A weekend of Linux fiddling…


Written by

So this weekend I’ve been fiddling getting Linux as my main OS on my laptop again; this post is just some odds and ends I’ve done.

Conky BOFH Excuses

I wanted some BOFH style excuses being displayed on my conky, so I took an excuses list and then popped it on my webserver and it outputs a single line at random. The conky script reloads once every 6 hours.

${execi 21600 curl http://bofh.aboutcher.co.uk | fold -w35 }

 

Fix Legend of Grimrock Error

I was getting this error with Legend of Grimrock on my fresh install on debian:

GL_INVALID_ENUM 0x0500

so I took to the internet and had a search about, turns out I’m missing a dependency that the installer doesn’t check for but there was a helpful post on their forums and I installed it, if you have the same issue then install this:

apt-get install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0
yum install libtxc_dxtn

 

Debian Wheezy x64 and WINE…

So as you’ve seen my preferred distro is Debian and I have previously written a post on installing a newer version of WINE that what is in the Debian repo’s for better computability. Today I followed my own instructions and to my surprise it didn’t work, mainly because the guide was aimed at squeeze and there are some big differences in the way Debian implements multi-arch and wine depends on some 32bit libs.

So here’s my attempt at a newer guide.

  1. Install libpng12-0 and libpng12-dev
  2. Download Wine-Gecko from the Mepis Repo for Mepis 8.0
  3. Download Wine from the Mepis Repo for Mepis 8.0
  4. Install Wine-Gecko
  5. For x64 download ia32libs from Debian Repo for Squeeze
  6. Install ia32libs
  7. Install Wine

Now that should all work, Wheezy’s method of installing ia32libs it to include i386 in the architecture list in dpkg which results in better compatibility but also a larger system which isn’t always wanted.

 

Firefox and Debian

Linux Mint also provides a small repo for Debian which includes newer or non-free software that isn’t in the Debian repo. From here you can download and install a Debian version of Firefox instead of using Iceweasel which isn’t always upto date.

  1. Download firefox-l10n-en-gb (or your lanaguage).
  2. Download firefox
  3. Install firefox-l10n-en-gb (or your lanaguage).
  4. Install firefox

You should now have firefox setup correctly even in update-alternatives and gnome etc.

 

Debian and MATE Desktop

This one’s fairly simple but strangely not documented on their website. If you liked Gnome2 but not Gnome3 then presumably you don’t want to have to install all of Gnome3’s libs to run the ‘classic’ or fallback desktop. This is where MATE comes in which is a fork of the Gnome2 code with some updates and changes. To install it just do the following:

echo "deb http://packages.mate-desktop.org/repo/debian wheezy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install mate-archive-keyring
apt-get update
apt-get install mate-core mate-desktop-environment

and there you go, you should now have mate installed.

 

That’s all for now but I do have more stuff for another day.