Ajitabh Pandey's Soul & Syntax

Exploring systems, souls, and stories – one post at a time

Tag: Debian

  • Locale Problems in Debian and Ubuntu

    Recently I have been facing some issues with locales in Debian and Ubuntu based Xen based virtual servers. These typically appear while running the man command and apt-get or dpkg commands.
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  • Configuring ALSA On Debian Sarge

    I needed to configure ALSA on Sarge because I wanted to use Ekiga Softphone and although it supports OSS but the support is not good. It was fairly straight forward process to do that:

    ajitabhp@fimbles:~$ sudo apt-get install libesd-alsa0 \ 
gstreamer0.8-alsa esound-clients alsa-base alsa-oss
ajitabhp@fimbles:~$ sudo alsaconf

    In the alsaconf screens I answered all the defaults. And once I was done, under the menu item

    Applications→Desktop Preferences→Advanced→Multimedia Systems Selector

    I changed the default sink and default source to ALSA and Pipeline to alsasink and alsasrc respectively.

  • Backporting Ekiga Softphone

    Since I use apt-pinning it was quite easy for me to install Ekiga from the backports. The first thing which I needed to do was to configure ALSA on sarge.

    Next I just installed Ekiga as:

    ajitabhp@fimbles:~$ sudo apt-get install ekiga
    ajitabhp@fimbles:~$ sudo apt-get install libpt-plugins-alsa

    Next when I ran Ekiga I got an error saying “No usable audio plugin detected”. This was really annoying specially as I have all the required dependencies. Googling around helped me here and I found that the libpt-plugins-alsa needs to be installed from the backports repository and according to my pinning preferences it was installed from the sarge repository. So I had to do:

    ajitabhp@fimbles:~$ sudo apt-get -t sarge-backports install \
    libpt-plugins-alsa
    ajitabhp@fimbles:~$ sudo apt-get -t sarge-backports install \
    libpt-plugins-v4l2

    This uninstalled the installed libpt-plugins-alsa and install it from the sarge-backports repository.

  • Filesystem in User Space

    Setting up sshfs

    In order to setup sshfs on a debian system, I needed to install the sshfs packages:

    sudo apt-get install sshfs fuse-source module-assistant kernel-headers-2.6
    sudo module-assistant build fuse
    sudo module-assistant install fuse

    While building the fuse module I was asked whether I need a seperate group to be able to use the fusermount command and whether I want this group to be removed when the package is removed and so on. I answered all the defaults. Finally I put myself in the group which I created while building the fuse module.

    That’s it, then logout and log back in so that the group permissions can take effect. Or use the newgrp command.

    To mount the remote filesystem I first created a main directory to hold all my remote mount-points.

    mkdir remote_dirs
    cd remote_dirs
    mkdir server_1 server_2
    sshfs user01@server_1:. server_1/
    sshfs user01@server_2:. server_2/

    If ssh keys are already setup for a password less login then you wont be asked a password otherwise a password prompt will be displayed where you need to enter the remote servers password.

  • Apt Pinning

    I normally stick with Debian Stable on my laptop. But atleast there was one package which I needed out of testing or unstable, git. So I thought of using the Debian backports repository. I followed the instructions to use the backports repository and came through this very good APT Pinning document. This is how I installed git on my laptop.

    I added the following line to my /etc/apt/source.list file

    # Debian backports
deb http://www.backports.org/debian/ sarge-backports main contrib non-free

    and the following to my /etc/apt/preferences file. I needed to create this file as I was not using multiple repositories before, so I had to make all the entries. However, only the middle entry which pins the priority of the sarge-backports repository is required. If most of the time stable is preferred then the priority of stable has to be higher than that of sarge-backports. The last pinning which specifies the priority of -10 to other Debian releases is just a proactive measure to make sure that if I add a new Debian repository to the /etc/apt/sources.list file then I need to specify a pinning preference explicitly in this file, else it will have the priority of -10 which is lowest or no priority at all.

    # Debian stable has a higher priority than the
# backports repository
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=stable
Pin-Priority: 900
Package: *
Pin: release a=sarge-backports
Pin-Priority: 200
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -10