Three years ago I posted about installing Debian and Openbox. Well. I’ve done it again. Only a month ago I had declared I was fully slack but here I am writing on a machine running Fedora 36 writing about my Debian 11 installation.
I ran into a couple of issues with Slackware. Some apps were very slow to open. I thought I had it figured out, but apparently not. I also couldn’t get Wine to run correctly so opted for a couple of other tried-and-true distros.
My Debian 11 install was done around a month ago from the restricted iso (so it had the firmware necessary to run my wifi from scratch).
I installed the base system plus Xfce to provide me with a basic infrastructure that works. I don’t run Xfce on the machine but am running Openbox.
The basic steps post-installation were:
- As su, /usr/sbin/adduser [username] sudo (to give me sudo privileges)
- Run visudo and simplify authentication for my user (makes life less secure, but easier. I run all programs requiring elevated privileges with the prefix sudo)
- Install the following (using sudo apt install):
- openbox obconf tint2 feh vim dmenu conky picom volumeicon-alsa redshift-gtk xinput thunderbird hledger hledger-ui hledger-web ncdu mpv geeqie gimp hugo scid stockfish toga2 pass neofetch transmission-gtk htop
- Install the megasync deb using sudo apt install ./megasync-Debian_11_amd64.deb
- Install the build-essential apps to compile from source using sudo apt install build-essential
- With that in place then git clone and build https://gitlab.com/wavexx/acpilight (to facilitate modifying screen brightness)
- Then install the wine packages using sudo apt install wine then sudo dpkg - -add-architecture i386, sudo apt update then sudo apt install wine32
- Install my VPN using sudo apt install ./expressvpn_3.32.0.5-1_amd64.deb
- Finally sudo apt install rsync
Like 2019, it works, it’s fast, and it’s relatively simple.