Debian operating system

I'm a retired Unix (AIX) admin and I run some Linux servers at home. But, I'm still using Windows as a desktop. This whole Windows recall thing is the final straw - I'm switching to Linux for desktop. I've done a bit of research and believe Debian is the best fit for me. So, I recently installed it on one of my small servers.

I like it but I find the "half baked" approach to systemd a bit confusing. My default minimal server install has both cron jobs and systemd timers configured for basic system maintenance tasks. For example logrotate is fired twice a day - once by /etc/cron.daily/logrotate and once by /lib/systemd/system/logrotate.service. I'm tempted confirm that everything cron does is actually also done by systemd and then apt purge cron\* && rm -rf /etc/cron*. But, I suspect that might break future package installs and updates?

I'm also not excited by ifup/ifdown - why not just use the capability already included with systemd? This is just a minor thing for me as there's no real duplication I guess.

Is the a Debian based "pure systemd" distro??

I know it's not directly Debian, but...

I'm currently running a Zorin 17 x86_64 vm (in virtualbox, windows 11 host), which uses wayland.
In it i have a Debian 9 stretch aarch64 chroot, which comes with X.

I'd like to test the GUI app i compiled in that chroot, how is that feasible?

For reference, this is how i setup initially:

$ sudo apt install debootstrap qemu-user-static
$ sudo mkdir -p /opt/deb9/sysroot && sudo chown -R myuser:myuser /opt/deb9
$ sudo /usr/sbin/debootstrap --arch=arm64 --foreign --variant=minbase stretch /opt/deb9/sysroot http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/
$ sudo cp /usr/bin/qemu-aarch64-static /opt/deb9/sysroot/usr/bin/
$ sudo chroot /opt/deb9/sysroot qemu-aarch64-static /bin/bash
	# /debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage
	# echo 'APT::Install-Recommends "0";' >> /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99noExtras
	# echo 'APT::Install-Suggests "0";'   >> /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99noExtras
	# echo 'deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/ stretch main contrib'      > /etc/apt/sources.list
	# echo 'deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/ stretch main contrib' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
	# uname -nm | sed -e 's/ /-/' > /etc/debian_chroot
	# apt update
	# apt install -y g++ make cmake automake autoconf libtool git vim pax-utils tree
	# adduser myuser
	$ su myuser
		> do stuff

Network isn't really configured so any git push or similar is done outside the chroot.

In the last day or so, Emacs GTK on Debian Trixie is locking up my system frequently. It's so bad that I can guarantee a full lock-up within a few minutes of opening Emacs. Env. is Gnome 48 on the Framework 13 and I assume it's XWayland causing the issue. FWIW, the issue doesn't seem to impact on Sway.

Is anyone else seeing similar issues?

I built a new firewall under Debian 12. The machine has eight network ports, and during configuration I accidentally used the same name for a couple of the ports in the files under /etc/systemd/network/*.link. I ended up with two link files referencing two different MAC addresses but naming each of them as WAN0, and once systemd got that configuration it wouldn't let it go.

From what I could find online, normally I would just issue systemctl daemon-reload followed by a update-initramfs -u and after a reboot systemd should have had the updated information... but no dice this time. The way I finally discovered the problem was when I noticed under ifconfig that my wan0 port was pointing to the wrong MAC address (even though the link files had been corrected).

After several hours of fighting with it, I finally managed to get it to work by renumbering all of my link files, and now the information for each port matches up correctly. But my real question here is WHY did systemd refuse to read updated link files? Is there another step I should have taken which was mysteriously never mentioned in any of the dozens of web pages I looked at trying to fix this? I really need to understand the proper process for getting it to correctly use these files so I can maintain the machine in the future.

(God I miss the reliability of udev already)

I have a few (~5) applications where the version in the debian stable repos is to old for me. Examples would be podman and restic. I found out that the version for testing are recent enough. Is it possible to install specific apps from testing while the default is stable?

I'm building a new rack server (Poweredge R620) and am using the option "consoleblank=600" in the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX setting. During the setup I used the wrong memory stick and installed Bullseye, and screen blanking was working correctly there. Since I had already finished nearly all the configuration this week, I thought it would be easier to just do a regular dist upgrade than reloading the whole system.

After upgrading to Bookworm and rebooting, I notice that now when the screen blanking is supposed to kick in (which normally just turns off the display), I am instead getting what looks like rolling static on the screen. I have several other R620 racks running Buster so I know the screen blanking should work with this hardware, but this appears to be an issue specific to Bookworm.

Note that even when I try something like setterm -blank 1 or setterm -powerdown 1 I get the same resulting static after 1 minute. To be clear, this is specifically for the command line, I do not run desktops on my servers.

A google search for the problem has been unsuccessful so I'm hoping someone can point me to a solution or help with the proper search terms.

I've been using Fedora for the past few months and Pop OS for some months before that.

Debian was my first choice after Pop because of ideological reasons - non corporate structure mainly. But I couldn't get games to work properly (my PC is only 7-8 months old). So I've been trying Fedora, but the more I learn about Red Hat and it's involvement, it's harder to stick to the distro.

What would be a good way to setup Debian (and KDE, because apparently GNOME is also Red Hat's, although I do like the environment) so that it works well for my use case? The two year old DE and app versions does bother me but I guess I can learn to live with it. Do I try testing? Do I use backports?

PC specs: Ryzen 5 5600 Processor, RX 7600 GPU

I'm wanting to leave Windows, but am struggling as I can't seem to find a Linux stable distro for the SnapDragon X Elite. I have a Galaxy BooK 4 Edge and I noticed Debian shows the most promise. Help would be appreciated

In Debian live images the links to download the testing branch are broken. Any alternative way to download them?

If one unmounts a disk, is that disk still available for write and can the following sync do anything?

[Solved]

I love the idea of trying Debian but every time I try to ditch Arch for it I end up just giving up after not being able to find all the packages I need in the repos.

How do you guys deal with that? I’m not even talking about them being out of date. I’m talking about them missing altogether.

Hello everyone! It's been about a month that I'm experimenting Debian on an external disk. For the most time, I've been using Testing. The issue is, that some packages are missing from Testing, while they exist on Stable (or on Unstable). The biggest problem with that is that some packages require dependencies that don't exist on the Testing repo and as such I can't install those apps.

So, I thought about adding the Stable repo, at a lower priority. If something doesn't exist on Testing, it will grab it from Stable.

How bad is that approach? I'm not doing the reverse (using stable and grabbing apps from testing), which might be way worse. Does anyone else do that? I couldn't find anything related online.

PS. I'm a bit tempted to switch to Unstable all together, but I don't know if I'll be careful enough to use it in the long run.

PPS. I might build a home nas at some point (with Debian Stable) and keep regular backups of my laptop so that I'll be kinda safe if I ever switch to Unstable.

Morning everybody. I’ve got a server at home running Debian and I handle everything over SSH aside from file transfers for which I use webmin. I’d be trying to get Frigate working on it using Podman but couldn’t get it to find the hardware I was passing to it and got pissed off and gave up, that was a few weeks ago and everything was fine. The Podman container had its own user and I’d set it up so I couldn’t access the containers with any other users, even with sudo. I’ve gone back to it this morning and found that when i try to sudo su in (which is what I normally do) i get “This account is currently not available”. I checked everything my friendly AI hero suggested but I couldn’t figure out why it had locked. The last reference in journalctl was me closing the session and there was no records of failed logins or fail2ban being triggered. I had the ! in the shadow file and passwd was showing me an L to say it was locked. In the end I gave up trying to figure out why it had locked because I couldn’t see evidence of anything dodgy so I just went to unlock it. I’ve tried passwd -u and I’ve remember the ! and rebooted but it still won’t unlock.

I suspect Podman may have done something but I’m pretty sure I stopped the containers before I last logged off because I got sick of them filling the log files up, and though I’ve rebooted at least once in the last three weeks I don’t know if my containers are auto starting, or what that would do. I can’t even check until I’ve got the user logging on.

Anyone have any ideas?