adding fluxbox in stretch

I installed Debian Stretch on an old notebook a few months ago; for this installation, I went with the Openbox window manager, but no desktop environment.

Later, I decided to add Fluxbox.

The default Fluxbox desktop in Stretch:

The default menu wasn't all that great, but it included an entry for gmrun, which was enough for me to get to work.

Here's how my Fluxbox desktop is looking right now:

Not too bad.

By the way, there's a project (still under development) called DebianFluxbox, which is "a Debian Pure Blend which aims to provide a fully configured installation of Fluxbox, a light weight windows manager, out of the box." Interesting; I'd like to check it out sometime.

time and date in plasma 5

KDE Plasma 5 (version 5.8.6 in Debian 9) is still kinda lacking when it comes to being able to customize the date and time formats, but the "Formats" window in the System Settings Module does help somewhat.

I prefer to have a 24-hour digital clock, and I like a mm-dd-yy date format. Or even something like  Jul 07 17 or Jul 07  -- either one would be fine with me. I can easily do these things in Xfce, but not in Plasma 5.

Getting the 24-hour digital clock was fairly simple; I marked the "Detailed Settings" box; then, changed the setting for "Time" to "Default (C)":

Then I clicked the "Apply" button. I had to log into a new session for the changes to take effect.

Note the "Examples" towards the bottom of the "Formats" window. The "short format" for the date is not exactly what I want. The "short format" is what shows up for the date on the panel; I saw no easy way to customize it to my liking, so in the end I decided to leave the date off the panel. I guess I can live with seeing the date when the cursor is hovering over the digital clock:

goodbye to the K, hello to the Swirl

Clicking on the big "K" icon on the KDE Plasma 5 panel brings up the Application Menu -- aka, at least in the old days, as "the KMenu." That icon is shown here, at the bottom of my left-side, vertical panel:

In Debian 9 ("Stretch"), I prefer a Debian logo icon. To change it, first I right-clicked on the "K" icon and selected "Application Menu Settings...":

In the Applications Menu Settings window, I marked the box to "Use custom image":

Then, over to the right of that, I clicked on the folder icon:

In the "Choose an image" window, I navigated to the /usr/share/pixmaps directory and selected debian-logo.png:

Then, back in the "Application Menu Settings" window, I clicked the "Apply" button:

All finished:

stretch, with kde and openbox

Debian 9 ("stretch") was officially released as the latest Debian Stable on June 18. A little over a week later, I downloaded the debian-9.0.0-amd64-netinst iso and did a network installation; I went with the KDE Plasma 5 desktop, and I also added Openbox.

Stretch ships with KDE Plasma 5.8.6. I've added the Double Commander file manager to use instead of Dolphin, along with several other apps that weren't provided by default, like Geany text editor, VLC media player, Geeqie image viewer, and Mirage image viewer. Stretch comes with Firefox ESR (version 52.2.0), but I installed Pale Moon web browser to use instead.

Some other packages I added included synaptic, inxi, rsync, localepurge, screenfetch, and some stuff to use in Openbox, like nitrogen, gmrun, the Debian menu package, compton (for Konsole transparency in Openbox), and gxmessage for my logout/shutdown script.

The default Plasma desktop in Stretch:

Note the absence of application launchers on the panel. Those can be added, of course, but I kinda like that the choice is left to the user.

Here's a shot of the empty desktop after I made some changes:

Clicking on the KMenu displays what, in my opinion, is a smart arrangement: a customizable "Favorites" bar, which I use instead of "traditional" panel launchers; below that, the Logout, Reboot, and Shut Down buttons; the Application Menu, which I use instead of Plasma 5's default Application Launcher; and below that, a search box:

From the Desktop Settings, I switched around the mouse actions so that a left-click on the open desktop reveals the Standard Menu and a right-click opens the "Application Launcher" menu:

I've turned off most of Plasma 5's desktop effects, but one I've kept is the Desktop Cube. In my case, it isn't really a "cube" since I use only three virtual desktops:

For my Openbox setup, I'm using a customized desktop right-click menu, and a left-side, vertical tint2 panel with a few application launchers at the bottom. KDE apps, and all other apps, are of course available from within the Openbox session:

While many people complain (quite loudly, in many cases) that Debian is still too time-consuming (and, at times, still to difficult) to install and set up, I rather enjoy the process. I feel the same way about installing Arch Linux. For users with less patience and less time on their hands, there are many other Linux distros out there that provide nicer out-of-the-box experiences than what you'll get from Debian (or Arch), but at the cost of fewer installation options. Also, those "easier distros" tend to include a lot more stuff that I don't want or need.

In any case, I'm now set with another nice Debian Stable installation, which I'll be using on my main computer for the next two or three years. Life is good.

Some options for getting Debian can be found here: https://www.debian.org/distrib/

keyring issues

While trying to bring in updates in Antergos the other day (with the pacman -Syu command), I saw the following error messages:

error: antergos-keyring: signature from "Antergos Build Server (Automated Package Build System) " is unknown trust
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/antergos-keyring-20170524-1-any.pkg.tar.xz is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]
error: antergos-mirrorlist: signature from "Antergos Build Server (Automated Package Build System) " is unknown trust
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/antergos-mirrorlist-20170527-1-any.pkg.tar.xz is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]
error: pamac: signature from "Antergos Build Server (Automated Package Build System) " is unknown trust
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/pamac-4.3.6-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]

I typed n for "no" at each of those prompts. Result:

error: failed to commit transaction (invalid or corrupted package)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

I got things fixed, but only after having to dig through a few threads at the Antergos forums. Today, I see the issue mentioned in the "Pacman & Package Upgrade" section at the main page of the Antergos forums (at the moment, there's a link to the "Error during updating" thread). Too bad that there wasn't an "official" announcement posted somewhere.

In any case, the commands I used here to fix the problem:

wget http://mirrors.antergos.com/antergos/x86_64/antergos-keyring-20170524-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
sudo pacman -U antergos-keyring-20170524-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
sudo pacman -Scc
sudo pacman-key --refresh-keys
sudo pacman -Syu

The above-mentioned "Error during updating" thread contains posts showing a similar set of commands -- slightly different than what I ended up using here, though:

wget http://mirrors.antergos.com/antergos/x86_64/antergos-keyring-20170524-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
wget http://mirrors.antergos.com/antergos/x86_64/antergos-keyring-20170524-1-any.pkg.tar.xz.sig
pacman-key --verify antergos-keyring-20170524-1-any.pkg.tar.xz.sig
pacman -U antergos-keyring-20170524-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
sudo pacman -Scc
sudo pacman-key --refresh-keys
sudo pacman -Syu

Or, to "skip the sig-check":

wget http://mirrors.antergos.com/antergos/x86_64/antergos-keyring-20170524-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -U antergos-keyring-20170524-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
sudo pacman -Scc
sudo pacman-key --refresh-keys
sudo pacman -Syu

Good luck, Antergos users!

from the 'labs

I haven't tried this one myself, but ArchLabs Linux was "inspired by" BunsenLabs. I'm a big fan of BunsenLabs even though I don't really use it these days, as I prefer my own Debian Stretch + Openbox installation. Still, BunsenLabs is easily my favorite Debian derivative, so maybe one day I'll have a look at ArchLabs. Can't imagine that I'd ever replace Arch with it, but I might like ArchLabs for a quick installation on a spare computer.

Anyway, thought I'd post a couple of links, for those who might be interested:

https://archlabsblog.wordpress.com/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/archlabs/

They've got a tutorial about installing ArchLabs in Virtualbox, too.

juiced

For years, I've been a proponent of a diet high in fresh fruits and vegetables. Many elite athletes would agree.

Consider the San Antonio Spurs and their cold-pressed fruit and vegeatable juice drinks. It seems that the Spurs are kinda tight-lipped about it, but according to the article linked below, "Several Spurs see their special drinks as an all-important first step to the recovery process that staves off fatigue and injury."

They may be on to something:

"Over the last decade, and despite an older roster, the Spurs have ranked first in the league with only 1,054 missed games to injury."

Article: The San Antonio Spurs, made with 100 percent juice