I’ve been trying out Debian 6.01a (well actually Wheezy, as I’ve upgraded it to “testing” so its more like 7.0 than 6.0) in a VirtualBox VM, as I’m seriously thinking of migrating from Fedora 15 when I rebuild my desktop machine with its new motherboard, RAM and GFX card (and maybe NIC).

I’ve found that the forums are about as useless as the Ubuntu forums, full of questions with no answers or really n00bish stuff. So I’ve made a list of things I’ve found that fix the main issues:

Also to upgrade from Sneeze to Wheezy you have to edit /etc/apt/sources.list and replace “sneeze” with “wheezy” or “testing”, simples!

I had to rename ~/.thunderbird to ~/.icedove to get the Debian-branded Thunderbird to import my settings, ~/.mozilla opened fine in Iceweasel or whatever Debian call Firefox.

Apparently getting the Nvidia drivers working is easier than on Fedora too – codecs, JDK6, Eclipse and Flash were certainly easier.

There is a bug with seahorse-plugins unfortunately which will totally remove Gnome if you try to install it! As I use that a lot, I hope they fix it soon. Nessus 4.4.1 is supposed to be getting a Debian 6 .deb soon too.

dpkg -i followed by apt-get -f install does dependency resolution on .deb files like Skype, although apparently gdebi does it in one go.

Here’s my apt transaction(s):

apt-get install -t squeeze-backports iceweasel icedove
apt-get install dkms screen gcc g++ bcc iasl xsltproc uuid-dev \
zlib1g-dev libidl-dev libsdl1.2-dev libxcursor-dev libasound2-dev \
libstdc++5 libhal-dev libpulse-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev \
libqt4-dev qt4-dev-tools libcap-dev libxmu-dev libxml-dom-perl \
mesa-common-dev libglu1-mesa-dev linux-kernel-headers \
libcurl4-openssl-dev libpam0g-dev libxinerama-dev \
libqt4-opengl-dev makeself ia32-libs libc6-dev-i386 lib32gcc1 \
gcc-multilib  lib32stdc++6 g++-multilib  gSTM knockd gnome-mplayer \
vlc git-core gnupg flex bison gperf libsdl1.2-dev libesd0-dev \
libwxgtk2.6-dev squashfs-tools build-essential zip curl \
libncurses5-dev zlib1g-dev sun-java6-jdk pngcrush  g++-multilib \
lib32z1-dev lib32ncurses5-dev lib32readline5-dev expect \
flashplugin-nonfree acroread libspreadsheet-writeexcel-perl \
audacious build-essential module-assistant make  compiz \
compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-fusion-plugins-main \
compiz-gnome compiz-gtk fusion-icon compiz-fusion-plugins-extra \
compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported gnote google-talkplugin \
sun-java6-plugin checkinstall alien compizconfig-backend-gconf \
libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 gstreamer0.10-plugins-really-bad \
nautilus-open-terminal smplayer qtgstreamer-plugins \
debian-multimedia-keyring p7zip-rar rar unrar conky gnupg2 \
ttf-mscorefonts-installer gedit-plugins fakeroot dh-make \
schedtool nvidia-settings jfsutils nvidia-kernel-dkms \
gstreamer0.10-gconf virtualbox-4.1 opera-next nvidia-glx-ia32 \
google-chrome-unstable ttf-mscorefonts-installer msttcorefonts \
firmware-realtek gdebi subversion libxrandr-dev python-dev \
texlive-latex-extra eclipse texlive-base ffmpeg mencoder \
iceowl-extension etherwake gip hydra hydra-gtk nmap \
geoip-bin qgit apt-file gftp-gtk libxml-dom-perl strace ltrace \
pyqt4-dev-tools python-wxgtk2.8 bsdiff dos2unix screenruler \
wireshark tcpdump mysql-client numlockx ntpdate icedove-enigmail \ 
backintime-gnome backintime-common gkrellm lm_sensors

Update: It appears the Nessus .deb for Debian 5 works on Wheezy (installed using gdebi too!) although the official Debian 6 package will include a static openssl 0.9.8 with SSLv2 support.

update-rc.d -f nessusd disable stops it starting on boot, its not as nice as chkconfig but its certainly better than systemd on Fedora 15!