Usuário:LiesaCeja400

When one's computer becomes unstable, it's natural to think first of a particular app or the desktop. After that, one may tend to suspect the operating system. Finally one may find it turns out to be hardware at fault. This is what happened to me recently, and at the operating system phase, Debian became a last resort.

At first I blamed Sabayon and tried Linux Mint. When Linux Mint seemed to also be crashy, I resorted to the newly released Debian 6.0. I thought if anything was going to be stable, it'd be Debian. Although I finally found and replaced faulty hardware, I've learned a bit about Debian on the desktop. I've used Debian on my X-less server for years, but never thought of it much as a desktop system. So, here is a summary of my Debian desktop adventure.

I have two monitors hooked up to an NVIDIA graphics card. With Nouveau I could have a cloned desktop, but what good is that? I want an extended desktop or twinview. So, that requires proprietary graphic drivers. And that requires kernel sources or at least a header package (that developers provide to allow for the building or installation of some software like proprietary drivers). Well, I found the headers and that was sufficient.

I'm one of the few remaining humans that like to watch broadcast (or cable) television on my computer as I work. TV apps are becoming old and less usable each year as, I guess, watching TV is following in the path of 8-track players and the Sony Walkman cassette. So, even if a TV app is provided by a distro it usually doesn't work real well, with the most common issue being a hog of system resources. Debian doesn't provide any (that I could find). Then I remembered MPlayer can do TV even if it's a bit more inconvenient. Debian does provide MPlayer and so I'm using it although I have to adjust the volume with Kmix (or Alsamixer). One plus is that MPlayer doesn't show any system overhead.

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