[Thu Jul 13 14:08:17 CDT 2017]

Here's a very simple tip. If hearing the bell when using vim bothers you, add set visualbell to your .vimrc file. And here the instructions to install VirtualBox on Debian 9 (stretch). {link to this entry}

[Fri Jul 7 16:03:36 CDT 2017]

Here is an issue I recently ran into. For whatever reason, whenever I launched either Gimp or Evince on the laptop I recently upgraded to Debian 9 (stretch), they showed up in the status bar but failed to display the main window at all. As far as I can remember, they were working fine immediately after I upgraded the laptop, but perhaps that is not the case. Anyways, running the following commands as root to purge the packages and reinstall them appeared to fix the problem:

# dpkg --purge --force-depends evince
(...)
# apt-get install evince
(...)
# dpkg --purge --force-depends gimp
(...)
# apt-get install gimp
(...)

I did try a simple reinstall via apt-get install --reinstall, but that didn't appear to help. You will see some messages when you run the purge command above but, since you will reinstall the package right away, they are nothing to worry about. {link to this entry}

[Thu Jul 6 08:10:14 CDT 2017]

Here is some info on how to convert a text file to PDF format on Linux. It involves two steps: the first one using enscript to convert from ASCII text to PostScript, and the other one using ps2pdf to convert to PDF. It's easily scriptable, so that's what I did. I wrote my own simple bash shell script to take care of it. {link to this entry}

[Wed Jul 5 15:40:04 CDT 2017]

While attempting to install HPE MyRoom (a really good conferencing software indeed, and it runs on Linux natively!), I encountered a problem because in spite of the name of the installation file (which includes the string "amd64") the software package manager detects that it is a 32-bit binary:

$ sudo gdebi --apt-line hpmyroom_v10.4.0.0174_amd64.deb
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
This package is uninstallable
Wrong architecture 'i386' -- Run dpkg --add-architecture to add it and update afterwards

In order to install it, I had to run the following on my Debian 9 (stretch) laptop:

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
$ sudo apt-get update
Hit:1 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates InRelease
Ign:2 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch InRelease                          
Hit:3 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch-updates InRelease                  
Hit:4 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch Release                            
Get:5 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates/main i386 Packages [54.4 kB]    
Hit:6 http://repository.spotify.com stable InRelease                             
Hit:7 http://www.deb-multimedia.org stretch InRelease                            
Get:9 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch/main i386 Packages [7,073 kB]      
Get:10 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates/non-free i386 Packages [1,272 B]
Get:11 http://repository.spotify.com stable/non-free i386 Packages [1,136 B]     
Get:12 http://www.deb-multimedia.org stretch/main i386 Packages [158 kB]         
Get:13 http://www.deb-multimedia.org stretch/non-free i386 Packages [4,940 B]
Get:14 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch/contrib i386 Packages [47.9 kB]
Get:15 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch/non-free i386 Packages [68.8 kB]
Fetched 7,410 kB in 3s (1,923 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done

$ sudo dpkg -i hpmyroom_v10.4.0.0174_amd64.deb
Selecting previously unselected package hpmyroom:i386.
(Reading database ... 212823 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack hpmyroom_v10.4.0.0174_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking hpmyroom:i386 (10.4.0.0174) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of hpmyroom:i386:
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libc6 (>= 2.7-1).
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libstdc++6.
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libuuid1.
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libxtst6.
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libpulse0.
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libglib2.0-0.
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libx11-xcb1.
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libxi6.
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libexpat1.
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libfontconfig1.
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libfreetype6.
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libpng12-0; however:
  Package libpng12-0:i386 is not configured yet.
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libsm6; however:
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libxfixes3; however:
 hpmyroom:i386 depends on libxss1; however:

dpkg: error processing package hpmyroom:i386 (--install):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.13.3-9) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.23-1) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.60) ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 hpmyroom:i386

$ sudo apt-get -f install
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer
required:
  audacious-plugins-data libass5 libaudcore3 libavcodec56 libavresample2
libbinio1ldbl libde265-0 libguess1 liblircclient0 libmowgli-2-0
  libopencv-calib3d2.4v5 libopencv-core2.4v5 libopencv-features2d2.4v5
libopencv-flann2.4v5 libopencv-highgui2.4-deb0 libopencv-imgproc2.4v5
  libopencv-objdetect2.4v5 libopencv-video2.4v5 libopenjpeg5
libschroedinger-1.0-0 libsidplayfp3 libssh-gcrypt-4 libswscale3 libtbb2
libvpx1
  libx264-148 libx265-95
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following additional packages will be installed:
  gcc-6-base:i386 libasyncns0:i386 libblkid1:i386 libbsd0:i386 libc6:i386
libcap2:i386 libdbus-1-3:i386 libexpat1:i386 libffi6:i386
  libflac8:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libgcc1:i386
libgcrypt20:i386 libglib2.0-0:i386 libgpg-error0:i386 libice6:i386
  liblz4-1:i386 liblzma5:i386 libmount1:i386 libogg0:i386 libpcre3:i386
libpng16-16:i386 libpulse0:i386 libselinux1:i386 libsm6:i386
  libsndfile1:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libsystemd0:i386 libuuid1:i386
libvorbis0a:i386 libvorbisenc2:i386 libwrap0:i386 libx11-6:i386
  libx11-xcb1:i386 libxau6:i386 libxcb1:i386 libxdmcp6:i386 libxext6:i386
libxfixes3:i386 libxi6:i386 libxss1:i386 libxtst6:i386 uuid-runtime
  zlib1g:i386
Suggested packages:
  glibc-doc:i386 locales:i386 rng-tools:i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  gcc-6-base:i386 libasyncns0:i386 libblkid1:i386 libbsd0:i386 libc6:i386
libcap2:i386 libdbus-1-3:i386 libexpat1:i386 libffi6:i386
  libflac8:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libgcc1:i386
libgcrypt20:i386 libglib2.0-0:i386 libgpg-error0:i386 libice6:i386
  liblz4-1:i386 liblzma5:i386 libmount1:i386 libogg0:i386 libpcre3:i386
libpng16-16:i386 libpulse0:i386 libselinux1:i386 libsm6:i386
  libsndfile1:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libsystemd0:i386 libuuid1:i386
libvorbis0a:i386 libvorbisenc2:i386 libwrap0:i386 libx11-6:i386
  libx11-xcb1:i386 libxau6:i386 libxcb1:i386 libxdmcp6:i386 libxext6:i386
libxfixes3:i386 libxi6:i386 libxss1:i386 libxtst6:i386 uuid-runtime
  zlib1g:i386
0 upgraded, 45 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
2 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 12.0 MB of archives.
After this operation, 31.8 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
(...)

{link to this entry}

[Wed Jul 5 15:36:08 CDT 2017]

Here is another little annoyance I found out after upgrading the laptop to Debian 9 (stretch). When using SSH from within a GNU Screen session to connect to a remote system, it will show an error about the terminal type:

'screen.xterm-256color': unknown terminal type.

The solution is just to add the following line to your ~/.bashrc file:

export TERM="xterm"

{link to this entry}

[Wed Jul 5 11:51:54 CDT 2017]

Since we had a long weekend here in the US due to the 4th of July holiday, I decided to upgrade my laptop from Debian 8 (jessie) to Debian 9 (stretch). That way, if something went wrong, I had more time to work on it. To my surprise, the upgrade went quite smooth. I only ran one (sort of) major roadblock, which fortunately somebody else also ran into. Basically, when running apt-get dist-upgrade, I saw the following error:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
systemd : Breaks: rdnssd (< 1.0.1-5) but 1.0.1-1+b1 is to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

The solution, at least in my case, was to remove the package rdnssd. I don't use IPv6. So, I don't truly need it. Once I removed that package, all dependencies were satisfied, and the system upgraded without a problem.

Now, there are a couple of issues I did run into. First of all, it looks as if good old XChat has been removed from the Debian repos. Instead, they have HexChat, which appears to work just the same. So far, I didn't notice anything but some minor differences (which, incidentally, could be due to the fact that I was running an older version in the previous release of Debian anyways). Also, for whatever reason, GNOME Shell refused to start the Telegram client. It didn't show an error or anything. It just showed it starting, but it never displayed the main screen for some reason. In the end, instead of struggling with the config and try to figure out how to fix it, I opted for installing Cutegram instead. It had been recommended to me by my son as a better client anyways. Finally, today, while using OpenVPN, I ran into the following error:

Options error: Unrecognized option or missing or extra parameter(s) in /etc/openvpn/client.ovpn:14: pull (2.4.0)
Use --help for more information.

The solution to this other one is here. Simply use pull as an option in the configuration file, without adding any options. So far, that's it. I'll report if there is anything else. {link to this entry}