LinuxMint Debian and adjustments

I recently moved to Linux Mint Debian after using Ubuntu for since quite a while. (Reason: Like many, I'm not so much fond of Unity)

However, Debian is not as polished as Ubuntu. Here are some of the fixes I made:

Installing 686-pae kernel

LM Debian comes with 486 kernel, which has support for single CPU only. The first thing to do is install 686-pae kernel

# apt-get install linux-image-686-pae

Reboot and choose the new kernel.

Installing Virtualbox

Virtualbox is available in the repository.

# apt-get install virtualbox

However, virtualbox wont work because of the newly installed 686-pae kernel, so we need to rebuild the vboxdrv modules. This requires linux headers for 686-pae kernel.

# apt-get install linux-headers-686-pae

This should rebuild the vboxdrv modules automatically, post installation. But if it doesnt, do the following:

# dpkg-reconfigure virtualbox-dkms

Installing Wine

Unfortunately, Wine is not available in the repo. Use the repo at http://www.lamaresh.net/

Add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list, or via Synaptic - Settings - Repositories - Other Software - Add

deb http://www.lamaresh.net/apt squeeze main

Then update and install.

# apt-get update
# apt-get install wine

Fixing Mint-X themes

There are two Mint themes, Mint-X and Mint-X-Metal, which are very soothing and greenish. However there's a little glitch with expander plus (+) signs (eg, visible while installing software using Synaptic). To fix, open /usr/share/themes/Mint-X/gtk-2.0/gtkrc file (as root) and remove the following line:

GtkExpander::expander_spacing = 16

Do the same for /usr/share/themes/Mint-X-Metal/gtk-2.0/gtkrc too.

Also, if you want to change the font size for panels, look for font_name variable in this gtkrc file.

Few other changes

You might also wanna install ttf-devanagari-fonts and ttf-mscorefonts-installer. Also download the latest Firefox (currently 9.0) and install it to /opt/firefox/

# tar -jxf firefox-9.0.tar.bz2 -C /opt/