Vanilla kernel for Debian Lenny
The default Linux kernel of Debian Lenny is of course very stable – but a little outdated. If you’re the more adventurous type (or just need support for newer devices) you might like the idea of installing a more recent vanilla kernel? Luckily, Debian makes this task quite easy and you’ll end up with real Debian kernel deb-packages! I’ll provide a small HOWTO here which you might follow and a small script which will automate everything. I gathered most of the information given here from the official Debian documentation (have a look at this and this).
Lenny: VirtualBox 1.6.6 & current kernel 2.6.29
Debian is one of the best Linux distros out there (if not the best). The latest stable version called Lenny was released about a month ago, but as always, Debian never ships the latest software or kernel versions. So I decided to install the latest vanilla kernel (2.6.29) from kernel.org (I might provide a howto for this task later… 
), but to stick with Debian’s software repositories. This work’s really great – most of the time… I ran into one problem installing Debians (rather old) VirtualBox OSE 1.6.6 though. As I don’t run Debians kernel I needed to compile a suitable kernel module for my kernel 2.6.29 using Debians module-assistant. But compiling the module bailed out with errors: ‘struct task_struct’ has no member named ‘euid’. Luckily I found a solution for VirtualBox 2.10 on VirtualBox Forums. Of course the provided patch didn’t work for VirtualBox 1.6.6 but from there on it was easy to build one. If you run into the same problem, well, this is how it worked for me:
Fedora desktop with Dust theme and Murrine svn gtk engine
Running Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop I fell in love with it’s Dust theme – not officially part of Ubuntu 8.10, but you can get it here. So I wanted to install it on my desktop machine running Fedora 10.
First problem is that Dust GTK2 theme requires a recent Murrine engine and Fedora provides version 0.53 only. As I recently got to like the fun of building RPMs I decided to try my luck – and it worked out! So, I can provide Murrine svn143 RPMs for Fedora. But starting applications from within a terminal window showed up some error messages concerning Murrine engine & Dust theme. So, I did some slight changes to Dust’s gtkrc files – et voilà, no errors anymore.
Next I needed some orange touched icons for this theme. I liked Tangerine a lot when running Debian/Ubuntu and this icon theme goes very well with Dust theme, but it showed up with Ubuntu logos… Don’t get me wrong, I like Ubuntu (and it’s logos), but not when running another distro… So, I replaced Ubuntu’s logos with Fedora’s and again tried to build RPMs. In the end I was left with a desktop like this:
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Switching from mp3 to ogg
When it comes to multimedia software most Linux distributions have one thing in common: no proprietary codecs – and this might include MP3 playback. I have no deeper insights in the license terms of the MP3 codec, but there is a whole website about it by THOMPSON, the company claiming to control MP3 licensing: mp3licensing.com. There are other proprietary codecs as well, i.e. “aac” which I think is the default file format for Apple’s iTunes and devices by Nokia and Sony. Wouldn’t it be nice to not care about this crap? The open source alternative is “ogg vorbis“, providing great quality audio files and high compression at the same time. So, how can you switch from mp3 to ogg?
If you already have a large collection of MP3 files I guess it wouldn’t make any sense converting them to OGG (though possible). Just keep them as they are. But you could start ripping your new CDs to OGG and go on with this format.
If you’re interested http://www.vorbis.com/ would be a good starting point.
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WBT-201 & Fedora 10 (building RPMs)
Of course I wanted my Wintec WBT-201 gps logging device to work with Fedora as it did with Debian/Ubuntu (see this post). And after playing around a little with the stuff, it did! So, this is what I wanted:
- gpsbabel (accessing and converting gps data)
- gtk-g-rays2 (managing the WBT-201)
- gpscorrelate (automatically adding gps data to exif tags of my pictures)
Installing and configuring Fedora 10
I still like Debian and Debian based distros like sidux or Ubuntu most, but – as always, if something works too well – I wanted something new… As I recently joined a training course at Red Hat and a new release of Fedora just hit the servers, I went for Fedora 10.
I think the main difference between Fedora and other “big” distros is the fact, that within a Fedora release, you’ll receive major version upgrades of applications and even the kernel itself. I think this is a pro, though you might argue, this might have a negative affect on a distro’s stability. So far, I couldn’t find any big issues.
As you can read in every review about Fedora, it comes strictly with open source software only. No playback of mp3 files or Nvidia drivers. It’s very easy though to add those features, if you know how. If you’re used to Fedora, you won’t find anything new here. If you’re a first time Fedora user or even new to Linux, this post might be of help. I just put together all the useful information I found on the net and I will always refer to the original text. A good starting point is “The Unofficial Fedora FAQ“.
Debian with lame, mencoder, transcode, xvid & dvd::rip
Debian has one of the largest software repositories around but also has a very strict policy (which I respect) when it comes to legal stuff concerning free software or copyrights. I guess this is the reason why some multimedia software packages are missing. If you stick with Debian you have to install them manually, or – if you want the easy way – you could of course add some third party respositories or change for example to Ubuntu which doesn’t seem to share Debian’s concerns. As I’m running sidux (which is based on Debian Sid) I wanted to go for the manual installation (I don’t like to add repositories other than Debian’s). Debian comes with an MPlayer package but it lacks menconder. If you need menconder you’ll have to install from sources. lame, transcode, xvid and dvd::rip are not part of Debian repositories at all, so we’ll have to install them from sources, too. In this HOWTO I’ll explain how this worked for me (running sidux on amd64). I guess it should be similar to Debian testing or even stable.