Yet Another Linux Blog

One of the many bugs holding up Etch is this one: #354622: Uses Mozilla Firefox trademark without permission.

It seems that the branding (logos and trademarked name) of Firefox is not under a DFSG-compliant license, that is, it is not “Free Software”. The browser itself is Free Software, but not the artwork and the name. This finally explains to me why Ubuntu didn’t have the Firefox icon.

The most likely solution seems to be that Debian will re-brand Firefox and redistribute it that way. That means choosing a new name (yes, again ). The Debian maintainer isn’t too thrilled: http://ze-dinosaur.livejournal.com/.

So I downloaded the latest (2006-09-15) nightly Etch netinst image for AMD64, installed it on my spare machine. Here’s some random notes.

The Debian install process is easy, except for the damn exim4-base questions. I’m never sure about the mail delivery options, (localhost/smarthost/host). I’ll have to look it up once and for all sometime.

dpkg --get-selections | wc -l shows that there are just 244 packages as part of the minimal install, i.e. the “normal system” task in tasksel.

There are a few useful packages missing, IMO. I had to install the package pciutils to get lspci and the package ntpdate to set the clock.

I also installed the package sysstat because I like the commands iostat and mpstat.

I then installed the package linux-image-amd64-k8 for the K8-optimized kernel.

problems:
#on shutdown, the machine hangs at “stopping portmap daemon”. not sure why, so I just removed the portmap package. Since stopping the portmap daemon didn’t work, I had to kill it.
#i want to remove openbsd-inetd, but that would remove some useful packages. The current workaround is to comment everything in the /etc/inetd.conf config file, which will prevent the inetd from starting, as described in this message: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/08/msg00487.html
I am not sure of the reasons why a machine _needs_ inetd running anyway. Ubuntu doesn’t have an inetd installed in the default install at all.

I wrote a draft of this post approximately one year ago. I wanted to point out the following problems with Ubuntu (6.10 at the time):
ssh-krb5 breaks ubuntu-base and ubuntu-common; no authconfig equivalent; desktop administration tools are quickly accessible, but shouldn’t be on a “corp” desktop.

Things have certainly changed since then. The default OpenSSH packages now have krb5 built in, and there’s an Ubuntu project for quickly configuring the Kerberos/LDAP settings.