Quick notes on Squeeze

A few more quick notes on Debian Squeeze, which I'm still playing around with.

First of all: if you care at all about keeping a Debian system neat and tidy, you absolutely must install things by giving apt-get the --no-install-recommends option. You can set this permanently by putting the following line:

APT::Install-Recommends "0";

in /etc/apt/apt.conf. This tells apt to only install the package you asked for and things it depends on, not things that are "recommended" to be installed with it. I mentioned briefly in my last post that Debian packagers often list things as dependencies which should in fact only be recommendations. Well, they also apparently often list things as recommendations which should, at best, be "suggestions" (which aren't installed by default). Seriously, it's insane the stuff you'll end up with if you're not careful about this. Try installing keepassx, a simple password manager for X, without ignoring recommendations and you'll end up with MySQL installed. Or try installing evince, a PDF viewer, and you'll end up with a bunch of filesystem related stuff installed (FUSE stuff, as well as stuff for dealing with DOS and NTFS filesystems). It seems like there has been no effort at all made by the Debian community to control this sort of thing, which is disappointing. Another good bit of advice is to use deborphan to show you packages which are not dependencies of anything, so that you can uninstall anything that's snuck in (say, by virtue of Debian's absurdly broad definition of "standard system tools"). With a bit of effort, it's possible to keep things fairly lean.

Two other things I've noticed after a few days of using Squeeze: first, it looks beautiful. I suspect that what's happened here is Squeeze has automatically configured a bunch of X.org stuff which Arch never did (not that I'd expect Arch to) and which I didn't know enough about to set up myself. Maybe I'm running in 32 bit colour now and was in 24 bit on Arch, and/or maybe I now have font anti-aliasing on and previously didn't, or who knows what else. Whatever the cause, everything just looks a lot brighter and more crisp than I'm used two. Secondly, it's damn fast. However, I don't think this is actually about Debian vs Arch at all (after all, there's no good reason Arch should be slower). On my Arch install I've been using Xfce as a desktop environment, whereas with Squeeze I've been experimenting with something a bit lighter - just Openbox, with tint2 providing a panel. My hypothesis is that with this setup, all my ordinary applications can fit comfortably in RAM without any swapping (seriously, I've used zero swap on my Squeeze install for days), whereas with the extra weight of Xfce I was pushed over that limit and swapping regularly. I could be wrong about the cause, but whatever. It's just amazing. Iceweasel (rebranded Firefox) 10 starts up from scratch in a fresh X session in about one second, and Sylpheed does the same. Given the processor (a single core CPU clocked at just over 1 GHz, with frequency scaling turned on - something Debian setup for me automatically, by the way), I find that very impressive. Getting Iceweasel 10 to install from backports was very easy, incidentally, and is much nice than than version 3 which comes with Squeeze. I'm struggling to get a modern version of the Arduino IDE installed, however, since it's not in backports. It is available in Wheezy, including in source form, so by my understanding it should be easy to download the Wheezy source package and compile it against my Squeeze libraries, but whenever I ask apt to do this it complains that it can't find Arduino source in testing. I know it's in there, so I must just not be asking it correctly. Hopefully I'll figure it out soon enough.