Debian Workstation (Bookworm) (v2023-02)

Date: 2023/02/25 (initial publish), 2025/09/04 (last update)

Source: note-00038

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TOC

This is an deprecated guide. See the newer updated guide.

This is based on the older deprecated guide.

Workstation usability

Let me update note on configuring and administrating my workstation under post-Debian Bookworm (12) GNU/Linux in testing.

This is non-hardware specific notes and tips.

For the hardware specific notes and tips, see:

System installation

Initial installation by debian-installer

The initial installation by the debian-installer should skip “Desktop environment” task to make it light GUI-less install.

This installs (mostly) packages with Priority: values in required, important and standard.

Initial setup (manual)

I found running following provides convenient work environment for the normal installation. (For the virtual environment installation, you may skip some parts.)

# No passowrd required for the user in sudo group
# please note the last match wins configuration
%sudo ALL = (ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
# No password for 8 hours
#Defaults timestamp_timeout = 480
#Defaults timestamp_type = global

NOTE: Please note that the last matching configuration is active for sudo.

Initial setup (automatic)

Running initial-setup script found at my repository should set up the same as the above manual case.

NOTE: See Personal DEB package repository for how personal repo is created and used.

Tidy-up package installation status for aptitude.

Since I use aptitude as the primary package maintenance tool, I usually tidy-up package auto install flags (M) missing for some libraries after the initial install.

Use of ~i!~M~poptional in l prompt in aptitude to set library packages as auto-installed. If some of them are not used by other program, let them remove.

Now you can verify intentionally installed packages with:

$ aptitude search '~i!~M~poptional'

(This intensionally ignores some outdated packages with priority=extra packages.)

Install typical packages

Typically, installing 00-typ and 00-notex task packages from the personal repo sets up a decent workstation.

Set-up GRUB

In order to probe OSs on other drives, add a following line to /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

This is good idea for dual-boot on MBR disk.

But this is not so robust for btrfs.

Multi-boot with GRUB

For more robust multi-boot, I usually add following as /etc/grub.d/40_fixed_linux (The first line should be #!/bin/bash without space. Intentional mistype to avoid missing line):

#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries.  Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment.  Be careful not to change
# the 'exec tail' line above.
menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux --- main SSD' --class debian --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-fixed-fe3e1db5-6454-46d6-a14c-071208ebe4b1' {
        load_video
        insmod gzio
        if [ x$grub_platform = xxen ]; then insmod xzio; insmod lzopio; fi
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod btrfs
        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root fe3e1db5-6454-46d6-a14c-071208ebe4b1
        echo    'Loading Linux from /dev/nvme0n1p5 ...'
        linux   /@rootfs/vmlinuz root=UUID=fe3e1db5-6454-46d6-a14c-071208ebe4b1 ro rootflags=subvol=@rootfs  quiet
        echo    'Loading initial ramdisk from /dev/nvme0n1p5 ...'
        initrd  /@rootfs/initrd.img
}
menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux --- sub SSD' --class debian --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-fixed-51f9cd11-30b3-4d99-b2ed-fe411fa22ee6' {
        load_video
        insmod gzio
        if [ x$grub_platform = xxen ]; then insmod xzio; insmod lzopio; fi
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod btrfs
        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 51f9cd11-30b3-4d99-b2ed-fe411fa22ee6
        echo    'Loading Linux from /dev/nvme1n1p1 ...'
        linux   /@rootfs/vmlinuz root=UUID=51f9cd11-30b3-4d99-b2ed-fe411fa22ee6 ro rootflags=subvol=@rootfs  quiet
        echo    'Loading initial ramdisk from /dev/nvme1n1p1 ...'
        initrd  /@rootfs/initrd.img
}

If you have multiple Debian system installed, you should make a backup copy of /boot/efi/EFI/debian/grub.cfg to protect it gets overridden by installing the second Debian system.

See https://wiki.debian.org/Btrfs%20migration .

Re-install and UID/GID issues

UID and GID used by some applications are not fixed. So, if you reinstall the exact same packages in a different order, you end up assigning UID and GID for the application.

UID in range between 101-999 such as ones for avahi, saned, colord, _ssh, … are the most susceptible on this issue.

apt-cacher-ng needs special attention.

EFI-based firmware updates

Install gnome-firmware package and invoke GUI to update firmware on devices supported by fwupd using Linux Vendor Firmware Service.

Many firmware data can be updated using gnome-firmware.

Workaround for some firmware

Some firmware devices may experience some problem to be updated by gnome-firmware.

Most notable one on my system was “Lenovo System Firmware”. (I don’t know if this was version dependent or not.) I used vendor’s BIOS update offered as bootable CD and made USB key containing it image data:

If the BIOS options Security > Secure Boot is enabled, it may restrict booting up from the BIOS Update bootable CD image, you may need to disabled the Secure Boot option to use it.

If Windows 10 or 11 is installed, you may need to reenable Secure Boot after this operation.

Desktop customization

These settings also need to be set again after some major update of GNOME.

GUI Desktop customization

The gnome-tweak package installed as a dependency of gnome package helps to tweak the system.

Although I don’t use this feature, once GNOME Shell integration is installed to the Chrome browser, you can adjust locally installed GNOME extensions via browser from GNOME Extension web site.

Terminal customization

Right mouse click with single button

For Mac or some Sony Vaio with single tap pad button, the following allows proper secondary-click (or even middle-click).

Keyboard shortcut customization (GNOME Settings – launcher)

Keyboard shortcut customization (GNOME Settings – custom shortcut)

Name     Terminal
Command  gnome-terminal
Shortcut SUPER-\

(SUPER-\ is easier to type than SUPER-T.)

Keyboard shortcut customization (Input Method)

New better way with GNOME extension

(The older method is recorded in GNOME shell changes.)

prefs.js

Since I don’t intend to use SUPER-SPACE and SUPER-SHIFT-SPACE shortcuts, I don’t bother to disabled normal SUPER-SPACE and SUPER-SHIFT-SPACE shortcuts in “Settings” -> “Keyboard” -> “Keyboard Shortcuts” -> “Typing”.

For other extensions I use, see GNOME extensions for better UX.

Keyboard shortcut customization (IM)

For Japanese input with US keyboard, set IM (mozc etc.) configuration as:

Since Windows-E style Alt-` is grubbed by Gnome Desktop, this can’t be used to toggle IM for Mozc.

See my old Japanese input on US-keyboard (in Japanese) and its Google translation.

Note on non usable shortcut key combos for super

Keyboard shortcut customization (GNOME Tweaks)

For Vim use:

Web browser

Although Chromium exists in the official Debian repository, it lacks account synchronization capability with other devices since 2021. Although there are some workarounds tips posted on web, installing Chrome can solve this situation for sure.

The best solution seems to be adding APT repository by adding /etc/apt/sources.d/google.sources in DEB822-STYLE FORMAT and select the google-chrome-stable package.

Mail client

For the GUI access to the remotely hosted IMAP4 mail services, use GNOME Online accounts and Evolution. This approach works for Gmail etc. and compatible with using other devices such as smart phones. Evolution can also be configured to read locally delivered mails to mbox too. (send+receive).

For the command line such as reportbug and daemon programs such as cron to send mails to external hosts and local accounts, use of exim4 as the locally installed MTA is good idea. With “sudo dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config”, Select “mail sent by smarthost; received via SMTP or fetchmail”. Everything else can be default.

To use Gmail for smarthost, set up “Mail Server configuration” as “smtp.gmail.com::587”. It is irrelevant for us to worry “Hide local mail name …” since the smarthost service rewrites it anyway. Edit /etc/exim4/passwd.client as: smtp.gmail.com:foo.bar@gmail.com:application_password (You need to create application_password in advance.)

Whenever I wish to send out mails with “@debian.org” address, I use ssh+sendmail (created shell script ~/bin/sendmail-p.d.o) to access a Debian host. (This trick may be usable for any hosts such as salsa.debian.org etc.)

I have mail configuration for:

I usually don’t bother with fetchmail these days.

GRUB 2 wallpaper

Place your JPEG wallpaper graphics (JPEG) in /boot/grub/ and run sudo update-grub or sudo dpkg-reconfigure grub-efi-amd64.

GNOME desktop wallpaper

You can set wallpaper graphics from:

Command line

Personal packages

These are my personal packages to help my command line. The source of these are published to my github repo and binary packages are published to my github web page.

Build script is repository.sh.

See Personal DEB package repository for the method to publish and their usage

Shell setups

Frequent commands to use:

Test accounts

Adding extra user name for /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow with the same UID=1000 enables to create useful test accounts. Please make sure to create different home directory for each user name. GDM seems to get confused by this situation of single UID having multiple user names. So I gave up.

I decided to create accounts, for example u1 accessible by osamu as group, with:

$ sudo adduser --comment "" u1
$ sudo adduser osamu u1

LibreOffice

The version of LibreOffice available on Debian testing environment has some glitches more often than the version available on Debian stable environment. Issues for printing to Hagaki was the killer bug for me.

I find that the installation of LibreOffice Debian packages available from the upstream LibreOffice site on Debian testing environment is the least effort solution for me. For stability, I chose older stable 6.4.7.2-2 version aimed for business deployments (2021/12). This enabled me to print nicely to Hagaki.

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