Getting a GUI

After installing Debian, often one is left with just a command line prompt waiting for the user to enter login and password. If you are coming from Microsoft Windows environment, this command line prompt looks similar to the DOS prompt. This article explains how to get a GUI environment after installing basic Debian.

Since I have experience only with KDE, I will try to focus just on installing KDE.

In order to get a working GUI as quickly as possible, run the following two commands as root.

apt-get update
apt-get install xorg kde kdm

This will fetch all the required packages necessary to run KDE.

During the installation of the packages, there will be some questions regarding configuring X environment etc., Once you finish answering all the questions, you will get a working KDE environment.

Last activity: Jan 24, 2007

control kmail sounds

In kmail, the default keyboard shortcut to send messages is ctrl-Enter. When this command is entered, a pop up comes giving the options "Send Now", "Send Later" and "Cancel". However, When this popup comes up, an annoying sound is played. To get rid of this sound use

kcontrol -> Sound & Multimedia -> System Notifications

In the tab on the right hand side, select

"A warning message is being shown"

and remove the sound icon by clicking on corresponding icon. Then click on Apply button on the bottom right hand side and close the kcontrol window.

move tabs in konqueror

On the tab that you would like to move, click with the middle mouse button and then drag it to the required place.

This tip has been tested on a Debian Sid machine running

$konqueror --version
Qt: 3.3.6
KDE: 3.5.2
Konqueror: 3.5.2

How to view changelogs of a Debian package over web

Every installed package on a Debian machine has changelog.gz and/or changelog.Debian.gz depending on whether the package is specific to Debian or not. These files are stored in /usr/share/doc/packagename.

For example, since firefox is not specific to Debian, it has both changelog.gz and changelog.Debian.gz . OTOH, since wajig is specific to Debian, it only has changelog.gz. There is no changelog.Debian.gz for wajig.

changelog.gz refers to changes done by the upstream author where as changelog.Debian.gz refers to changes done by the Debian maintainer.

/usr/share/doc/packagename/changelog.Debian.gz contains the changelog for the installed package. If a new version of package is available in Debian repositories then sometimes it is useful to have a look at just the new changelog without downloading the whole package. In order to see the latest changelog of a package, you can use

http://packages.debian.org/changelog:packagename

So to see changelog of the latest firefox package available in Debian repositories use

http://packages.debian.org/changelog:firefox

As usual, Comments and suggestions can be emailed to kamaraju at gmail dot com.