Note to Self: Some favorite packages in Debian 10

When setting up a new machine, it can be useful to check from the old machine which packages were manually installed:

apt list --manual-installed=TRUE

Note to self:
These packages were manually installed on main laptop (A) in Debian 10

Development-related packages (and tools that are helpful in development):

apache2
mysql-server
php
php-gd
php-mbstring
php-mysql
php-xml
geany
geany-plugins
jedit
nano
icdiff

Packages related to audio/video

audacity
ardour
musescore
mplayer
mplayer-doc
kdenlive
xine-ui
pavucontrol
calf-plugins
festvox-suopuhe-lj
festvox-suopuhe-mv

Other nice/useful packages:

autokey-gtk
geeqie
jhead
krita
mlocate
rsync
tigervnc-viewer
vpnc
wget
whois

Testing Laravel with SQLite in Debian 10

apt install composer
apt install sqlite
apt install php-sqlite3

composer create-project laravel/laravel example-app

php artisan migrate

Mon 11/17/25, 2:07 AM | CS

Notes on Debian 13 Install and Setup

I installed Debian 13 on an HP Elitedesk machine. During install, I chose Mate as the desktop environment. Here are some notes about the install and configuration.

Install Media

USB memory with image: Debian 13.2 network install

Sources.list

Working /etc/apt/sources.list after install:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie main non-free-firmware

deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security main non-free-firmware

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-updates main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ trixie-updates main non-free-firmware

For more information, see https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList#sources.list

Display manager

Debian added LightDM as the display manager.

To enable automatic login: Edit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.

Add the following lines below [Seat:*]

autologin-user = user-name-here
autologin-user-timeout = 8

Installing firewall

Install package gufw + dependencies. Then activate and configure through: Preferences -> Internet and Network -> Firewall Configuration.

Adding/activating Languages

System-wide locales can be configured using:

dpkg-reconfigure locales

Although it seems that with Debian 13, this step is not necessary to change the language of applications.

Changing the desktop language for one user

LightDM starts an X session for the user. Among other things, the file .xsessionrc (if exists) is read from the user's home directory.

To set language for the desktop environment, you can add these lines to /home/username/.xsessionrc

export LANG=fi_FI.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=fi_FI:fi

(In this example, the language is set to Finnish.)

Information sources

Debian's man page "Xsession"
https://wiki.debian.org/LightDM
https://wiki.debian.org/Xsession

Mon 11/17/25, 3:16 AM | CS

SSH Port Forwarding

Local port forwarding means: The "original" port is in another machine, and ssh makes it accessible through a local port. So you can connect to a remove service as if it was a local service. The traffic is encrypted by ssh.

Example command:

ssh -L 44444:localhost:1234 remoteuser@remoteip