Mint Debian Testing

[steveo314]

To Clem:

Can the community help with testing the mint debian edition or is it still too early in development???

[Grundoko]

I'd also like to be able to help in testing.

[randomizer]

Community testing is traditionally only at the RC stage.

[sickie]

In Debian's case, as it's a completely new base and people interested in it are probably more computer savy, that tradition could be broken.

[steveo314]

yep yep. some debian lovers want to sink their teeth into this mint edition so bad they can taste it even if it is still in development.

[Hraefn]

Consider me one of those wanting to sink their teeth into Mint Debian. I've been playing around with Crunchbang 10 Statler (alpha 2), which is Debian-based, and I'm loving it so far. I can't wait to see what Mint can do with Debian.

[steveo314]

im about to give crunchbang a go. ive heard all good about it. did you try it when it was ubuntu based??

[Hraefn]

Never tried Crunchbang prior to 10. I'd thought about giving it a spin a few times but somehow never got around to actually doing it. I have heard some very good things about it, though. Still, I don't think I'll try give the stable (#! 9) a try; Statler is the new Crunchbang and, although it's ostensibly an alpha 2 release, it's been stable enough for me so far.

[steveo314]

does it come with tint2 out of the box or lxpanel?

[Hraefn]

Tint2 (which I think was in 9 as well). My overall impressions of Statler was that it was fast, faster even than Mint Fluxbox CE, especially on old hardware.

[steveo314]

yea not using gnome or kde makes a great differences in speed though the 2 are good d.e.'s. im not a big fan of tint2 myself. i prefer the lxpanel.

[Hraefn]

Tint2 does take some getting used to. It has it's own limitations, too, such as not being able to add launchers (yet), etc. Still, it's an active project and the development looks promising. There are also several workarounds for some of tint2's limitations, such as using the ADeskBar launcher, ADesk Menu, or even using lxpanel alongside tint2.

Edit: Hmm... maybe I should also play around with adding Crunchy features to other distros...

[steveo314]

give archbang a go.

[solainix]

May I suggest including BTRFS support in the installer?

[shayney]

As debian seems to be popular here I just thought I would ask, those using debian testing or debian testing with the mint tools...
How on earth do you install debian testing?

Last time I tried installing I used disc 1 from the download site and everything was fine.
Lately I have been trying allsorts and can't get anywhere.

I have tried the debian live gnome cd but when I try to install it complains about a kernel module mismatch and is uninstallable.

Tried a netinstall but it seems the installer doesn't support WPA encryption and I cannot use a cabled connection at this time (long story).

Trying to install from disc 1 as before left me with no X or gnome or anything and as with the problem above, I couldn't configure a wireless connection to install what I needed.

Tried using the mint debian installer from a debian live cd but it hangs at "calculating file indexes" and never installs.

I could just find out and download however many install cd's I need for the full desktop but I'm wondering what method people here use.
Does anyone know of a LIVE testing install that actually installs?

[Hraefn]

give archbang a go.

I gave it try, actually, and it's really rather nice. Pacman takes a little getting used to (I've been using apt-get for so long), but that's no biggie. Were you ever able to get persistence when running from a Live CD/USB, though? That's one of the things preventing me from really playing around with it.

On the other hand, Crunchbang 10 is looking really nice, IMHO. I've been playing around with the looks and whatnot, but since I'm a minimalist at heart, not a lot has changed.

[anticapitalista]

Does anyone know of a LIVE testing install that actually installs?

Try antiX.

[solainix]

In order to install Debian testing I use the netinstall image:

http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

Either CD or USB drive. Currently you have the option to choose among Gnone (default), KDE, Xfce and LXDE.

[shayney]

Unfortunately I cannot use netinstall.
As mentioned before, it does not allow wpa when configuring the network so I can't get a connection and I can't use wired at the moment.

As it happens, I used crunchbang and installed gnome from that but it seems debian testing suffers the same problem as ALL debian based distros (including mint and ubuntu), my sound doesn't work.
I can get it working in ubuntu and mint by installing the alsa backport modules but they don't exist in debian and I haven't managed to get it to work.

Strangely enough, sound works out of the box on every RPM based distro I've used.

[eric71]

Has anyone here playing with Statler or antix 8.5 (or Debian Squeeze itself, for that matter) tried adding the Debian portion of the Mint repository (http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php?release=Debian) to your apt sources? The packages seem up to date, so are presumably what Clem and Ikey are currently working with. I have been using Mint 9 for the past few weeks, and love it. But I am also intrigued with the idea of running a rolling distro. I'm too restless to wait for a release candidate from Clem and Ikey. Perhaps a line such as "deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main import" would do the trick. Then installing mint-meta-debian. I've got antiX on my laptop at home and may try it out when I get back from work. I'll install the official release when they get there. I just want to try to mintify a light squeeze-based distro in the meantime.

If anyone has previously tried it and can save me the time, I'd appreciate knowing how it went. if not, I'll report back when I've tried it.