Category Archives: Debian

Debian GNU/Linux

Debian’s e17 Packages

I thought I’d start looking at using Debian’s experimental E17 packages. I commented out all other E17 repo’s from my source.list and installed the debian e17 package. It installs a minimal amount of related packages, and there doesn’t seem to be lot of e17 packages available in the experimental repo

sudo aptitude install e17
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states… Done
Reading task descriptions… Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
e17 e17-data{a} libecore-con0{a} libecore-evas0{a} libecore-fb0{a} libecore-file0{a} libecore-imf0{a} libecore-ipc0{a} libecore-job0{a} libecore-txt0{a} libecore-x0{a} libecore0{a}
libedbus0{a} libedje0{a} libeet1{a} libefreet0{a} libembryo0{a} libevas-engines{a} libevas0{a}
0 packages upgraded, 19 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 8110kB of archives. After unpacking 15.5MB will be used.

This appears to provide a good basic E17 Desktop, but provides no additional themes, and I’m not sure how many modules it includes. Here’s a screenshot:
Default Debian E17 Install

If you want to use this add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental main non-free contrib

This also includes KDE4 packages. You’ll want to be careful with this repo, that you don’t pull in and install too many (possibly breaking) packages from it.

Look for my latest posting on E17 as this information could be out-of-date:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/category/e17/

Lenovo Laptop?

I’m thinking of getting a new laptop either the Lenova ThinkPad T400 (which is a replacement for the T61), or the IdeaPad U330 to replace my aging Dell 700m

The big thing for me is do they work with Linux (for me specifically Debian or Ubuntu).

For anyone interested in either laptop, looks like the the U330 works (near) flawlessly with Ubuntu. See this posting on this thread for an enthusiastic comment:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5741753&postcount=5

And with the T400 you’ll have some work to get everything working smoothy. Such as the dual-graphics cards which is how Lenovo get’s up to 10 hours of battery life from the T400.

However, if you don’t mind using breaking stuff, the new Beta version of Ubuntu appears to work reasonably well on the T400. See this blog posting and this thead on Lenova’s forums for more details.

I’m torn between either, the small size of the U330, versus the better battery life of the T400 (and the fact that both are a weeeeee bit dear).

OK, I’m tired as I write this, and I find sometimes when I “blog while tired” that my grammar/spelling/ability to make sense suffers, so maybe I’ll rewrite this in the morning. 🙂

Key missing?

If you get this error message:

W: GPG error: http://people.debian.org unstable Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 212253A4F641D1A6
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

This is because you don’t have the public key for Randall’s Nvidia Debian packages! The following instructions are from

http://wiki.chrismoonlight.de/doku.php?id=wissen:computer:linux:gpgupdateerror

gpg –keyserver pgp.mit.edu –recv-keys F641D1A6

gpg –armor –export F641D1A6 | sudo apt-key add –

sudo apt-get -u update

However I would have thought that installing either the debian-maintainers package or the debian-keyring would have the required key as the description of each packages says it’s has the keyos of the Debian maintainers:

debian-maintainers – GPG keys of Debian maintainers

debian-keyring – GnuPG (and obsolete PGP) keys of Debian Developers

E17 on Debian

Quickie install instructions:

Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

# repo from Falko Schmidt:

deb http://debian.alphagemini.org/ unstable main

This will also require you to have Debian’s unstable branch listed in your sources.list .

If your have Enlightenment DR16 installed or any other versions of E17 installed you’ll need to uninstall them:

sudo aptitude remove –purge enlightenment-data enlightenment e17 emodule* libevas* libefreet*

Install Falko’s E17 build:

sudo aptitude install -t unstable e17-desktop e17-extras e17 eutils emodules0-all enlightenment

And this should install E17! Logout and select Enlightenment from the session list of your login manager. I’ll update this post with more details later in the week or at the weekend.


Look for my latest posting on E17 as this information could be out-of-date:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/category/e17/

This article originally posted at:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/04/24/e17-on-debian/

Update on Enlightenment E17 for Debian

Update: I’ve decided to use Falko’s packages, see my posting here:
http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/04/24/e17-on-debian/

If you want to run E17 on Debian you have 4 choices (as of April 2008):

Wait for E17 packages to make it into Debian’s experimental repository:
http://sicherheitsschwankung.de/post/jan/2008-03-31/going-debconf-08

The Debian E17 team are in the process of loading packages into Debian experimental branch and they should be available in the near (or not so near) future.

Use the AlphafeMini repository for Debian Sid/Unstable, created by Falko Schmidt. See http://xsm.alphagemini.org/E17/repository/ for more details.

Maybe use Elive’s repositories to install E17 as Elive is based on Debian, but this may cause other problems as Elive might be based on a older version of Debian (anyone know?).

Compile your own see http://www1.get-e.org/EFL_User_Guide/English/_pages/2.2.html for more details. But, you will have to uninstall these if you ever want to install a pre-packaged version, plus you’ll have to manually update packages yourself.


Interestingly, Falko Schmidt is also a member of the team working on the E17 packages that are going into experimental, so using Falko’s packages might be the safest and easiest approach to get E17 on Debian. However, when packages are available in experimental (and eventually in Sid), you may need to purge Falko’s packages and install the Debian experimental ones.

I’m going to e-mail Falko to see if he has an opinion on this.

Look for my latest posting on E17 as this information could be out-of-date:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/category/e17/

This article originally posted at:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/04/17/update-on-enlightenment-e17-for-debian/

e17 on Ubuntu Revisited

Ever since my original post on installing Enlightenment E17 on Debian and Ubuntu things have changed, such as the server that hosted the package repositories for both Debian & Ubuntu going off-line (supposedly temporarily but it’s been offline for almost 6 months).

Also, I’ve been having issues with E17 working correctly on my laptop running Ubuntu. This is probably because of conflicts between old and new packages, and because E17 is still beta code.

In this posting I’ll concentrate on installing or reinstalling E17 on Ubuntu 8.04 otherwise know as Hardy Heron. You should be able to use the same instructions to install E17 on other recent versions of Ubuntu. I’ll also try and the same for installing E17 on Debian at some point in the future.

First, remove all existing traces of any previous E17 installs.

sudo apt-get remove --purge e17 emodule* libevas* libefreet*

You’ll notice that I’ll use a mixture of apt-get and aptitude to remove and install packages. I’ve found that sometimes aptitude is a little too aggressive in removing packages, and sometime will remove package that I need. For instance when I started to remove E17, aptitude also wanted to remove xserver-xorg which would mean X wouldn’t work (no GUI).

Next, remove any old repositories for E17 from you sources.list. But, first make a back-up copy of the file:

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.bak

Then, remove or comment out any other E17 repositories from the file, by editing the file with your favourite text editor. I normally use emacs:

sudo emacs /etc/apt/sources.list

Or if you don’t have X running and are doing this from a console:

sudo emacs -nw /etc/apt/sources.list

You can use # to comment out lines. Remove any references to edevelop.org or soulmachine.net .

Then, add the dunnewinde.net repository, by adding the following lines:

# dunnewind e17 repository for Ubuntu Hardy
deb http://e17.dunnewind.net/ubuntu hardy e17

You can replace hardy with either gutsy or feisty if your running either of those versions of Ubuntu.

Now your ready to install/reinstall Enlightenment E17! 🙂

sudo aptitude install e17

Or if you also want to play with a media player based on E17 libraries install eclair also.

sudo aptitude install e17 eclair


Once the install is completed, logout. At the login screen (GDM) change your session to Enlightenment and login and you should see something that looks like the following:

Sorry that screenshot is missing. I deleted it as someone was leeching the image by linking directly to the image from their blog (using up my bandwidth instead of theirs). I’ll upload a new image in the near future.

No other themes are installed, I’ll write another post in the next few days showing how to get themes from get-e.org and install them. In the meantime here’s a screen-shot using the Darkness theme:

This posting originally at:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/04/15/e17-on-ubuntu-revisitede17-on-ubuntu-revisited/

Eclipse 3.3.2 and Debian

So I wanted to install Eclipse at home, the version that comes with Debian is 3.2.2-5 and I wanted to try 3.3.x and install WTP and some other plugins that aren’t packaged with Debian (anyone know why?).

After downloading and installing Eclipse the welcome screen would appear with an error message saying:

Error creating the view.

org.elipse.core.runtime.Plugin

This is because the default jvm or java executable on my system was one provided by gcj and for some reason Eclipse’s eclipse doesn’t seem to work properly with gcj (or I had a too old version), Debian’s 3.2.2 Eclipse packages seem to work fine with gcj. Gcj is an Open Source Java compiler provided by GNU.

Using Sun’s JVM solved this. To install Sun’s JVM, if you don’t already have it, issue the following command:

aptitude install sun-java5-bin

Debian uses what’s called alternatives, this means that the java executable /usr/bin/java is actually a symbolic link to /etc/alternatives/java which itself is a symbolic link to the real java executable. You can manually change the links in /etc/alternatives or run:

update-alternatives –all

And change all the java tools to point to the ones that come with the Sun JVM. Alternatively, you can install galternatives which is an easy to use GUI tool to manage alternatives.

Updated March 2008: Corrected misspellings, and grammatical mistakes.

Enlightement e17 on Ubuntu Screenshots

E17 Darkness Theme on Ubuntu:

E17 Darkness Theme on Ubuntu with the menu highlighted:

E17 Darkness theme with a wallpaper from vladstudio.com:

Themes are available from get-e.org. The packages for Ubuntu come with Darkness and other themes, the Debian package appears to only come with the default theme.

Look for my latest posting on E17 as this information could be out-of-date:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/category/e17/