dranorter

I have successfully installed Debian Etch on my MacBook, dual booting with OSX, with most features working properly.

I have several questions, of course, since I am new to this whole Linux thing, the chief one being: Is there any way to right-click?! I was able to do without right clicking for five days - most programs only use it as a convenience - but now I find I absolutely need it, for one of the main applications I wanted to use in Debian.

So what I would like to do is make it so I can hold down some key (the apple key, probably) to get right-clicks. Is there a way?

Other issues:

1. In command-line mode (pressing ctrl-alt-fn-F1), the display is fuzzy. I like using the command line full screen and would prefer it to be crisp and beautiful. Any ideas?

For the same reason, I would appreciate instructions on starting up with the shell and going into X & Gnome only when I say so.

2. When I sit inthe shell very long, the following appears:

hda: cdrom_pc_intr: The drive appears confused (ireason = 0x01). Trying to recover by ending request.

over and over and over...

3. When I use synaptic to update my packages, I get problems.

E: openbsd-inetd: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
E: netbase: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
E: exim4-base: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
E: exim4-daemon-light: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
E: exim4: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
E: sun-java5-doc: subprocess post-installation script killed by signal (Interrupt)
E: cupsys-bsd: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

4. My wifi behaves very strangely. I followed the Debian macbook wiki to get it working; but at first it seemed not to work at all. Then I tried switching to wifi from ethernet (an ethernet cable plugged into my wireless router). This consistantly works. As long as I connect via ethernet, and actually download something via that connection, I can switch to wifi successfully.

This is quite inconvenient for me. I assume it is caused by the inetd problem.

5. A friend who uses Etch advised me not to use the update manager which appears next to the clock, because it had uninstalled packages without notifying him first. Thus I use Synaptic, or dselect, or aptitude, to do my updates. Is this a valid fear, and/or a reasonable solution?

techieMoe

I curious how you did this. Did you follow a tutorial? If so, could you post a link? Did it involve Boot Camp at all? I'm intrigued.

Unfortunately I can't offer you much help on your problems, but hang in there. Perhaps one of our Debian gurus will pop in. You're blazing a new trail here.

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dranorter

I'm sorry I didn't have time this morning to post a more detailed description... in fact, I don't have much time now, but basically:

I followed the http://wiki.debian.org/MacBook tutorial from Debian. It gives a method of non-destructively repartitioning the hard drive, so that one does not have to reinstall OSX in order to set up the dual boot. This did not work for me, however; if someone tries this and it does work, I would like to hear about it.

So I backed up my files (sloppily), reinstalled, and then did the nondestructive repartition, which now worked. Then I installed rEFIt, and then installed Debian (pretty much straightforward, but look at the tutorial for a few necessary details).

I used Etch though I would have preferred Sarge, simply because the tutorial seemed to suggest more of my hardware would work if I used Etch.
I used the i386 version rather than AMD64; not sure what impact this decision had.

It took a couple of restarts of Gnome before the multiple workspaces, as well as the system font settings, worked properly.

The sound did not work until I selected the correct device in the sound settings.

The iSight camera did not work.

The CD button worked fine without setting up Pommed (which the tutorial recommends doing); I just had to set it up in keyboard shortcuts.

I am not sure what closing the lid does; one time it caused an error, but usually it only turns off the screen.

As described in my previous post, WiFi is buggy. However, Ethernet works great.

I think that sums it up. My main problem is need of right-clicks. So, anyone know how to set up a key to switch to left-handed mouse behavior, or something like that?

EDIT:

1) The process does not technically involve boot camp, in that one does not need boot camp to do it, but the "diskutil resizevolume" command, which it uses, was made for Boot Camp.

2) I had wanted to create another partition for files accessible by both Mac and Linux; but the resizevolume command refused to do so. I believe this is because there is a limit on the number of partitions allowable... I remember seeing somewhere that Boot Camp only allows four, and right now I have OSX, Debian, Debian Swap, and some tiny system partition, so since resizeVolume is a boot camp command, I gave up.

dranorter

Well, I tried installing a package called mouseemu which claimed to do what I want- make holding some key simulate a button two or three mouse click. My mouse suddenly stopped working. Fortunately I could easily fix the problem from the command line-- removing the package from my system fixed everything.

But I want the package to work, damn it! This is the one thing seperating my Debian installation from excellence... I need full clicky functionality.

dranorter

Okay, I came up with a temporary fix:

I downloaded the brightside package and used it to configure one corner of the screen to map the main mouse button to the third mouse button, and a second corner to map the main mouse button back to itself.

So the top left corner executes

xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9"

and the bottom left changes that first value back:

xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9"

Thanks goes to this website for instructions on remapping mouse keys via bash.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwork...l?ca=drs-l1005


Now the obvious question is, is there a way to execute these commands with a keypress rather than by going to the corner of the screen? Please tell me if there is!!! I would be very excited.

techieMoe

You could possibly put those commands in a shell script, link them to an icon on the desktop and configure a shortcut to launch those scripts on a keypress. It may not be the most elegant solution, but it could work.

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dranorter

... How is this done? Gnome's hotkey configuration tool doesn't allow for any custom actions (forgive me if I'm wrong, I'm in OSX fo the moment... ); what would you use?

techieMoe

Oh, hmm.. Well, I'm more of a KDE person. I'm used to being able to set arbitrary shortcut keys. I'm sure there's a way to do it in Gnome... I just don't know what it is.

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TechieMoe's Tech Rants

dranorter

Update on progress:

I installed KDE, but wasn't much more satisfied with the solution there (press key combo, click, press key combo, click... can't just hold down a key for right-click), so I am sticking with Gnome and moving to corners of the screen for now.

My internet is still malfunctioning somewhat, but it seems I can usually fix it just by opening and closing KDE's wifi manager.

Closing the screen of my laptop for very long seems to make the screen go black with no way of getting back into gnome. Is there a way of making it ignore the lid closing?

I will post my questions on the Debian forum when I have time, since they are mostly Debian-related, not install-related.

ibanex22

i had the same problem, forgot about my thread , but dranorter redirected me here... heres the script i run, it makes the "eject" button work as my right click:

(i think i had to apt-get xmodmap...) just got it working in ~/.fluxbox/startup by putting the second two lines in there. not sure about kde/gnome.

also, has anyone gotten sleep/standby working?

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