Nicer fonts in Crunchbang

I went ahead and installed Crunchbang on my old Compaq Presario 900. All went well, but I was slightly disappointed with the way fonts are displayed. I came across a post on the Crunchbang forum which describes how to enable subpixel smoothing. One of the .fonts.conf files posted worked for me, as you can see in the following screen shots.Using gnema's configuration file (the third of three suggestions), fonts definitely look smoother and less bitty.

Live USB boot from floppy disk on old computer

I have access to my old Compaq Presario again, and tried booting it from my Crunchbang Live USB. To my disappointment, the BIOS was too old to allow a USB boot. However, I was delighted to find that there is a way round this- by booting from the floppy drive.

There are a couple of good guides I came across to getting round the BIOS restriction (How-to Geek and Instructables), but they focus on using a CD (my CD drive is kaput), and the guide that does mention floppies tells you how to write one in Windows, so here's a version for Linux.

1) Download Plop Boot Manager
2) Extract the files and dd the floppy image (plpbt.img) to a floppy disk using this command (change the floppy name if necessary):

dd if=plpbt.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 conv=sync ; sync

 (From debian.org.)

Boot from the floppy with the USB inserted and you'll get an option screen which includes a USB boot.

I found that my keyboard didn't work in the Crunchbang option screen. The default option was a Live boot, and the keyboard worked once the OS had booted, but it doesn't look as if installation is going to be possible without a work-around.

Update: I tried the Live session again and realised that I'd hit the enter key, and Crunchbang was just taking a long time to load because it was running from a USB 1.0 socket: for about a minute or so, it looks like the menu is frozen.

NB: Running a Live OS from a USB 1.0 socket is s..l..o..w.

debian-multimedia.org name change

debian-multimedia.org has become deb-multimedia.org, requiring repository sources to be updated to the new name.
There is also an update for the multimedia keyring. I noticed some strange behaviour with this and couldn't work out what was going on until I happened to look at the debian-multimedia.org page. I hadn't updated the repository sources so the keyring update was marked auto-removable.

Gnome 3.4 arrives in Debian Testing

Gnome has been updated to 3.4 in Debian Testing. When I tried out Gnome 3.4 from a Live USB, I was most impressed by some of the changes in Gnome applications, but Empathy and Epiphany are still at version 3.2. The only new feature of Gnome 3.4 I have noticed so far is the new wallpaper which changes with the time of day. Time to check out the release notes again and look for new features and improvements.

Microsoft picks Linux for secure Skype servers

Skype "Supernodes" will be run with Linux boxes, says Ars Technica (via Linux Today). Interesting to see which OS MS considers the most secure.

Firefox current release on Debian Wheezy.

As described in my previous post, Iceweasel in Debian Testing is tracking the Mozilla Firefox Extended Support Release. As I'm interested in the "latest features, performance enhancements and technologies" in my browsing experience, and not in long term support, I decided to try the release versions of Firefox and Thunderbird on my Debian Testing installation.

Installing Firefox and Thunderbird only involves downloading the latest version, unpacking the folder and running the program. There is a question about where to put the folder: some recommend /opt, others /home: I'm going with the DeviceGuru guide which has served me well and uses usr/lib. Using /opt or usr/lib will necessitate running the programs as root in order to update, whereas updates to /home should be automatic, although there is the hypothetical risk of malware being able to infect program files in /home. (Create a simlink as described in the guide so Firefox can use existing browser plug-ins.)

To create menu items, create .desktop files in /usr/share/applications/ as described on the Debian forum, changing file locations if necessary. For example, here are my modified Firefox and Thunderbird .desktop files which conforms with the guide linked to above:

[Desktop Entry] 

Encoding=UTF-8 

Name=Mozilla Firefox 

Comment=Browse the World Wide Web 

Type=Application 

Terminal=false 

Exec=/usr/bin/firefox %U 

Icon=/usr/lib/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png StartupNotify=true Categories=Network;WebBrowser;

[Desktop Entry] 

Name=Thunderbird Mail 

GenericName=Mail Client Comment=Manage your email and contacts Exec=thunderbird %u 

Icon=/usr/lib/thunderbird/chrome/icons/default/default256.png Terminal=false 

Type=Application Categories=Application;Network;Email; StartupNotify=true MimeType=text/calendar;text/x-vcard;text/directory;application/mbox;message/rfc822;x-scheme-handler/mailto;

An alternative method is to use Applications>System Tools>Main Menu (also known as Alacarte). A difference with this method is that .desktop files are created in ~/.local/share/applications, and are assigned a name by that program.

To see Firefox and Thunderbird as options in System Settings>System Info>Default Applications, it's necessary to edit /.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list as described in this bug report. Here's what my edited file looks like:

[Default Applications]
x-scheme-handler/http=firefox.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=firefox.desktop
audio/x-vorbis+ogg=audacious2.desktop
application/msword=libreoffice-writer.desktop
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text=libreoffice-writer.desktop
x-scheme-handler/mailto=thunderbird.desktop

[Added Associations]
x-scheme-handler/http=firefox.desktop;
x-scheme-handler/https=firefox.desktop;
audio/x-vorbis+ogg=audacious2.desktop;
inode/directory=audacious.desktop;audacious2.desktop;
application/msword=libreoffice-writer.desktop;
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text=libreoffice-writer.desktop;
x-scheme-handler/mailto=thunderbird.desktop;

If you have used Alacarte to create menu entries, substitute the .desktop file names created by that program: for example, you may see alacarte.desktop instead of firefox.desktop.

The only problem using Firefox and Thunderbird under Gnome 3 in Debian Testing is that they do not integrate into Gnome 3's messaging system. This is a bit of a disappointment compared to Fedora where Firefox and Thunderbird do integrate nicely. I'll have to investigate how this is done and see if it is possible in Debian.

Iceweasel tracking Firefox Extended Support Release

A post on the Debian forum alerted me to the fact that Debian is tracking the Firefox Extended Support Release: my Debian Testing installation comes with Iceweasel 10.0.3esr-3. I blogged about the ESR release here. It provides security updates for longer, but feature updates less often than the normal release: Iceweasel 10 ESR has the security updates of Firefox 12, but without the new features.
Debian packages are ultimately progressing towards the Stable release, with long term support, so it obviously makes sense for Debian to track the ESR release, but ironically it means that my Testing installation uses Iceweasel 10 while my Stable installation uses Iceweasel 12 from the Debian Mozilla team.
Currently there are no obvious feature differences between Iceweasel 10 and Firefox 12, but Firefox could reach version 18 before Iceweasel sees a feature release.

(Graphic from Mozilla Firefox ESR Overview.)