Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" on EEEPC 900

The new Linux Debian, 6.0 “Squeeze”, version has been recently released. Less than a day after the official release date the live version has been also made available. I decided to try it on my EEEPC 900 not to evaluate a possible definitive installation but because Debian is the base on which are built Ubuntu and many important distributions so it is interesting to see how the “pure” Debian behave and perform on my system.

Download and installation

I downloaded the disk image from Debian download page, many download options are possible, among the others the one I prefer, Bittorrent, is available . I then tried first to prepare the bootable SD card, as usual, with the boot disk preparation utility provided with Ubuntu but, for same reason, the tool didn't work with the downloaded Debian disk image. I so went for the command line way and, following Debian's site instructions, I copied the image to the SD card with the following commands.

sudo chmod 777 /dev/sdc

cat debian-live-6.0.0-i386-gnome-desktop.img > /dev/sdc

after a while I have been able to boot from the SD card to Debian (unfortunately this method made my SD card look like it was only 1GB).

Libre Office on Ubuntu Linux (and the EEEPC)

Libre Office is the latest development split from the more known Open Office project. There has been, recently, a lot of talking about it since it seems that it will be shipped in future Ubuntu's releases replacing Open Office. I decided to give it a first person look and install it on the EEEPC, where I usually write my blog posts.

Download and installation

Libre office isn't include yet in Ubuntu's repositories so installing is a little tricky but not difficult. I downloaded installation files from Libre Office download page. Installation files are three archives: a bigger main installation archive and smaller language and help-files archives. The download page properly recognised my operating system and language offering by default the correct files. A torrent download option is also available.

The downloaded archives contain a lot of .deb package files. After extracting all .deb files on the same folder I simply changed directory to where files where extracted and executed the following command on every folder:

sudo dpkg --install *.deb

Once the install process ended all programs of Libre Office suite have been made available in the “Office” folder of Ubuntu's NBR interface.