Debian Jessie post-installation August 2015

I recently installed Debian Jessie from scratch in my laptop. Take in mind that I already had a Sid installation and I wanted its same functionality. I am going to describe here some of the post-installation tasks that I did. Some of them are much needed for me. Other ones won’t be interesting for the  most of people.

Activivities

Somehow activities in Debian Jessie’s KDE 4.14.2 did not work out of the box. I cannot live without activities ! I finally found that activities are disabled by default and that you need to install an specific package for them to be installed.

apt-get install libkactivities-bin

Multiarch support

I have an amd64 system and I need i386 support for some applications like Skype.

dpkg --add-architecture i386

apt-get update

Skype with two accounts

I happen to use Skype with two accounts at once. So I needed to recover my /usr/local/bin/skype script which has:


#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/skype &
/usr/bin/skype --dbpath=~/.SecondInstallation/ &


from my old Sid installation.

FX keys not working as a regular PC

I don’t like FX keys to work as a Mac. In my case, contrary to my old howto (Use Xorg in mac book pro (ES)), I just had to edit:

/etc/modprobe.d/function.conf

add to it:

options hid_apple fnmode=2

and run:
sudo update-initramfs -u
After that you just need to reboot your machine and FX keys worked as I expected for me.

Flash

I tried the recommended Ubuntu partner repository instructions but it used an old flash version. I just used the PepperFlashPlayer Installing Debian wiki page instructions.

Gnome Network Manager

I use gnome network manager instead of the kde one (Maybe I’m wrong on that but I think I found out that kde’s network manager package is no longer there in Jessie). I installed:

apt-get install network-manager-openvpn-gnome

and I recovered files from my old system so that old connections were alive again. I reused files from these two directories:

/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections

and

/etc/NetworkManager/VPN

.

Recover my sound settings

So I want to be able to control my actual device controls from kmix. Not the fake global volumes from pulseaudio which might hide some specific settings.

• I install: plasma-widget-veromix package to be able to control pulseaudio if needed.
• Add veromix plasmoid to my kde panels (In order to control pulseaudio from it easily)
• Thanks to : kmix does not show all channels (part 2) I just edit: /etc/environment and I add to it: KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1

Oracle Java

Yes, I need sometimes to use official Java. I just used instructions found on: HOW TO INSTALL ORACLE JAVA 8 IN DEBIAN VIA REPOSITORY [JDK8] in order to do it.

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Sonido sólo por altavoz derecho

Ayer actualicé Debian Unstable a su última versión. Sólo tuve que reinstalar el modulo de la tarjeta de red para que todo me funcionase. Tampoco fue un gran cambio. Pasé de KDE 4.6.4 a KDE 4.6.5. A mi me interesa la versión 4.7 para poder definir de forma global el sistema gráfico raster (exceptuando openoffice que lo tengo con la mejora de qt).

Al probar el audio me di cuenta de que sólo me iba el altavoz derecho del portátil o bien el izquierdo se oía muy flojo. En el control de volumen sólo puedo controlar master y no el balanceo de izquierda a derecha a la hora de reproducir.

Al final para oir bien las cosas tuve que ejecutar:

sudo alsamixer

elegir la tarjeta de sonido de intel y subir el surround a tope (configuración que tenía antes de la actualización) y ya lo oigo como normal. Aunque, la verdad, creo que el altavoz izquierdo se oye menos pero, claro, todo este tiempo no me había dado cuenta. De todas maneras se oye bien.

Creo que tengo pendiente editar algún fichero para que en los controles de volumen me aparezcan todos los volumenes (micros, auriculares, hdmi, etc.) en lugar de un solo control. Vaya de eso no tengo escrito nada. Otra vez será.

Nada más. Creo que probaré a ver si por fin puedo hibernar (y sobre todo deshibernar) el mac book pro porque eso sí sería una mejora que aportaría la actualización.