User talk:Rebhana

The following is a compilation of modifications I applied to my personal installation of Easy Debian and which I suggested for inclusion in the next versions of debian-m5-v3b.img.ext2 and the easy-deb-chroot package.

(This is essentially a writer's digest of my contributions to the thread Easy Debian Fremantle Beta Testing - @qole: feel free to add comments, mark as "Fixed in v3c", won't fix, or whatever, as you like; all others: discussions should continue in the above talk thread, not here, please.)

Contents

Proposed changes to easy-deb-chroot 0.9.46-1fremantle1

su -

(assumes that /etc/profile is amended as in images v3c and later)

/usr/bin/debbie: add hyphen in two lines: 

sudo /sbin/debian su - ...

Some applications do not work properly without that (zim), others fail in LXDE (gramps), and internationalization works better in debbie and /sbin/debian that way (the Maemo environment variable LANG does not include ".UTF-8").

It would however be necessary to communicate this change to users of images up to v3b, so that they insert the necessary environment variables for openoffice and GTK_MODULES into /etc/profile.

also in debchroot.desktop: 

Exec=osso-xterm "sudo debian su -"

.xbindkeysrc

  • delete spurious first lines
  • add tab and escape, too: 
"xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\t'"
  Shift+Mod5 + Right

"xvkbd -xsendevent -text '\e'"
  Shift+Mod5 + Left

The last one was suggested by debernadis to be mapped to Shift+Backspace, but that is already taken by the microB browser for "forward". The Fn+Shift-combination (Shift+Mod5) is however free. Perhaps this should be used also to replace Shift+Space and Shift+Up for full-screen toggle, since these two combinations are also already in use for N900 Shortcuts and Gestures.

Another suggestion is to include the information about F1-F12 key bindings in the "Information" window of LXDE together with the instruction to first press Fn and then rock the thumb down to Shift (that would have to be done in the image).

Proposed changes to image debian-m5-v3b.img.ext2

UPDATE: All the issues addressed below are fixed in the new image (v3d). If you don't want to re-install, you can find here what's required to fixing a v3b-installation yourself.

Better internationalizability

  • change /usr/bin/xephwm5 such that:

zenity line now has --title Information clause to force dialog title to not change per locale (safer: covers all locales)

original suggestion: 

export TWOWIN=`wmctrl -l | grep -i Info | awk '{print $1}'`

This covers languages bs, ca, cs, da, de, en_CA, en_GB, es, eu, fr, gl, hr, hu, id, it, lt, lv, nb, nl, nn, pl, pt, pt_BR, ro, sk, sq, sr@Latn, sv

  • don't enable sticky keys hack by default

therefore in /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart comment out: 

#xkbset exp 60 =sticky =twokey =latchlock
#xkbset sticky -twokey latchlock

Preparation for "su -" in future /usr/bin/debbie

  • Add 
#Messy hack to make tap-and-hold work with GTK apps.
export GTK_MODULES=libgtkstylus.so
#Some OpenOffice environment variables
export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN="gtk"
export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP="gnome"
export SAL_NOOPENGL="true"
export OOO_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"
export SAL_DISABLE_SYNCHRONOUS_PRINTER_DETECTION="true"
#export SAL_DISABLE_CUPS="true"

to /etc/profile

  • Instead of "PS1='\u@\h:\w\$ '" I also suggest to put I 
  PS1='deb:\w\$ '

into /etc/profile. Remove any $PS1 setting from /root/.bashrc.

v3c: Implemented differently: get partition ID from blkid, like chroot script

In order to work also with "debian su - user" needs full path "/sbin/blkid" in /etc/profile !
$PS1 setting should (still) be removed from /root/.bashrc, so that prompt is not overwritten when one does "debian su -" (needed for having full localization also for root)

packages

evince
does not show up in LXDE menu. For that it needs "NoDisplay=false" in /usr/share/applications/evince.desktop followed by 
xdg-desktop-menu install --novendor /usr/share/applications/evince.desktop
make evince also display postscript files
I noticed that installing "gv" pulled in the required packages (psfontmgr perhaps?) to display postscript files also with evince
extra packages
are of course not needed, since everyone can install them themselves. The following packages are however small enough to consider having them added: less, rsync. Slightly bigger but extremely useful: openssh-client (wontfix), cups-client
xbindkeys
man pages are missing, but would be desirable I think. Simply re-install xbindkeys.
/var/run/onfirstchroot.rc script might have xbindkeys started by default. But that does interfere slightly with Maemo. For instance, Shift-Space under Maemo is a language toggle, which is then turned into a full screen toggle until closechroot is executed.

Sound

Not sure whether fixing sound by 

debbie 
xmms2d -o pulse

and then starting lxmusic fixes the configuration stored in /home/user or in the image. If in the latter, this could be fixed in the image.

Minor cleanups

  • /etc/hosts aliases localhost to Nokia-N800-23-14. Since the 2GB image doesn't work for Diablo (true?), this should be changed to Nokia-N900-42-11 perhaps.
  • xephwm5 produces (harmless) error "trl: command not found"
  • /var/log could be cleaned. Since no syslog is started (correct?), auth.log, bootstrap.log, daemon.log, debug, kern.log, lastlog, messages, scrollkeeper.log, syslog, user.log contain only obsolete messages from before the image was created and could be emptied (frees a few MB)
  • are the files in /root used at all (another MB)
  • /etc contains a number of files ending with "." or ".MonSep8"
  • /etc/passwd contains (encrypted) root and user passwords
  • /var/backups/ could be emptied
  • /etc/mtab fixed to make "df -h" work (thanks hstende)
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