel/Documentation/.

Restart sound system

# cd /etc/init.d
# then ./alsasound restart

Play Test Sound

# locate *.wav
/usr/share/sounds/KDE_Beep_RingRing.wav
/usr/share/sounds/KDE_Beep_ShortBeep.wav

# aplay /usr/share/sounds/KDE_Beep_RingRing.wav
Playing WAVE '/usr/share/sounds/KDE_Beep_RingRing.wav' : Unsigned 8 bit, Rate 22254 Hz, Mono

External references

• http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/sound.htm
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449
• http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/6978
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=314383
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3267595
• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/Lenovo3000C200_89224MG
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.20/+bug/107821
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.17/+bug/85869

Remove CDROM installation

Firstly comment out the CDROM installation from /etc/apt/sources.list. This seems to be done automatically from Lenny.

Next change any references to “stable” are replaced with the name of the current stable release, currently “Lenny”. If we don’t do this, then when the next release “Squeeze” goes “stable”, suddenly your system will be upgraded next time you do an apt-get upgrade.

$ apt-get update

Proxy Server

If it didn’t work, then you may need to configure apt with your proxy server.

Option 1 - Edit apt.conf

The usual method is to add the following line to /etc/apt/apt.conf:

$ nano /etc/apt/apt.conf
Apt.conf:
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://admin:password@proxy:port/"

Obviously it is not generally a good idea to have a username and password in plain text form in this way.

Option 2 - Environment Variable

It is also possible to add the proxy server to the environment variables:

$ export http_proxy="http://admin:password@proxy:port/"
$ export ftp_proxy="http://admin:password@proxy:port/"

Obviously this will be lost when you close the current console. Again it is not a good idea to enter usernames and passwords as command line arguments, so you should clear your bash_history.

Option 3 - Update Proxy Server

Ideally you need to change your proxy server to allow traffic without the need to specify a username and password.

Add Backports

In many cases you will require newer packages than are afforded by stable alone, and for that purpose you need Debian Backports. To add backports, visit:

• http://www.backports.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=instructions

And follow the instructions on that page to add the repository to your sources, and add the security keyring.

Pinning

If you have multiple sources in your sources.list, then in general the latest package will be selected by default. You can change this behaviour by creating a file /etc/apt/preferences. This is called “pinning”.

Save as /etc/apt/preferences…

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=stable
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: origin www.backports.org
Pin-Priority: 600

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing
Pin-Priority: 400

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 300

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -1

For a fuller description of pinning see the following page:

• http://wiki.debian.org/AptPinning

Saving and restoring package selections

To save your package selections:

$ dpkg --get-selections >filename

Remember to save your sources.list and preferences.

To restore your package selections:

$ dpkg --set-selections < filename
$ apt-get upgrade-dselect

If you install kde from a Debian base install, then it is likely that you do not have the attractive new Debian theming for the boot loader and KDM login. The key to this is the installation of desktop-base, but you do need a few other packages, which don’t currently get treated as dependencies.

Install packages

$ sudo aptitude install desktop-base ksplash-engine-moodin kdmtheme splashy splashy-themes

Add splashy to grub

Look for the kopt line in /boot/grub/menu.lst and add quiet splash vga=791:

N.B. vga=791 is suitable for 1024x768, if your monitor resolution is below this, then you should change this number by reference to the table below.

/boot/grub/menu.lst:
# kopt=root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet splash vga=791

N.B. Do not uncomment this line, this line is not used itself, but is used by update-grub to automatically populate the actual kernel lines further down

Then update-grub to apply this change to your kernels:

$ sudo update-grub

Splashy VGA settings table

The 65000 colour line is the one recommended for this purpose, so you’ll probably want 785 or 788 if you have a low resolution netbook. I don’t believe there is any point in increasing to 794, as I believe the new Debian themes have been designed for 1024x768 (I have not checked that fact).

Configure KDM themes

Under KDE Control Panel, System Administration, KDM Theme Manager, enter Administrator Mode and enable KDM Themes and select “More Blue Orbit”. It will warn you that your changes will be overwritten by /etc/default/kdm.d/, but this step still seems to be required.

Remove Login Manager Background

Under KDE Control Panel, System Administration, Login Manager, select the Background tab and disable the background. This background displays after your new KDM Theme and before your actual desktop, which is definitely one background too many!

After setting up my Eee PC on Debian and following the tips (see Lenny on Speed to maximise performance, I have found the same tips quite effective on other Debian systems. The key changes are as follows:

Add a ramdisk file system for /tmp

/etc/fstab:
tmpfs      /tmp     tmpfs      defaults     0    0

Add a ramdisk file system for /var/run and /var/lock

/etc/default/rcS:
RAMRUN=yes
RAMLOCK=yes

Add relatime option to hard disk file systems

Lastly, in /etc/fstab, add the following option to each hard disk based filesystem “relatime”. This is really important, as this stops the system from recording when a file was last read; without this option set, every time a file is read on your system, it is written to with the date last read - effectively changing a read into a read/write and thus slowing down the system. Adding the relatime option cuts this nonsense out and makes a surprising performance improvement.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>                   <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults                      0       0
/dev/sda1       /               ext3    errors=remount-ro,relatime    0       1
/dev/sda6       /home           ext3    defaults,relatime             0       2
/dev/sda5       none            swap    sw                            0       0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto               0       0
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto                0       0
tmpfs           /tmp            tmpfs   defaults                      0       0

Using a faster system shell

By default, the standard system shell /bin/sh is provided by bash. Bash is very slow at start-up, because it does quite a lot of things before it starts to process shell statements. During boot-up, a lot of shell scripts are executed, and switching to a quicker shell has a noticeable impact. To switch /bin/sh to point at dash, install the package and use dpkg-reconfigure to enable it as the default system shell.

$ aptitude install dash
$ dpkg-reconfigure dash

Thanks to Debian Wiki for these tips.

Okay, to be quite honest my Debian Lenny 64-bit Toshiba Satellite Pro A300 laptop is really fast. Certainly the fastest machine that I’ve ever used, problem is that makes you hungry for more speed. So far I have followed several of the suggestions included in this Debian EeePC page, for example adding the relatime option to the disks.

I’ve also switched on boot concurrency and installed preload, as discussed in this forum thread. Early days, but it does feel very snappy indeed. The bootup doesn’t seem much faster, although apparently preload can slow things up a tad, but it is still around one minute, including about 5 seconds for the bios and another 15 seconds for typing in the kdm and kwalletmanager passwords.

I’ve also moved the unmountnfs.sh from the shutdown scripts to position 14, to enable this to be completed before closing the network services. This has dramatically improved the shutdown performance.

Follow these links for more information:

• Debian EeePC Tips & Tricks
• Debian Forum Topic

Lastly, exim4 is installed by default, but you really don’t need this if, like me, you send/receive mail through a dedicated server, this shaves a second or two from the boot process.

I guess the logical replacement distro to install on an eepc, is the Ubuntu EeePC remix. To be quite honest I think you have to have a pretty compelling reason to go anywhere else. My compelling reasons were that I just wanted a standard distro, that I know well and can look after without having to learn new skills; as a KDE user I ideally wanted access to KDE apps. It really was always going to be Debian Lenny EeePC.

The installation instructions were an absolute doddle, which really don’t require any help from me. I installed KDE, expecting it to be a bit sluggish, but the great surprise is that it is really fast.

All in all a really good experience and it really is lovely to be typing this on my Debian Lenny EeePC.

Thank you Debian.

When my old Dell laptop died, I naturally fell back to using my EeePC. Now I’ve been using my EeePC for about six months now, and a very happy user I have been. When I first bought it, I visited eeeuser.com to enable me to add icons to the easy mode interface, so that I could add openvpn and NoMachine NX for connecting to our LTSP server. Once done I had an ideal machine for taking notes and doing occasional server admin from the shell, and even connect to our LTSP server via VPN.

So now my old Dell laptop has died, and without warning my eeepc has been promoted to primary laptop. So of course I wanted to bring it all up-to-date, I went into the upgrade option and saw that there were several upgrades waiting, which I duly installed. This whole process felt scarily reminiscent of Windows Update… Sure enough my custom icons had all disappeared, but fortunately I had anticipated this and had taken a backup of the simpleui.rc. But the problem went deeper than that, I found that Xandros had changed the whole file structure, and even when I found the new locations for the simpleue.rc file, my custom icons were simply ignored.

Some Googling “eeepc lost icons” found that I was not alone, but there was seemingly no fix for the problem (I think solutions have since been discovered). In any case, I was by now feeling pretty fed up with such a non-standard system, so decided to leave Xandros and go to a standard Debian distro… more on this in due course.

The battery on my ageing Dell Inspiron 8200 had to be replaced recently, then the charger, and then (perhaps damage from cheap charger/battery?) the laptop died completely with amperage warnings about a month later.

So I researched a replacement laptop, and ordered a Toshiba Satellite Pro A300, with 3gb RAM and 250gb hard drive. I ordered with downgrade media to XP Pro. Yes, anyone who has read my previous postings will appreciate just how appallingly hypocritical that is; but given that I will need XP to run under VirtualBox, and given that you don’t seem to save any money by not having it, it made sense (even if it irks to be constantly adding to MS profits).

Tempted though I was to install Kubuntu 8.10 (my old laptop ran 8.04), I decided that the sensible thing to do (given KDE version) was to install Debian Lenny. Obviously I had chosen a laptop which should be readily Linux compatible, so I did expect an easy time, and so it proved. I decided to install the 64-bit version.

The installer picked up our DHCP server without a fuss, and prompted me to insert the non-free driver for the Intel wireless into a USB stick, which I did and it picked up without a fuss. I asked the guided partitioner to give me a separate home, but apart from those two interactions, I just accepted the default for everything else.

I booted into Debian, and noticed that they have prettied kdm in the past few weeks, and even given kwin a new default wallpaper. OpenOffice 2.4 and Iceweasel were already installed, so there really wasn’t much else to do.

The good news is that, thus far at least, all the packages that I have wanted have been available (remember this is 64-bit). As far as I know (I’m new to 64-bit) I have a pure 64-bit system. It all seems very snappy, apart from OpenOffice, which takes a second or two to load.

The astonishing thing, and something that I have never seen mentioned in any Linux vs Windows review, is how quick it is to go from zero to actually having a fully productive machine. Probably close to one hour.

There is one negative, which is that for some reason Debian Lenny 32-bit and 64-bit have a mismatch in versions between virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-modules. Such problems are only to be expected (Lenny hasn’t been officially released yet) and I have checked that there is a bug report logged. To fix the problem in the meantime:

$ sudo aptitude remove virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.26-1-amd64
$ sudo rmmod vboxdrv
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential module-assistant
$ sudo aptitude install virtualbox-ose-source
$ sudo module-assistant auto-install virtualbox-ose
$ sudo dpkg -l virtualbox*  (check all are at same version)
$ sudo modprobe vboxdrv

Some weeks ago the hard drive on my work PC failed, with a temperature error on the hard drive. I swapped the drive out but then had to decide which distro to install. I had started my Linux life with Kubuntu, experimented with Debian Sid + Experimental, before returning to Kubuntu. Given Debian Lenny’s imminent release, the logical progression was to try that.

I downloaded the ISO using Jigdo (see How to Download Debian with Jigdo) and ran the installer. It really was simplicity itself and, except for the lack of a live CD, the installation was at least as simple and maybe simpler than Kubuntu. In particular I love the fact that the partitioner gives you intelligent options, rather than the Kubuntu installer’s all-or-nothing approach.

Having installed Debian Lenny, I was struck by just how like Kubuntu it is, hardly surprising given the Debian parentage of Kubuntu. What was surprising though, was just how easy everything was - I simply added non-free and contrib to the repositories, installed Java, Flash, the Win32 Codecs, and the MS Fonts. To improve its looks I simply did:

$ sudo apt-get install kwin-style-crystal kde-icons-nuvola

And then I activated Crystal style and the Nuvola icons in the KDE Control Panel. The Crystal style takes a little bit of tweaking to make it look like Kubuntu (if that’s what you like). To complete the effect I also installed Compiz, and Openbox, so that I have a choice of three Windows Managers - Slow, Medium and Fast!

It’s been bothering me for some time that I am using Kubuntu instead of Debian on my work desktop PC. Yesterday I had a drive failure necessitating a reinstall; what better excuse could there be? Having decided to change to Debian, I decided to install Sid, and then I decided that, as KDE 4.1 is now out, why not go the whole hog.

The experience was pretty positive, really the only problem was that I needed to tweak the xorg.conf in order to get my keyboard and mouse working, other than that it was a pretty straightforward install.

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier   "Default Layout"
    Screen       "Default Screen"
    Inputdevice  "Generic Keyboard"
    Inputdevice  "Configured Mouse"
EndSection

Installing VirtualBox was not such fun, but the following link sorted me out:

• Virtualbox OSE Debian Install

So far I have installed Iceweasel3, OpenOffice3, NoMachine NX Client and VirtualBox, and it’s running really nicely. I have activated the KDE4 compositing effects, which seem very slow, so hopefully some room for improvement there in subsequent releases.

So would I recommend Debian Sid KDE4.1 over Kubuntu? Well I think that’s an unfair comparison, as I’ve installed a bleeding edge solution, but all-in-all it really wasn’t a scary installation at all.

Well done to the Debian team.