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===========================
Debian Linux
===========================

See also `freebsd </software/freebsd-tricks>`_ and 
`unix </software/unix-tricks>`_ tricks.

Some gotchas from installing debian a few times:

 * To enable sshd in ubuntu install ``openssh-server``

 * Massive ``ssh`` headache issues from around 2007-2008; make sure to check on
   these.

 * ``git`` is not what you want; you want ``git-core``

 * Python transition should be better, but I couldn't find a way. 
   To get to python 2.5 on etch, do something like::

    Edit /usr/share/python/debian_defaults to this Code:

        # the default python version
        default-version = python2.5
        # all supported python versions
        supported-versions = python2.4, python2.5
        # formerly supported python versions
        old-versions = python2.3
        # unsupported versions, including older versions
        unsupported-versions = python2.3

    Then sudo pycentral updatedefault python2.4 python2.5
    And change the symlink /usr/bin/python to point to python2.5

 * Make sure to install things like bzip2, unzip, less, etc

 * ``bash`` by default takes a very long time to initialize because the 
   auto-completion scripts are loaded multiple times; disable this in
   ``~/.bashrc``? See also [bash].

 * For building stuff you want ``build-essential``

 * For the usual system man pages ("Linux Programmer's Manual"), you may need
   to install 'manpages-dev'

 * To install emacs without an X environment, use ``emacs23-nox`` (or a more
   recent version).

 * To change time zone: ``sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata``

 * Might want oss-comapt for, eg, baudline?

Debian Package Tools
------------------------------
``dkpg -S somefile`` shows what packages a given file were installed by. ``dpkg
-L somepackage`` lists all the files installed by that package. 

``apt-rdepends -r somepackage`` shows all packages depending on a given
package, recursively. You probably just want the first group, not the full
recursive tree.

To *not* install "recommended" or "suggested" packages, pass ``-R`` as an
argument to ``aptitute``. To find out *why* a package has been installed (or
guess why it might be?) use the ``aptitude why <package>`` command.

To extract the contents of a .deb file, use the ``ar`` command, then extract
data.tar.gz:

    ar vx somepackage.deb
    tar xvf data.tar.gz

Debian Packaging
-------------------

sudo aptitude install gcc-4.4-arm-linux-gnueabi

Wheezy to Jessie Migration
-----------------------------

Had trouble doing dist-upgrade. Ran `sudo apt-get install init` to fix init and
then continued with dist-upgrade.

Permissions problem with changing wifi settings ("(32) Not authorized to
control networking"). Tried:

    https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=749778`


Add a Launchpad PPA
----------------------

First, deps:

    sudo apt-get install software-properties-common python-software-properties

Then:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:some/ppa

If it's an Ubuntu-only PPA, you'll need to edit the
`/etc/apt/sources.list.d/blah.list` and substitute the best Debian alternative.
Eg, for wheezy, 'trusty' is probably the closest.