You can choose from a bunch via aptitude, if you want to stick with a free and supported option I'd say go with iceweasel. Iceweasel will install into a Mozilla directory, supports extensions, and has an icon that looks a bit like Firefox... Hmmm whats going on here? Basically Debian has requirements for all packages that they put into the APT repositories, and although Firefox is considered by the world to be free there are components it holds rights to like icons and logos. The compromise is this: someone can take all the code that is firefox, call it something else, and release it under a free license. The name they choose to call it is iceweasel. If my 10,000' view summary isn't enough for you google will take you all back through this history. Toss Ubuntu into that search to find the deeper interesting dirt. For those of you just needing a browser that is familiar to what you already use, here you go:
debian:/home/thom# aptitude install iceweasel
Boom, done, you can skip the rest of this post.
OK for the real cowboys ready to step up their game a bit, I think Firefox is too bloated and slow. 99% of the time I don't need all that it can offer and I just want something light and fast. I know everyone is thinking Chrome is all awesome, but I still prefer Opera for these reasons:
- small install size
- light memory usage
- FAST web browser
- built in email client with imap support
- built in IRC chat client
- bag of chips
OK so by installing this I can skip installing any other browser, email client, or IRC chat client? Yes it is so. Now I'm not going to say it's the best at any of them, but for me it's the perfect balance of what you get vs what you pay. So why wouldn't you want to use Opera? Here is the list of cons:
- it is proprietary software
- it's not in the APT repos
- you can't use Firefox or Chrome extensions with it
If I have to choose between Google and Opera for my non-free fast browser, I'll take Opera thank you. Let's figure out how to get this installed so you can check it out! First thing we'll need to do a web search to find some good info like this
http://wiki.debian.org/Opera
(this isn't optional reading if you are about to install Opera on Debian, please go read it now.)
Now that we know what we're up to let's get into a console and su to root. First step listed is to modify our sources.list, this is NOT a step to be taken lightly. Once we allow trusting to the Opera repository it opens up a security hole that could be exploited. Assuming that's not stopping you:
debian:/home/thom# geany /etc/apt/sources.list
That will open up Geany as root, then we can add these lines:
# This is just a comment, put whatever you want in here.
deb http://deb.opera.com/opera lenny non-free
We can click save in Geany and close it. Now just because we added that line to the sources.list file doesn't mean it's active yet, let's alert our OS to the change:
debian:/home/thom# aptitude update
Notice we get the same error as the example on the wiki link for their apt-update. Either way we need to add a gpg key to trust this source before we can use it.
debian:/home/thom# gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key 9D1A0061
We should see we have imported 1 key, we can take a look at it:
debian:/home/thom# gpg --fingerprint 9D1A0061
We can see it's from Opera and has some time before it expires. OK Now we actually need to establish the trust:
debian:/home/thom# gpg --armor --export 9D1A0061 | apt-key add -
And we see a little "OK" to be the only sign that we've now opened ourselves up to getting poisoned packages from Opera, but if you've made it this far you must know what you're doing right ;)
OK let's try that aptitude update again:
debian:/home/thom# aptitude update
Yeah that should be much happier now.
Now look at the next line in the wiki, "apt-get install opera" so remember that post about pick one package manager and use it exclusively? Well if we go all copy/paste happy here and install Opera via apt-get there will be no log of it or dependencies met in aptitude. So do the right thing:
debian:/home/thom# aptitude install opera
Now a couple exits will close out our su session and our xterm window, then we can pull up a menu and Applications -> Network -> Web Browsing -> Opera. If you accept the agreement click that and behold your new fast as hell browser! I'm not gonna get all application oriented but there are a few things you should do with Opera the first time you see it:
Speed Dial
- close the tab that welcomes you to Opera
- what you see now is the "speed dial" it's 9 websites you can pre configure
- right click on all of the ones that are set and clear them
- right click on one of them and choose edit
- type in thomslinuxblog.blogspot.com and click OK, it will prefetch the page
- since I only do about one post a week, right click set the reload to never (or whatever you want)
Widgets:
- once you are settled into the speed dial, click the menu Widget and then Add Widget
- you will see all of the Opera widgets, I don't use any widgets but if it's your thing you can knock yourself out
Email:
- click tools and choose email and chat
- choose OK to setup an account, choose email
- run through the wizard to setup your email, personally I only use imap
- see your email! If you have a large inbox or slow mail server it may take a little time to pull down headers
IRC:
- click tools and choose email and chat
- choose add to setup an account, choose chat
- run through your setup wizard, I'm doing my freenode/NA setup
- now say what room you want to hit, like #debian and in you go!
So how cool is Opera? We've got our speed dial setup, my blog in one tab, my email in another tab, and IRC up in yet another tab! That is freakin sweet and fast! All of this only burned 17Mb of disk space!
OK we'll save flash, java, sound, etc for later as we have other dependencies we'll need to take care of along the way. At least for now we can research how to make fluxbox not look like vomit! Next time we'll start the cleanup, I promise.
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