Network Manager and Repositories

The Debian Series - Part III

The first run of openbox will bring a pretty blank desktop. Right click anywhere on the desktop will show the standard openbox menu. Selecting the terminal emulator will bring an xterm - terminal emulator.

xterm is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System. A user can have many different invocations of xterm running at once on the same display, each of which provides independent input/output for the process running in it (normally the process is a Unix shell).

We will install network-manager to manage the system connection.

NetworkManager attempts to keep an active network connection available at all times.The point of NetworkManager is to make networking configuration and setup as painless and automatic as possible. If using DHCP, NetworkManager is intended to replace default routes, obtain IP addresses from a DHCP server and change nameservers whenever it sees fit. In effect, the goal of NetworkManager is to make networking Just Work.

Open the terminal and type :

$ sudo apt-get install network-manager

For the DVD installation route,  wired connection via  network-manager is now available. 

For the USB/Net-install, you must edit /etc/network/interfaces to let network-manager manage the eth0.

$ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

put # in front of any eth0 configuration.

Now we will set the source list to point at debian mirror instead of the DVD.

$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Put # in front of the DVD mirror and in front of almost everything there

and add a debian mirror :

deb http://ftp.your-country-here.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org testing/updates main contrib non-free

The mirror list is available at debian site here.

Set the distribution string in the sources.list to the code name "testing",  make you live the life of eternal upgrades.  

Update the repositories, update and upgrade the system

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

And done. Your system is up-to-date.

back : installing openbox.
next : the debian menu.