I am slowly but surely, getting Debian installed on my home machine. I am heavily endebted to emma for her help, suggestions, enthusiasm, humour and dotfiles, but I have beaten my head against these particular walls often enough that it is starting to feel good.

Most of the process works as expected, requires minimal kicking and has been pretty satisfying on the whole. Getting X working, is, as always, the thorniest challenge, but with known hardware I can now almost casually sacrifice the correct chickens and scatter the right entrails to get where I need to be.

The real bastard was getting my mail system set up – I wrestled with exim for a long while – Debian stable is ludicrously conservative, and I was for a long time worried about both exim and mutt being too many versions behind my config files and knowledge. After much gnashing of teeth, the installation of postfix and an upgrade of mutt (to 1.54) I still couldn’t get the MTA to honour my setting of a From: address. Finally, I looked at /etc/Muttrc (which I had looked for earlier in the process but didn’t find because I was expecting a directory and lower case) and found this little gem:

# don't generate a From header
unset use_from

Once I commented that out things worked just fine. I’m really pleased to have sorted that out, but I am also really peeved at the Debian dork who set that as off by default. All MUAs may suck, but every one I’ve ever seen sets From: correctly.

In all of the speculative fiction I’ve ever read in which there are computers, there are very few times when anyone guesses that, at this stage of the game, it is not hardware manufacturers who differentiate between computers, but operating systems. When someone asks about your computer, that is usually what they mean. It is a strange state of affairs, that’s for darn sure – to be concerned with the software run at the lowest level on your hardware, rather than the hardware itself.

The last couple of days of the website being down are aparently due to a PHP upgrade. The new version does not include by default the PEAR database abstraction library installed, and so several aspects of this site which use them borked. Little things like database connection. That has been fixed and the server rebooted, but it definitely means that I should re-code to avoid depenence on modules on whose presence I cannot count.