Debian Linux 6 and the Trinity Desktop

Originally published December 6th, I thought this was an excellent way to open my "blog".

Enjoy. Curt-

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Well, I am finally done with a week's efforts at almost successfully jumping from Lenny and a very familiar KDE3.5 environment to Sid and the Trinity Desktop.

====== Debian Squeeze Install: ======

Having installed Debian quite a few times over the course of 15 years, this was not difficult. I used a daily-build of the Squeeze bootable business card for the install:

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/unstable/current/i386/iso-cd/

Debian 6, Squeeze, was released February 6, 2011, so my "daily build" comment is no longer valid. Best to use the current "stable" release.



The build I had, which was some couple of weeks old, had an unfortunate tendency to "hang" for a while with a blank (blue) screen, waiting for something. It would eventually get on with the install, and there were no errors that I could see, but it was not a Good Thing to do that.

I didn't use the "graphical" install, since it's just a change in the display of the same text menues. I'll take the text, thank you, "Advanced ==> Alternate Desktop ==> XFCE".

Being concerned about the "hanging", I ended up doing the install a couple of times, and the last time I decided to do the "Expert Install" which is nothing more than manually choosing ALL the options, and manually selecting each step in the install process. This harkens back about 10 years in the automation process, but it also allows for selecting a pure "Sid" install right from the very start, or Squeeze or even Lenny while it's still the official Stable, if that's what the customer wants.

Using the 44MB "business card" means that the target machine MUST be network attached in order to install. 5 years ago, it was possible to use the "business card" image to install a remarkably minimalistic system without the network, and then connect and do the rest by hand. No more. If there is no network connectivity, there is no install, but this is hardly a concern unless you're trying to use an esoteric F/OSS unfriendly Wifi card.

Once up and running, I put the TrinityDE repository in /etc/apt/sources.list, along with such nice additions as DebianMultimedia.org.

Prior to rebuilding, I copied my entire /home directory to another machine. When I was satisfied with the running system, I copied the entire directory back, which means Iceweasel had all its settings and add-ons, Wesnoth has it's ad-ons, .ssh, .gnupg, .skype, .Virtualbox, and the .kde (and .kde4) directories were available as they were the last time that "everything worked".

This is a Very Good Thing. It also means that if I blow something up, the last working settings are always available to start over.

======= TrinityDE =======

Installing TrinityDE was as easy as any other package set, just let apt-get, aptitude, dselect or whatever your favorite tool is do it's job.

http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/debian_installation.html

Do add all 4 of the Trinity repository lines, even if you aren't going to be building from source. For some reason, it just doesn't quite work otherwise.

Even though I'm using Sid, I used Squeeze as the target in the Trinity repository. With TrinityDE, and with others such as VirtualBox which do not offer a Sid specific repository, I have had no problems with doing so. When Squeeze launches, and the repositories are updated, I will change them to point to the next "testing".

Ah, the joys of command line computing!

The download took quite a while, because Trinity does not have the immense bandwidth available that the mainline Debian repositories do. No matter, Xfce worked just fine in the interrum.

What I wanted to do was copy over ONLY those things, like bookmarks, password wallets, kmail settings and the like, that I needed. I didn't want all the cruft that had built up in the application menu over the years, for example.

Alas, that was not to be.

Trinity Wallet Manager: would not, simply would NOT, import the old wallet data. I tried copying all the .kwl files into the analogous .trinity/ folder, that didn't work. I tried "Import Wallet" in the wallet manager, but it took it as 460 instances of binary data, not text of passwords or form entries.

Needless to say, without the wallet, I didn't even bother to start Kmail.

Konqueror: although the bookmark.xml file copied just fine, and worked, favicons simply would NOT update. It's a little thing, but I like the way that Konqueror uses the favicons in its menues and I know what to look for. I have a lot of bookmarks in Konqueror, and it's very much a case of "You don't know what you've got 'till it's gone." Also, there are now two status bars at the bottom of Konqueror, one with just the adblock filter showing, redundant to the fact that the adblock icon is also on the "normal" status bar at the bottom of the window, so at some point I'll figure, or find, out how to turn that new one off.

Nepomuk: Started automagically whether I wanted it to or not, I don't, but at least I could turn it off quickly and easily. Hooray.

The answer to these problems was,

$ rm -r .trinity
$ cp -a .kde .trinity

This is what I've done in the past when upgrading, and it worked exactly the same as it did before. I got my entire set of KDE3.5 settings back, favicons in Konqueror, passwords in Kwallet, even Kpgp came up without my remembering that I needed it.

Kmail: certainly has been updated, I need to go through and find out more about the changes. There are header changes in the message view window, but at least the email accounts were all scanned, mail downloaded and parsed correctly the first time.

One very good thing about the TrinityDE Kmail, trash compaction WORKS! For all the YEARS I have been using Kmail, I had to delete the /bob/Mail/trash file by hand, "touch trash" to recreate it, just because every time I would try "compact trash folder" Kmail would give the awful message, "for security reasons, compaction has been turned off for trash."

Several months of spam, attachments, family photographs and Debian-User mailing list digests can create multi-hundred-megabyte trash files. The fact that compacting the trash file has been enabled is the first new thing in TrinityDE that I am exceedingly happy about.

Let's hope that the continued development of TrinityDE, as shown by that seemingly small change, is on an evolutionary basis, rather than the revolutionary fervor that caused the need for TrinityDE to be founded in the first place.

I'll post the results of trying to expunge the cruft from the application menu, later.

The expunging never took place. More on that later.

Thank you for listening, and Don't Fear Trinity. For us hopelessly disgusted with KDE4, it _works_.