Installing Debian Linux on PPC Part III - Installing the GUI

[4/24/15: Updated for Jessie stable]

By now you should be booted into your new system (if you're dual booting OS 9 and you didn't see a "MacOS" option in yaboot, see how to add it manually in Part IV). You're past the startup dialogues and are staring at a terminal prompt, yourhostname login: _

Here you want to type root, then enter your root password. Now you're logged in as root with all the superpowers that come with it. Don't let it go to your head, though. You'll only be the root user momentarily.

We logged in as root because in order to get administrative access through your user account, you have to install the sudo package first. So at the command prompt, type:

aptitude install sudo

Aptitude is the installer program we'll be using. Other people may use apt-get, but they're basically the same. Once it's done installing, type visudo at the next prompt and you'll see a text file to edit. Navigate down to the line:

root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

and just below it add the line:

yourusername ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

Then save changes with ctrl + o (and name it "/etc/sudoers" not "/etc/sudoers.tmp"), exit with ctrl + x, and finally logout of your root session by typing logout.

At the next prompt, type your username and user password and you should be logged in with sudo capabilities. Incidentally, if you want to take a break here, enter:

systemctl poweroff

and this will shutdown your computer.

But if you're still here, now's the time to install your GUI. Again, you could install "lxde" or "xfce4" here, but for our purposes (fastest performance, obsessive DIYism) we're going with Openbox. At a terminal prompt, type on one line:

sudo aptitude install xorg slim openbox obconf obmenu menu-xdg gtk2-engines-murrine gtk2-engines-pixbuf fonts-freefont-otf fonts-linuxlibertine lxappearance

What it all means:

1) Xorg provides the X window server.
2) Slim is a slim and fast login manager (LightDM is a more popular, but sometimes troublesome, choice).
3) Openbox, obconf, and obmenu are what you need for Openbox.
4) menu-xdg provides a Debian applications menu.
5) The murrine and pixbuf engines are required by many third-party themes.
6) fonts-freefont-otf and fonts-linuxlibertine provide some extra fonts I like.
7) LXAppearance manages your themes, fonts, and icons.

Enter your password and watch the install happen. Once done, we can move on to installing applications, but let's take care of a couple of things first. First, edit your apt sources:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

In here, you'll want to add extra repositories by adding "contrib" and "non-free" to each of the entries like this (single line):

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free

Make sure they all end in main contrib non-free. Then save and exit, and run:

sudo aptitude update

to update to your new repositories. That last update step is required every time you change your sources list, and it's a good idea to run it before installing any new software.

Next, if you have a first-generation Airport card or an ATI graphics card you need to install non-free firmware*, and you also may want to add the Microsoft fonts installer for fonts many web pages use (single line):

sudo aptitude install firmware-linux-nonfree ttf-mscorefonts-installer

*Note: With firmware-linux-nonfree installed, Radeon users may get graphics lock-ups unless you force PCI mode at boot, i.e. at the second Yaboot screen, type "Linux radeon.agpmode=-1" without quotes. This is explained more in Part IV - Graphics.

Meanwhile, the mscorefonts installer will auto-launch and take a bit to install all the fonts.

Now we can install some applications. Since my laptop is going to be used for web surfing, writing, and music/video, I'm going to install just a basic set by typing on one line:

sudo aptitude install iceweasel icedove qupzilla sabnzbdplus transmission audacious mpv mplayer vlc smtube pluma libreoffice libreoffice-gtk fotoxx shutter mirage evince xournal asunder rox-filer xarchiver lxterminal default-jre icedtea-plugin filezilla gufw gksu

1) Iceweasel and Icedove are Firefox and Thunderbird rebranded.
2) QupZilla is a full-featured webkit browser. To set your system's default browser, check this page (Note: QupZilla doesn't receive security updates like Iceweasel does).
3) Sabnzbdplus and Transmission (execute command is transmission-gtk, FYI) are for Usenet and BitTorrent.
4) Audacious is a really cool, lightweight music player (or if you like console apps, there's Cmus which supports internet radio streaming, too).
5) mpv, MPlayer, and VLC are media players (See below for adding deb-multimedia apt sources as MPlayer is no longer in the official repositories. G3 users will need to compile VLC from source without Altivec--see Part V for more on that.).
6) SMTube is a Youtube viewer.
7) Pluma is basically the old Gedit without all the Gnome dependencies.
8) LibreOffice is for those of us who can't abide by Abiword, and libreoffice-gtk ensures LibreOffice uses your GTK theme.
9) Fotoxx is a lightweight image editor.
10) Shutter is a versatile Skitch replacement and screenshot utility.
11) Mirage and Evince are for viewing pics and pdfs, while Xournal offers basic pdf editing.
12) Asunder is a CD ripper and encoder.
13) Rox-filer is a lightning-fast file manager that I wrote about here (Thunar and PCManFM are two other relatively lightweight alternatives).
14) XArchiver is a GUI tool for unpacking zips and tars, etc.
15) LXTerminal is a close equivalent to OS X's Terminal.app.
16) default-jre installs open-source java (replace jre with jdk if you intend to develop java applications), and icedtea-plugin is a java web plug-in (some people report they need to disable this in Iceweasel because it causes their cpu to jump to 100%).
17) FileZilla I use for SFTP-ing between Macs.
18) Gufw is a simple firewall utility that requires root access, so you launch it with "gksudo gufw" (gksudo is installed with the gksu package).

As noted earlier, you need the unofficial Deb-Multimedia repositories to install MPlayer and a bunch of other multimedia packages which Debian's official repositories don't carry for licensing reasons. Go to www.deb-multimedia.org and follow the instructions, which are basically:

a) Add one of the deb-multimedia repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list, then run "sudo aptitude update".
b) Install deb-multimedia-keyring.
c) Ignore scary-sounding warnings about untrusted packages and install MPlayer.

I should also tell you about a little aptitude trick. There's a disc burning application called Brasero that I want, but when you install it the normal way it pulls in Yelp, a Gnome help guide, which I don't need. So to avoid that, try (on one line):

sudo aptitude install brasero --without-recommends

and it'll leave out recommended extras without interfering with the basic functions of the program.

Once all that's done, you're ready to enter your GUI. Just note that right and middle click are mapped by mouseemu to F10 and F11 (or on some keyboards F11 and F12) by default. You can change these by editing /etc/default/mouseemu and restarting the daemon with "sudo /etc/init.d/mouseemu restart". Xev and showkey are two command-line tools to get keycodes from (showkey must be run in an actual console, not a terminal emulator).

So to get to our GUI, type "systemctl reboot" to restart. I hope I didn't forget anything...

Coming up next, Part IV - Configuring Stuff. Be there or be square!

Part I - Pre-Installation
Part II - Installing the Base System
Part IV - Configuring Stuff
Part V - Bugs & Quirks