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2013-08-09

Netinstall Jessie to Sid, Openboxed

After dist-upgrade two weeks ago serious problems appeared in Vsido (Sid with experimental repos enabled) - CPU-usage went up, as did memory-usage. Some people couldn't even boot... - (upgraded) xorg and nvidia driver conflicted.
So I thought of flying a bit lower (without 'experimental') and netinstalled pure 'sid' from scratch. Well, and I had messed up my Vsido a bit, while playing around.

Do take a look to previous netinstall post here.
What follows here is mostly what I found to be 'different and strange or silly'.

Making Sid:
Rebooted after install and went stright for /etc/apt/sources.list.
Changed things to sid:
#sources to sid
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ sid main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ sid main non-free contrib

# added debian multimedia
deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org sid main non-free
Security (added by install) goes out - no such thing in Sid.

One can add some repos. But - you have to install also their keyrings:
aptosid, siduction (I did not try them), spacefm (no success, keyserver timed out)
- sudo apt-get install deb-multimedia-keyring
- apt-get install also to: aptosid-arhive-keyring, siduction-archive-keyring
- with spacefm it's a bit different, as root, do:
gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 0x01937621 0x107165A1
# when successful,
bash -c 'gpg --export -a 01937621 107165A1 | apt-key add -'

But as said, no success here - and I installed it from downloaded 'deb'.

When sources are ready:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Everything seemed to be fine - no errors, no things 'not upgraded'.

Making ze colorful picture:

Then I installed Openbox and other essentials:
Only thing I thought of doing differently was swapping xfce4-terminal to roxterm. But, xfce4-terminal wanted a lot less deps - so it stayed.
Lightdm install with --no-install-recommends gave 3 times less dependencies. A lot of gnome trash went away. Lightdms' version 1.6 is already this new fucked-up one - no hackable greeter.ui file, no session picker in center-menu.
As a side-note: If using Synaptic, also do not forget to remove 'check' from Preferences 'install reccommends by default' - saves you from a lot strange junk.

Reboot.
Installed smxi and when trying to install Nvidia drivers, got message that kernel 3.9.1 amd64 (installed by Debian Installer) has no headers and there isn't any in repo too. Doh! I decided not to think too deeply over it, and installed liquorix 3.8.13 kernel - and Nvidia installed without problems. Strange, though.
One more observation: If you want to clean up useless xorg drivers with smxi - you have to run xorg at least once before.

Rebooted for new kernel and, as usual, ran sgfxi in console to get that installed Nvidia working (it goes like that every first-time-installation).

Holy moment! Login to Openbox ... and do all usual stuff (again, look up the previous openbox posts).
Let's list here only some strange happenings, odd outcomes:
- When Debian had still first, native kernel, then booting text ran small. After change to Liquorix, text turned big (res 640). Changing resolution bigger in grubs' conf doesn't work... Me, baffled. 
Edit: Took whole menuentry from Sids' grub.cfg, made 41_sid file in master-Grub /etc/grub.d, copy/pasted menuentry - and Sids' console resolution turned to nice 1024x768. I guess that crucial lines here were (omitted by master-grub):
set gfxpayload=keep
insmod gzio

Irritatingly, I also got several penguin pictures displayed before initrd load... got rid of them by adding following kernel parameter: 'logo.nologo'. Edit ends

- Compton: As usual, missed a lot of deps. I installed everything, even asciidoc. But, 'make install' failed anyway - with some line in source error. Jeez... so I ended up copying the comptons' executable to /usr/bin as per usual.
- Showdesktop and exit scripts didn't work. Both are python, so I installed a bunch of python stuff - thinking that error is there. It wasn't - it was missing 'wmctrl'.
- I did adduser username sudo (which was complitely ok), and was a bit confused why it still didn't work. I forgot to install 'sudo', that's why ...
Moral here is - it pays of to make precise list of 'essential things to install' - and also to follow it.
- For some reason my boxes bios clock lately insist of being 3 hours incorrect... Here helps installing 'ntp' which then takes time from nets' server.
- Firefox doesn't save to ntfs partition... ups, file manager too. Need to install 'ntfs-3g' and 'fuse'. Last time when Openboxing Wheezy, I got them probably automagically when playing with smxi.
- And one more funny thing: I happened to stick mother-in-laws' Kindle to my Linux box - and bloody thing refused to accept 'umount' as eject. Well, you have to install 'eject'... then it ejects.

Everything seems to work now (knock the wood). Memory-usage is the same as with my Vsido install (unborked) - 160M. And no funny peakings with CPUs. 

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