The Magic

lookit all these ridiculous colors OMFG

Debola

This mostly adequate mess of a page exists to support your wicked new Debian/Openbox Linux desktop, which, I mean; it's hard not to like. Back up your data, should you care, we're gonna install handy function and reliable whiz-bang that coincides with a keyboard driven paradigm mirroring a holistic kinetic effervescence. All that word-salad, lordy. You'll dig it.

For the new folks, it's only a computer-machine. Bunch of parts packed together with a zillion and 7 ifthenbuts happening ALL OF THE TIME in a heat-regulated enclosure. That's it, really, just ifthenbuts that are on or off and the regulation of such things by other ifthenbuts doing the same. All the words like bus and ram and your mom and hard drive are all just the same words they ever were, like: mount. Heh. I used to love dropping that one in homes after supper building stuff out for folks. Can I say that? Heh, it was always funny.

Behold my outlandish and reliable desktop

Debola, I call it debola on github, is just Debian (the "OS") and Openbox (the window manager) and some configs, scripts, and whatnot that takes advantage. You would definitely do more after running the restore script. For example, you may install debsecan (do it) or any number of other packages and set up a ton of other things your own way. Starting here is a pretty good desktop paradigm on your workstation, or, whatever. Bespoke; reliable and smooth running. It's easy-as-cake for you to have this, too, because, you know, the linux. Try the script after a net install. See if you don't love this setup.

See the supporting stuff and let's do it real quick, go grab the net-installer iso . Burn it to a USB stick - I (and soon you) have a handy alias for mintstick, which is pretty awesome:

Mine is a typically enough partitioned 1TB nvme drive.

How easy - I got that fancy goodness by typing "lll" into a terminal. Huh. Then I got a menu with W-z and grabbed scrot to select the area for a pic instead of messing with the code to present it here.

These configs have been running happily on all of my personal machines, and machines of others, for years. Decades, even, in many cases. Aside from being rediculously fast and reliable it is, alas, equally boring, and, to its end, again; reliable. Yaaaaawn. It's Debian, whaddya want?

I insist that you take a moment to consider how utterly boring and reliable this setup is on your computer-machine. It runs forever and never quits and everything works always all of the time. WTF!? I know, weird, right? It's real, though. In fact, until this year, it has been forever since I changed much of anything aside from cleaning stuff up. I made it all a little prettier this year (jan '25) and am using kitty. I may have added a couple more keybinds and scripts for fun and handy. Just little pecks at it, you know? And, I'm not using kitty anymore, but, alacritty. I bounce around a little from time to time.

Go ahead with that USB stick - boot to it, run the installer; I typically allow root, manual ethernet, targeted kernel, system tools only at software tasksel and for grub: yes, yes, no...reboot.

UPDATE: Not using grub anymore, but, systemd-boot, which is faster, as stable, and I can add kernel boot arguments just as easily. I turned off secure boot in the BIOS to make it easier, but, you can still employ it and use a shim - how-to's abound. Just arrow down to it at that point in the install, or, not and stick with grub, no worries.

Post install I log in as root to install sudo and aptitude . Then, I run # visudo to add the NOPASSWD:ALL argument to the sudo group members and then I add myself to the sudo group: # usermod -a -G sudo $UNAME. No more password prompts. Many people object to this - pffft, I am the only user on this laptop

Have a look at the structure of supporting files, where they go. Restore script puts everything where it needs to be.

~/
.bashrc
.bash_aliases
.bash_functions
.profile
.xinitrc
.bashcolors
.gtkrc-2.0
.fehbg
.screenlayout/
films.txt

~/.config
fastfetch/
Thunar/
  uca.xml
lxpanel/
kitty/
wallpapers.cfg
starship.toml
obsession.conf
openbox
  menu.xml
  autostart
  rc.xml

~/bin
kevin
obamenu.py
procinfo.pl
Originals
places-pipemenu
recent.sh
pick.sh
waldesk
datemenu.py
mkpwd.sh
frank
resz
color.sh
lscolors.sh

~/.local/share

scripts/

Wait, though, there's more

Some of the handy 'inside the box'

handy aliases

#------------------------------------------////
# Package Management:
#------------------------------------------////
alias sources='sudo x-text-editor /etc/apt/sources.list'
alias deb='sudo dpkg -i'
alias show='aptitude show'
alias list='dpkg -L'
alias cpf='sudo aptitude clean && sudo aptitude purge ~c && sudo aptitude -f install'
alias remove='sudo apt-get remove --purge'
alias install='sudo aptitude -y install'
alias apps='sudo synaptic'
alias search='aptitude search'
alias update='sudo aptitude update'
alias upgrade='sudo aptitude full-upgrade'
alias updoogie='runwithfeedback upgrading upgrade'
alias devs="aptitude -F '%p' search '~i -dev$'"
alias devsizes="aptitude -F '%I %p' search '~i -dev$'"
alias otto='sudo apt-get autoremove'

More good

function hg() { history | grep "$1"; }

function cl() {
DIR="$*";
# if no DIR given, go home
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
DIR=$HOME;
fi;
builtin cd "${DIR}" && \
# use your preferred ls command
ls -F --color=auto

function myps() { ps $@ -u $USER -o pid,%cpu,%mem,bsdtime,command ; }

Yabbah

$ cfp - clean's up packages
$ nap - suspends they system
$ weather - all of it
$ src - sources .bashrc
$ obr - reconfigs & restarts openbox

Keybinds

W-Z - custom main menu
W-L - locks the desktop
W-S - screenshot menu
Print - xfce4-screenshooter
W-A - Audacity, playing
W-P - Pianobar, playing
W-B - x-www-browser (Firefox)
W-F - x-file-manager
W-E - x-text-editor
W-T - x-terminal-emulator (alacritty)
W-G - Nexuiz
W-M - Claws-Mail
W-H - htop
W-I - yad icon browser
W-K - KeepassXC
W-W - LibreOffice Writer
W-R - ssr, recording
C-A-P - flick picker

Later. Bitches.