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Debian is an excellent linux distribution. It took me some time to get familiar with it. Here are some of my notes.

To get the sound in Debian (you probably don't need all of them):

To change display manager in Debian: modify the file /etc/X11/default-display-manager.

To mount usb drive as a user: modify the file /etc/fstab. Add /dev/sda1 and 'user' options.

To mount a ntfs partition with write permission: mount -t ntfs-3g

To have "true" fullscreen mode in mplayer: add zoom=yes in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf.

Use iceweasel(firefox) in Thunderbird: go to preference-advanced-general-config editor and change network.protocol-handler.app.* to iceweasel.

Use i810switch to switch the display mode.

To install latex packages not in tetex distribution: follow this link.

vi key binding in xdvi: add the following line to .Xdefaults xdvi.mainTranslations: #override\
<Key>j:down(0.015)
<Key>k:up(0.015)
<Key>l:right(0.015)
<Key>h:left(0.015)
Run the following for seeing the effect: xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults

To listen mp3 via ssh: ssh name@host cat foo.mp3|mpg123 -

To repeat one song temporarily in xmms2: xmms2 config playlist.repeat_one 1 (0 to go back to normal)

If failing to open deluge, try dbus-launch deluge.

Duel-booting with Vista may suffer from a slow booting process as the script hwclock.sh and hwclockfirst.sh takes too much time to set the system clock. On system with Debian only this should never happen but in case one may add HWCLOCKPARS="--directisa" to /etc/default/rcS. It may solve the problem. man rcS for more.

To force a fsck check on next reboot, just make a file /forcefsck.

Recently my computer's PAM got messed up. It turns out that an easy fix is apt-get --reinstall install libpam-modules.

All about locale. So I was getting a lot of "perl: warning: Setting locale failed." warning and after googling around, found something not obvious. On Debian, run dpkg-reconfigure locales, and choose the locales. In particlar, I have only two namely, en_US.UTF8 and zh_HK.UTF8. Make sure LANG=en_US.UTF-8 is correctly in the file /etc/default/locale. Also I have LANG="en_US.UTF-8" in the file /etc/environment.

WPA, for a long time I just use WEP for wifi. Finally have some time to figure out the way to deal with WPA. First, need to have wpasupplicant installed. Then make a wpasupplicant.conf with network={ ssid="Name" scan_ssid=1 key_mgmt=WPA-PSK psk="password" } It may depend on the network but then the above works for me. The manpage of wpasupplicant.conf provides a lot of example. However, there are not many details about each option. After that run as root wpa_supplicant with -i set to the name of wireless card and -c set to the config file. If there is no error, one can proceed to run dhclient to obtain ip address.

On Debian 6.0, they handle the touchpad differently and for me I need to run synclient TapButton1=1 in order to keep the default touchpad behavior as in 5.0.