These are some simple and unorganized Debian tips that might make your system nicer or solve some minor problems. I don't really maintain this page too much, so some of the tips might not apply to your version of debian. When I add new stuff I'll try to remember to tag the version of debian I'm talking about.
Multimedia / DVDs / etc
The first thing you need to do on a desktop debian system is add the marillat/debian-multimedia repository. There you will find all the multimedia programs and libraries that the official debian cannot include due to licensing issues. What you need is to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and add the correct line for your system:
# for unstable: deb http://debian-multimedia.org/ sid main # for testing/etch (2006) #deb http://debian-multimedia.org/ etch main # for stable/sarge (2006) #deb http://debian-multimedia.org/ sarge main
Random tips
- Change the nice level of the X server. Debian assigns a nice level of -10 to the X server. This might cause some music programs to skip, you can change that with 'dpkg-reconfigure xserver-common'.
- If you can't get some programs in X to print correctly (like Mozilla) make sure your Xprint is working. Install xprt-xprintorg and read the README in /usr/share/doc/xprt-common
- To get reasonable disk performance install hdparm and tune it by editing /etc/hdparm.conf
- 'apt-cache search package' will search through the package database if you are looking for a specific app.
- packages.debian.org (or p.d.o for short) will search through the content of packages, even if they are not installed on your system.