How to get sound working in Debian

I assume your Debian box already installed with Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). If not, please install those pacakages first.

# apt-get install alsa-base

But i recommend you install other packages like alsa-utils, alsamixergui and alsaplayer. Then you need to investigate your sound card.

# lspci | grep -i audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01 )

# alsaconf
Terminating processes: 984.
Unloading ALSA sound driver modules: snd-hda-intel snd-hda-codec snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-pcm snd-timer snd-page-alloc.
Building card database...
Running update-modules...
Loading driver...
Setting default volumes...
===============================================================================
Now ALSA is ready to use.
For adjustment of volumes, use your favorite mixer.

Have a lot of fun!

# alsamixer

# speaker-test
speaker-test 1.0.13

# mpg321 01\ London\ Calling.mp3
High Performance MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 Audio Player for Layer 1, 2, and 3.
Version 0.59q (2002/03/23). Written and copyrights by Joe Drew.
Uses code from various people. See 'README' for more!

Now I'm enjoy to listen Clash's London Calling again.

last edit : some people ask me how to start alsaconf at bootime. This is a simple solution from my experience, after you have done speaker-test, pls do this :

#alsactl store

and also include the following lines in your /etc/rc.local file:

alsactl restore

How to install multimedia codecs, libdvdcss in Debian

Debian can to anything from pure unix server type machine to rich-multimedia desktop PC. After you do fresh installation, you need to do some housekeeping so as to enable you to play multimedia files which are encoded using proprietary or closed formats such as Microsoft's WMV files or Apple's quick time files. Here the way :

Open the file /etc/apt/sources.list and append the following line :

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main

then, update the packages using the command :

# apt-get update

Now you can install all the multimedia codecs as well as libdvdcss which is necessary to view DVD movies, using the

# apt-get install w32codecs libdvdcss2

Now you can install multimedia player like VLC, Mplayer, etc.

How to use apt-get behind proxy server in Debian

If you are a Debian GNU/Linux user, then you’re probably familiar with synaptic and apt-get to install application from software repositories. This post focussed on how to use apt-get/synaptic behind proxy server/firewall which under normal circumstances, you’re unable to use apt-get.

If you’re using Synaptic
Open up your Synaptic package manager (usually as root), go to Settings-> Preference -> Network. Enter your proxy server details like : username:password@proxyserver.net (or your server ip address), and put the proxy server port (usually 8080).

If you’re using command-line apt-get
Unlike Red Hat-based distro, in Debian you need to do some tweaking some to makesure your apt-get working using command-line.

Edit your /etc/bash.bashrc file as root.

Put these line at the end of your /etc/bash.bashrc file :

export http_proxy=http://username:password@yourproxyserver.net:port/
export ftp_proxy=http://username:password@yourproxyserver.net:port/

Then put the following code into the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/proxy

Acquire::http::Proxy "http://yourproxyserver.net:8080";

You can omit the username:password, if your proxy server has no password. That’s all for today! Happy apt-get-ing!

Finally i got my Debian again

In 2005, i put Debian 3.1 (Sarge) on my web server around 3 months to see how 'power' Debian it is. At that time, i'm waiting a new release for Slackware 10.2 and after that i'm shift back to Slackware. During three months using Debian as a production server, i have no big issue using them except once my web server got defaced. But this is not because the vulnerabilities from Debian itself but maybe misconfiguration of php.ini in Jooomla! CMS. Last week, i come again to Debian. The installation pretty straight forward, i know Etch have their GUI installer, but i'm prefer using their text based installer. I use DVD version that i got when i bought a linux magazine. The installation was complete using GNOME as a default window manager.