thoth's Journal: Debian Squeeze

I decided to redo my linux notebook and install either Debian or Fedora. Both Debian and Fedora have great communities and great support, so either would be fine. My notebook previously ran Ubuntu 9, Mint, and Ubuntu 10, so I cut out the middle man (so to speak) and went with the underlying distro for Ubuntu and Mint: Debian!

I downloaded and burned the Debian Squeeze netinst CD, and started the install. It went smoothly and the only thing I did differently was to opt for LVM instead of straight partitioning - I ended up choosing LVM with a separate /home, /usr, /var, /tmp. I also picked a few software packages: file server, web server, notebook, etc. I didn't choose everything, for instance I'm not interested in DNS, mail, or print server, and didn't select SQL/database since I wasn't sure what that would install (MySql? Nah, I rather take PostgreSQL) so I'll add what I want later.

Once the install was finished, I added a few more: VirtualBox, Videolan, Chromium browser, Eclipse, and a few other misc packages.

I went to test the sound, and hear nothing. After trying the volume settings and getting nowhere, I googled for help and found a suggestion that ended up working:

alsactl init

After this, I had sound. I'm not sure if that need to be done every boot, but if so I'll figure out what script I can add it to for that to occur automatically.

While fiddling with the system I noticed that "su" worked, but "sudo" didn't. It seems Debian doesn't enable sudo usage for the account created during install. After looking at the /etc/sudoers file, I saw it is configured to allow members of the "sudo" group to use sudo. So a quick:

usermod username -aG sudo

and that was fixed (I logged out and back in so the system would pick up my new group membership).