Mintifying Debian
Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) has finally got a 64-bit version. And it’s pretty good, actually. In fact, that’s the distro I am going to recommend to GNU/Linux newbies from now on. It has all the advantages of Linux Mint Ubuntu Edition (LMUE) such as being simple and GUI-oriented and having most things working out of the box, but less bloated and with Debian’s superior stability (yes, even if it is based on the testing branch) and performance.
The only problem I have found with LMDE is that the installer is far too minimalistic and lacks any advanced options, which maybe good for newbies, but it is not so convenient for me. Happily, another of the virtues of LMDE is that is aims to be fully compatible with its parent and, therefore, one can always do a regular Debian installation with the advanced options he or she needs and then mintifying it by adding the Mint repositories. The result does not look exactly like a fresh LMDE install, but it saves you a lot of time configuring Debian in order to make it usable for multimedia and other usual tasks.
How? This is how:
1) If you don’t have it already installed, install Debian. The default desktop (Gnome) is recommended for a better Mint experience. When possible, I always use the netinstall image, which saves a lot of bandwidth. If you prefer, Debian also has a live CD-edition, called Debian-live. UPDATE: If you need non-free firmware, you may also search for the installation image containing the proprietary firmware.
2) At this stage it is quite convenient adding your regular user to the sudoers group. As usual with GNU/Linux, this can be accomplished in several different ways. Even if in this case they may not be entirely equivalent, they mostly will for practical purposes.
One way is going to the menu System -> Users and Groups and adding yourself to the “sudo” group. Another way is editing the file /etc/sudoers and adding a line like “yourusername ALL=(ALL) ALL” without quotes right bellow the line “root ALL=(ALL) ALL”. In order for the changes to make effect you need to log out and then in again.
3) Then you may want to add the contrib and non-free Debian repositories by editing the file /etc/apt/sources.list and adding “contrib non-free” without quotes right at the end of each line ending with “main”.
4) Next you add the Debian Multimedia and the Mint repositories. You can for instance create a file within /etc/apt/sources.list.d called “lmde.list” and add these two lines into it:
deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org testing main non-free
UPDATE: All occurrences of “squeezy” have been replaced with “testing”.
5) We are almost done, but, if you want to avoid messages about missing keys, you should install the keyring packages for both repos:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linuxmint-keyring debian-multimedia-keyring
UPDATE: This step has been simplified.
6) Finally you update your system and install some stuff:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install mint-meta-debian
7) When that’s finished you can reboot into your mintified Debian and customise it to your likings.
UPDATE: What follows is out-of-date. Squeeze has already became Stable long ago and now Testing is Wheezy. In order to mintify Debian you need to use the Testing branch.
Caveats: Apart from the already mentioned aesthetic differences between mintified Debian and regular Mint, you should be aware that soon Squeeze, now testing, will become Stable and won’t be testing any more. There, you will have two options:
i) Do nothing and stick to Squeeze (soon-to-be-stable). This is the safe option, but be aware that the Mint repos are going to go with testing and therefore you are going to have a mixed system which may give you some (I guess they should be minor) issues in the future.
ii) Change all “squeeze” occurrences in /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/lmde.list to “testing” and perform a system upgrade. Then you will be always using the testing branch which is mostly safe and stable, but tend to be more so towards the late stages of development and less so during the transition periods. In fact, if you are sure that is what you want, you can do it right now.
A third way would be staying with Squeeze for a while and upgrading only when required (if, for instance, you need more recent versions of the software).
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What is the purpose of installing Debian and later Mintify it?
If a person installs Debian, he/she probably is well verse enough with Debian and will stay with it.
If a person installs Mint, then it’s already Mint
One thing that interests me is how much desktop-optimized is mint’s kernel? (I’m currently using Aptosid’s kernel under Debian)
Cheerio!
Cae,
Installing Debian is not so hard. You just need to follow the instructions and have some minimal notions about Linux partitioning. Other than that, the basic installation is quite straightforward for someone who had already installed any other OS. Even a first-timer with time and interest can figure it out.
LMDE is just plain Debian with a few additional packages and some pre-configured stuff. Therefore, if you mintify Debian you stay with Debian. It is not a different OS and it is 100% compatible. I just found out that the mintification automatises a lot of configuration task that otherwise you would have to remember and perform manually one by one (unless, of course, if you write your own script to do so). You have for instance, sun-java, the non-free flash plugin, a nicely organised control center, etc. Of course, you can do all that easily from a plain Debian installation, it is just considerably more time consuming.
Why not then just installing LMDE? As I mention in the article, the LMDE installer is too basic from some users. It is not only that, for instance, you cannot configure the LVM, is that lvm2 is not even installed and, if you configure that beforehand, you will soon find out that the installer is not aware of logical volume management and forces you to re-create and reformat the partitions. And the same applies to encryption, etc. That is the interest of using the Debian installer.
Hi Ivan,
I have no clue, but keep in mind one thing: Linux Mint (LM) is a Ubuntu-based distro and Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is a Debian-based distro and fully compatible with its parent. So they are two quite different distros. I think to remember that LM comes with its own custom kernel, which is a modification of the Ubuntu kernel (however, you should verify this by reading the LM documentation or just asking the developers). Nevertheless, as far as I can tell, the LMDE kernel is just the Debian testing kernel, with no modifications whatsoever as it comes right from the Debian repositories.
In my experience, Ubuntu feels more bloated and less responsive than Debian (same desktop) and I see not difference after mintifying Debian. But that is all I can tell. In principle, I guess you should be able to use an Aptosid kernel with LMDE and mintifyied Debian. Another option would be this:
http://liquorix.net/
But I have not tested it.
@koroshitchy
Thanks for the detailed answer. I had some problems with Liquorix, so I abandoned it some time ago.
The fact I like about aptosid’s kernel is that it is usually newer than debian’s (2.6.37 atm) and that it appears more responsive for UI stuff while some background process is grinding the disk and cpu (such as compiling KDE). Otherwise, I haven’t really noticed any changes.
I for one, welcome LMDE (although I’m probably not gonna use it) because we need more ‘almost vanilla’ Debian distros for common users
The only real contestant so far was sidux/aptosid.
Heh, I remember Shuttleworth telling me that Ubuntu tries to deviate from Debian as little as possible. The times have really changed since 2007
Cheerio!
Hi Ivan,
Yes, aptosid is also one of my favorite distros. I would be using it in my laptop if it were not because my sound card is not well supported by kernels newer than 2.6.32. In fact, the entire last year I have been using aptosid plus vanilla 2.6.32, but then I decided this was a bit pointless and came back to “old” Squeeze
In my workstation I need rock-solid stability. In fact, I was playing with Scientific Linux for a while (RHEL 5.X) but this was really too old and I had problems for compiling and installing certain software because of “obsolete” libraries and so on. Besides, I am used to apt, which in my experience works better than rpm-based package managers. So I have adopted Squeeze as my standard for all my computers and I will stick to it until it eventually will become too old.
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Very nice, and quality post.
Got me interested in what the real differences were between LMDE and Debian.
I look forward to similar posts from you.
Steve.
I went ahead and added the linuxmint.com repository to my 64-bit debian lennynahalf install, but have not yet pulled the trigger on any updates or package installations resulting therefrom. Last time I tried to install Iceweasel (Firefox) 3.6.x, I ended up in dependency hell (until I reverted back to 3.5.x) I am not able to upgrade to squeeze as I will lose fglrx / ATI Catalyst support for my integrated Xpress 200M laptop graphics card. (However, I am cranking the 2.6.29 kernel, ext4, xorg 7.3, and fglrx 8.593.) Any thoughts on the possibility of pulling the trigger on these mint packages on a lenny install?
That’s a tricky question and I am afraid I don’t think I can help you. Mintifying Squeeze is one thing and Mintifying Lenny is an entirely different business. In fact, I don’t think it is a good idea. I would not use the Mint repos, I think I would rather try to do it manually. Just add the Debian Multimedia repos for Lenny and install the codecs and everything you need. It just takes more time, but it is pretty straightforward. If you go for the manual way, you can search on the internet for the list of the default LMDE packages and install what is not already installed in your system (minus those that are Mint-specific). The rest is just aesthetics and you can do better than Mint just be customising Gnome or the desktop of your choice.
In addition, in my experience with LMDE 64-bit, I have observed that the multimedia plugin installed by default sucks (I don’t remember which one it is, but it is one of this all-comprehensive plugins). The xine plugin, with its limitations, works better with Firefox.
If I mintify Debian, what are the aesthetic differences? Do I end up with a desktop that looks like the Mint version? Or with the generic Gnome desktop, menus, etc.? Thanks.
If I recall it correctly, for the most part you end up with a Mint desktop minus a couple of small details. The most important one is that you still need to add the Mint menu to the task bar (and remove the Gnome one).
Hmm…. how does this apply to “mintifying” a debian server? I don’t care about the UI stuff, I just want to make sure that my server runs the same versions of programming languages, web servers, databases, etc as my development workstation does.
My workstation is LMDE (and I’m happy with it so far), so I assume my server should be Debian, … but debian what? testing? stable? cut? is cut a real thing or just an idea? I know don’t need the multimedia repo. If I add that mint repo, is it going to pull in a bunch of X/gnome stuff I don’t need/want?
Will doing this work properly on an ec2 instance, or will the virtualized kernel get screwed up somehow?
Or maybe I should just run debian stable, and not change anything?
LMDE is Debian Testing. I guess that mintifying a server will not make much of a difference… LMDE is meant to be fully compatible with Debian Testing and uses the Debian Testing repos. In the LMDE-specific repos there are few applications and those are mostly desktop-related. Just adding the repos should not pull anything. Most likely you will not need the Debian Multimedia repos, just the LMDE ones.
When I enter sudo apt-get install mint-meta-debian i get this
De volgende pakketten hebben niet-voldane vereisten: (next packages have non-fulfilled requests)
mint-meta-debian : Vereisten (requests): mint-meta-common maar het zal niet geïnstalleerd worden (it will not be installed)
Vereisten (requests): mint-meta-codecs maar het zal niet geïnstalleerd worden (it will not be installed)
Vereisten (requests): nautilus-gksu maar het is niet installeerbaar (it will not be installed)
E: Niet-werkende pakketten: (non working packages)
(translation in English: original language is dutch). I seem to be unable to mintify. using “aptitude install”… gives more or less the same result…
1.- First of all, the instruction are out-of-date. Currently you should be using Debian Wheezy (testing). At the time that the article was written Lenny was Stable and Squeeze was Testing. Now Squeeze is Stable and Wheezy is Testing. Provided that LMDE is based upon testing, you should mintify only the testing branch.
2.- If that was already the case for you, please, check that your apt sources.list contains the right repository names and remember to update the apt cache in case you change something:
http://forum.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=197&t=79533
http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php?release=Debian
(maybe something has changed since the time my instructions were written).
Have you added the Debian Multimedia repository for Wheezy?
3.- If 1 and 2 look correct, the problem comes from the Mint meta-package mint-meta-debian and it is most likely a temporary problem. You can obtain more information by trying to install the individual sub-meta-packages (or even the individual packages) and see why they refuse to install.