Installing Picasa in Debian

Everyone needs a good photo album program. My favorite is Google's Picasa: it does a great job at organizing your pictures and even has some good tools for touching up your photos.

We're going to go ahead and set up the Google repositories in Debian so that our package manager will handle upgrades as they become available. To do this, we will need to add the following to our /etc/apt/sources.list file:

# Google repository
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free main

As always, you can use your favorite text editor to add this:

# vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Or:

# gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Or, you can use echo and output redirection:

# echo "# Google repository" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

Now that we've got the repository added, we need to add the apt-key so that we can use it without error:

# wget -q -O – https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add -

We are ready to update our packages list:

# apt-get update

Now that everything is up to date, we can install Picasa with the following:

# apt-get install picasa

This should put Picasa on your menu, and you're ready to start using Picasa.

See you next time.

Installing Songbird

If you want to use Songbird as a media player in Debian, you may run into some problems since there isn't a Songbird .deb installation file compatible with Debian. You're in luck, though, because it's not too difficult to install from the tarball available from the Songbird website. We'll start in the logical place by downloading the tarball here, or you can use wget:

$ wget http://download.songbirdnest.com/installer/linux/i686/Songbird_1.1.2-1042_linux-i686.tar.gz

Now we want to untar the installation file:

# tar -xvf Songbird_1.1.2-1042_linux-i686.tar.gz -C /usr/share/

The above will create a directory Songbird inside /usr/share/. This way we can keep things clear in your home directory. In theory, we could actually run Songbird right now; however, we can do a few easy things to make it much easier to use Songbird. First thing, we're going to create a shell script, /usr/share/Songbird/launcher.sh, containing the following text:

#!/bin/sh
cd /usr/share/Songbird
./songbird

We can create this file with our favourite text editor or straight from the command line with cat:

# vim /usr/share/Songbird/launcher.sh

Or:

# gedit /usr/share/Songbird/launcher.sh

Or:

# cat > /usr/share/Songbird/launcher.sh << EOF
#!/bin/sh
cd /usr/share/Songbird
./songbird
EOF

The next thing we need to do is to change the permissions on the /usr/share/Songbird directory and all child objects so that users other than root can run Songbird:

# chmod 755 -R /usr/share/Songbird

Now the next thing we want is to be able to launch Songbird simply by typing songbird into the terminal, the run prompt, or deskbar. We can do that simply by creating a symbolic link to the shell script we just created:

# ln -s /usr/share/Songbird/launcher.sh /usr/bin/songbird

Now you can go ahead and test this out simply by typing songbird into the terminal, run prompt, or deskbar. The next thing that many people will probably ask for is to add Songbird to their menu. We just need to run alacarte to do this:

$ alacarte

Alacarte should also be accessible from the System menu (System -> Preferences -> Main Menu). You'll want to select the menu item you would like Songbird to appear under in the Menus panel to the left, and then click the New Item button on the right. In the Create Launcher window, you'll want to use the following settings:

• Type - Application
• Name - Songbird
• Command - songbird
• Comment - Whatever description you would like, or leave it blank

Click OK to create the launcher and then make sure the Show checkbox is checked for Songbird in the Items panel in the middle. Then click close and you will now be able to launch Songbird from your menu.

Enjoy listening to your music in Songbird. See you next time.

Installing Flash and Java in Debian

By default in Debian, the Iceweasel web browser does not have very good flash support and does not contain any support for java. These are not difficult to install, so let's get started.

• Flash installation
  We'll need to download the flash installation from Adobe. You can get the installation here, or you can download it with wget:
  
  
  $ wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz
  
  Once you've got the file, we'll need to untar it to get to the actual contents:
  
  
  $ tar -xvf install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz
  
  Now you need to change to the directory that was created from the above tar command and we can go ahead and run the installation:
  
  
  $ cd install_flash_player_10_linux
  $ ./flashplayer-installer
  
  The above command should recognize the directory for the default location of Debian's installation of Iceweasel. The installation will prompt you to close your web browser. You should now be able to go surfing the internet and play the flash games and flash videos that you want to.


• Java installation
  Installing Java is a bit easier, as the required packages are in the Debian repositories. To install Java applet support in Iceweasel, we just need to run the following commands:
  
  
  # apt-get update
  # apt-get install sun-java6-plugin
  
  That's really all there is to installing Java support. You should now be able to run Java applets in Iceweasel.

See you next time.