finally installed debian 8 stable

it's a long time since i have posted anything in this blog. my last post was more than a year back, 12th July, 2014. since then for various reasons, i was not able to give any time to this blog. finally had some free time available in this Puja.

during the Puja, decided to install Debian 8 stable in my small +ASUS  notebook. i bought this one from +Flipkart  one year back but i was not using this very much. recently though, i have started using this one a lot. i was using ubuntu 12.04; planned to change it to something recent. for various reasons, i was always interested in +Debian ; however, never had the courage to try this distro. during this Puja,decided to give it a try. keeping in mind about the low level hardware support, i planned to install debian with +LXDE.

downloaded the torrent file from debian.org. before this, i have always used unetbootin for writing the ISO image in a USB. Debian, though, actively discouraged this in the FAQ section. followed the guideline and used the cp method (cp <file> <device>) to copy the ISO file to USB. however, the first time i tried that, faced some problems. the USB drive was not bootable. tried again and was successful in the second attempt.

inserted the USB and booted the laptop while repeatedly pressing the escape button. this lead me to a screen asking me to decide where to boot from. selected the USB and booted form it. here also, i faced something unique. until now, whichever distro i have tried, they usually offer an option of running a live environment. however, debian did not offer me any such option. while going through the FAQ section again, i found that live distro is offered separately. anyway, selected the graphical install option form the options provided.
overall the installation process is quite simple. the guidance was given in a well described fashion. the only thing i decided to do manually was selecting the drive in which i want to install it. everything else was managed automatically by pressing the "continue" button. one other thing, i choose to install both LXDE and XFCE.
after the installation was finished, i booted the machine. i found few things-

1. no firefox; only iceweasel (however it was known to me)
2. mousepad not working
3. keyboard layout for bengali unavailable.
4. if we install only LXDE, network manager is unavailable. it comes with wicd. faced some problems with wicd. so installed network manager and removed wicd. 
5. changing notification from top right to bottom right. i am using the lower panel; so notification at the top-right corner looks odd.  

regarding browser, i installed "+Opera  next" in spite of the fact that it is lacking a few interesting feature. planning to install vivaldi as well; but that's for future.

upgraded iceweasel to version 41 (compared to version 38 in Debian 8). transferred my backups to the .mozilla folder using rsync and iceweasel was ready to do its job.   +Mozilla Firefox  backport ppa really helped to update the browser.

the main difficulty was to make the mousepad working. it was not responding to the clicks. +Google  came to help me. after a detailed search, entered the following command in the the root terminal:

mousepad edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/synaptics.conf

then edited the text file. text file looked like this after editing

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Touchpad"
MatchIsTouchpad "yes"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.5"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1."
Option "AccelFactor" "0.075"
Option "TapButton1" "1"
Option "TapButton2" "3"
Option "TapButton3" "2"
Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
Option "VertEdgeScroll" "1"
Option "CoastingSpeed" "8"
Option "CornerCoasting" "1"
Option "CircularScrolling" "1"
Option "CircScrollTrigger" "7"
Option "EdgeMotionUseAlways" "1"
Option "LBCornerButton" "8"
Option "RBCornerButton" "9"
Option "TapAndDragGesture" "1"
EndSection

the next job was to update the keyboard configuration file. this is necessary to be able to write Bengali. so, used the following command and changed the keyboard configuration file as follows:-

mousepad /etc/default/keyboard

 KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE

# Consult the keyboard(5) manual page.
XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="us,in"
XKBVARIANT=",ben_probhat"
XKBOPTIONS="grp:alt_shift_toggle"

BACKSPACE="guess"


next, changed the notification location from top right corner to bottom right corner using the following command

xfce4-notifdy- config

 
and choosing the proper option from the GUI. 

 

and now the notification is appearing in the bottom right corner. 

so, that's how my +ASUS  notebook is looking in this dussera/dassai/ dashami.