Sunday, April 22, 2007

Installed KDE on Debian

Decided to try to install KDE. Debian comes with Gnome as default.

Used "Synaptic Package Manager" and chose "KDE-desktop environment". Ran through the list of included programs, and deselected some applications. When I pressed "Apply" I was prompted for a install CD. I only had the first install CD-iso.

Then I remembered what we used to do in earlier versions of Ubuntu - edit the "sources.list". This list specifies which repositories the system shall fetch its packages from. It is located in /etc/apt. In order to edit this system file, I needed root privileges. As I have discussed earlier, I have installed the "sudo" command that I am used to use under Ubuntu.

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

enabled me to edit the list.

It read:

deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official i386 CD Binary-1 20070407-11:55]/ etch contrib main

deb http://debian.savoirfairelinux.net/debian/ etch main
deb-src http://debian.savoirfairelinux.net/debian/ etch main

deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib

I commented out the CD-rom and saved the file, modified file reading:

# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official i386 CD Binary-1 20070407-11:55]/ etch contrib main

deb http://debian.savoirfairelinux.net/debian/ etch main
deb-src http://debian.savoirfairelinux.net/debian/ etch main

deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib

Then, I pressed "Apply" again, and then the install started downloading files from the net without prompting me for the CD.

After the install was completed, I logged out of Gnome, and chose KDE... and it worked!

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