Installing the Trinity Desktop Environment on Debian

A recent discussion on LXer concerning the greatness that was Kmail reminded me that I never did a good write-up on installing the KDE3 fork, Trinity-DE.

One of the more interesting aspects of this particular discussion is that I wasn't the one to bring up Trinity-DE. Usually, it's me who points out that the wondrous fantasticness that was KDE3 has not left the world, that Trinity-DE is alive and well.

So it's time for a screenshot tutorial on installing Trinity-DE. For my base, I chose Debian Wheezy, using the Xfce-AMD64 install CD. You can choose any of the Debian Netinstall, CD#1, or DVD#1 disks and simply install whichever default desktop it comes with.

If you do choose to install KDE4 by default, then put Trinity-DE on with it, let me know how that goes. It's the one thing I haven't tried yet, since I do not prefer KDE4.

The Linux Live CD

It's been 12 years since Mark Knopper first created Knoppix, ushering in an amazing way to try running Linux: directly from a CD.

No installation hassles, no worries about losing data during an upgrade. No getting stuck in the middle of an install and not having a machine to use to track down documentation.

Just a running machine. Easily, quickly, and best of all temporarily.

The joys of multi-card reading

As mentioned at the bottom of my prior posting, because of a surprising number of errors being received when I tried to use my venerable external card reader, I had ordered an internal multi-card reader. Well, it arrived in good order, and now the front of my PC has one more blue LED than it had.

I guess this is the way that streetlights have destroyed the night for so many of us, one bulb at a time.

They nicely include both grey and black faceplates, for the utterly pointless aesthetics of having the machine match. It must be important to someone, and I did indeed use the matching faceplate. It was already in place. My server has a silver DVD drive in a black case, and I can't say that anyone has complained.

Desktop Linux's Killer Feature: Flexibility.

Debian has a reputation in the world of Linux distributions as, well, "stodgy". Debian Stable is pointed to as being out of date, stale, boring.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Debian developers have put together a titanic number of software packages, and done the work to make them function together like... "...like an enormous clock."

"The finest clocks have jeweled movements. Cogs that fit, and work together by design. I'm being metaphorical, Bob."

Several fine tutorials and demos have been posted of Debian since the release of Squeeze, 6.0, on Sunday. Here's one I particularly like:

But there is something more that I believe needs to be addressed. Just what do you get with one disk of Debian anyway?

I used Debian DVD#1 to see just what kind of variety a user could get out of it.