Debian sarge: Tips and tricks


Various tips on doing stuff with Debian sarge. Mini HOWTOs if you like, though that's a bit formal for me. Most common Debian problems can be answered with a relatively small amount of googling, but this approach isn't always successful; the procedures listed here mostly refer to cases where the Google approach either failed completely or was very long and tedious.

Upgrading from woody

Many thanks to the Debian team for the latest stable release, sarge, and the smoothness with which the dist-upgrade from woody was achieved.

However, nothing is perfect :-) I have come across a few odd problems, not all of which could be solved by the usual method of searching site:lists.debian.org with Google. So I am listing them here along with the solutions I have found by the second method of pratting about until it works. :-)

Home and End keys not working in jed
GTK applications failing with relocation error: /usr/lib/libXft.so.2: undefined symbol: XRenderQuerySubpixelOrder
VT switching with Ctrl-Alt-Fn not working
Applications suddenly have big fuzzy ugly fonts
ipopd logins give -ERR Unknown AUTHORIZATION state command


Other stuff

Making function keys in jed work in xterms the same as they do in text consoles
Setting up to boot from a root directory on LVM
Making dovecot run from inetd. This method DOES work.

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