Debian Squeeze -- sampling LXDE, plus I'm going to look into apt-pinning

By Steven Rosenberg on June 9, 2011 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) |

I finally cleared out a drive for a test machine (my IBM Thinkpad R32), but this entry isn't about that. (It's running Debian Squeeze with LXDE today after a day with Debian Squeeze with GNOME. I might try Linux Mint LXDE or Fluxbox next ...)

What it is about is my main Debian Squeeze laptop, the Lenovo G555 (it's no Thinkpad).

I already have a newer kernel (from Liquorix), newer Iceweasel and Icedove, Google Chrome and Debian Multimedia.

Now I want/need/have to have gThumb 2.13 (they added sharpen!!!).

I could build it myself. But instead I'm going to use apt-pinning to pull the newer gThumb from either Debian Testing or Unstable.

3 Comments

mf90 said:

Good for trying out LXDE. IMO it's the future of the classic FOSS desktop since the GNOME project seems hostile to maintaining an alternate 'classic' shell on top of GNOME3. XFCE may take it on the chin since it uses quite a bit of GNOME stuff.
I've given gnome-shell and unity a fair trial and don't care for them in their present state. I'm not a keyboard intensive writer or programmer and prefer not to use keyboard shortcuts. Give me a desktop environment that I can customize (like Windows classic and GNOME2) and navigate easily with a mouse.

June 21, 2011 2:46 PM

mf90 said:

Great minds think alike :-).
Meaning, I was just investigating apt-pinning for one of my few Debian annoyances - the default inability to install security updates ONLY from the command line.

In RPM based distros the zypper (OpenSUSE) and yum (Fedora) commands can do this but aptitude is a little lacking.

June 21, 2011 2:57 PM

Steven Rosenberg

said:

Meaning you want to use Synaptic but don't want to use it for updates?

I can sympathize. More fine-grained permissions for package installation and updates would be welcome.

There were quite a lot of things I liked about yum when I was running Fedora 13.

But I'm not hung up on bringing those features to apt/Aptitude, just as I'm not worrying about all the "good" parts of Synaptic making their way into Packagekit, which I think is pretty awful.

June 22, 2011 2:02 PM