I've been using Debian for three weeks now. I'm still getting everything set up the way I like it, with the same applications and utilities. And I'm finding a few small bumps in the road.
Kprinter. One reason I like the KDE desktop is the excellent "K" utilities, like
Kprinter. But every time I tried to run kprinter I got the message 'Library files for "kdeprint_aps.la" not found in paths.' Searching for "kprinter kdeprint_aps.la" on Google took me to, of all places, the
Xandros Linux forum, where I found someone with the identical problem. The solution is
"...go to the Control Center, Peripherals, Printers. Click thru the error messages. Change the print subsystem to CUPS at the bottom right. You need to do this for every user." Oddly, the print subsystem was
already set to CUPS. So I said what the hell, clicked on it, and re-selected CUPS. That fixed the problem! (I guess something is a bit odd in the default setup.)
Scdbackup. This is the backup program that
I have been using for the last nine months to back up my hard drive to DVD-Rs. To get this to run under Debian, I had to repeat the installation procedure from the very first step. And then I discovered that it needs several library files like "stdio.h" and "stdlib.h" in order to install. My previous distro had these in /usr/include, but the standard Debian install did not. At first I tried installing linux-headers from the repository
apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
and when that didn't work I tried the kernel source
apt-get install linux-source-2.6.18
and that didn't work either. Finally, Googling the words "stdio.h debian package" told me that I needed to install the libc6-dev package:
apt-get install libc6-dev
(although I actually used Synaptic, rather than apt-get, to install this). Now it seems to work, except that it wants to divide the backup into 4.7 GB chunks, but
genisoimage afio only writes 4.48 GB to the DVD-R, and then prompts for a new disk. Well, I'm sure that's a configuration option somewhere.
Daily backup. This was easy. I simply had to copy my old
daily "rsync" backup script to the new /root/bin directory, and then add the same line I used before to /etc/crontab:
05 12 * * * root /root/bin/backupdaily &>/var/log/backupdaily.log
to run the program every day at 12:05 pm.