Switching Linux's Again: Ubuntu -> Debian

Just switched my company laptop from Ubuntu to Debian. I switch Linux’s a lot. Right now I’m doing it cause I ran into some nasty bug’s on Ubuntu. I’m sure I will be installing Ubuntu on lots of machines soon anyway, especially in April.

My work laptop's desktop as of 02-22-2009The first bug came when I first installed Intrepid. I ran into the bug where the kernel fills my logs with errors from the wireless driver. Having your root partition fill up does some weird things. Around this point I installed Hardy again to get on a more stable platform. I recently tried to update to Intrepid again (this bug was solved in a recent kernel) but ran into other issues. Just small ones.

Then I read the Lenny release announcement on Valentines day, so that set this in motion. I can’t read release notes without wanting to install something.

My work laptop is a Lenovo (IBM) Thinkpad X61s. I love this machine for work and the install went smoothly. I havn’t had trouble with installing Linux in a long time. I did hit this bug with ncmpc, but I normally disable ipv6 anyway. A quick edit of /etc/modprobe.d/aliases and /etc/hosts to comment out ipv6 stuff and I’m all set. I really want to get into Debian packaging so I might use Lenny as a reason to do so. I’ve already told myself that I will stick to stable software as much as possible for work, and use my home Desktop and Laptop to experiment with different software.

Drcox Emacs 02-22-2009I’m using my compiled xmonad from my home directory at the moment (Had cabal install everything in .cabal on Ubuntu) but when I get ghc running again I will post about it.

After that I’ve installed the sid version of emacs (along with ttf-bitstream-vera, haskell-mode, ruby-elisp and emacs-goodies-el) so that I can use emacs 23 (I rely on a lot of features from 23, the least of which is nice fonts!). I’ve also installed mpd (with mpc, sonata and ncmpc, my xmonad config relies on this). My XMonad key bindings for audio keys work again (they didn’t on Intrepid, just simple windows manager keybindings that run mpc).

The one other thing I had to do to get my system back was make sure option “XkbOptions” “ctrl:nocaps” was in the keyboard driver section of the xorg.conf file. Can’t live with my Caps-Lock key not being another Left-Control!