Trying Debian Etch Linux - Part II

So I left off with getting my EXT3 and FAT32 partitions mounted at boot time. When I came back to Debian I dove right in to getting the NTFS thing happening. I installed the NTFS-3G stuff for NTFS support. Now I'm looking at making sure support for NTFS is there and what an /etc/fstab entry looks like when one uses NTFS-3G. Hmmm. NTFS-3G or NTFS support does not look to be enabled yet. I imagined that it would be there just by installing NTFS-3G and the dependencies. After looking at the NTFS-3G web site I decided to just try mounting my Windows Vista folder. I added the following line to /etc/fstab: '/dev/hda6 /media/vista ntfs-3g defaults 0 0', saved the file and exited the editor. Then, in a terminal as root, typed 'mount /media/vista'. It worked. So now I'll add the other two NTFS partitions and be done with NTFS-3G, assuming that they are mounted at boot time next reboot. If not, back to the documentation. When I rebooted and the NTFS partitions did in fact mount automatically at boot. Good good.

Installing Firefox 2, Adobe FlashPlayer and Java
Here's an outline of how I got Java and Flash working in Debian Etch. Firefox 2, don't think so.

I downloaded all three and moved them to /opt. First I extracted Firefox. Command 'tar xfvz firefox-2.0.0.1.tar.gz' Then I tried running Firefox from a terminal. Previous experience tells me that it might not run until I install dependencies. It doesn't work. Errors in the terminal output tell me I need libstdc++.so.5. Wonder how to install that in Debian? I'm a Fedora user! In Fedora I'd use yum install so I try 'apt-get install libstdc++.so.5'. That yields nothing. I turn to Synaptic. Search in Synaptic reveals libstdc++5. Close, so I install it and try running Firefox2 from the terminal again and get this note: (firefox-bin:4080): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:. What's up here? I've tried to get Firefox 2 working and apparently I've failed. Looking through the Debian User Forums it appears that Firefox 2 doesn't work for Debian. There's talk of something called 'IceWeasel' as an alternative. Apparently a Firefox 2 clone for Debian. I'll do that later, maybe.

Installing Java in Debian

I installed Java by downloading the binary package and moving it to /opt. From there I just ran it to extract/install and made links for libjavaplugin_oji.so to the Mozilla and Firefox plugin folders, like this:
ln -s /opt/jre1.5.0_10/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins and
ln -s /opt/jre1.5.0_10/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins

That's it. Ran Firefox, tested Java, it works. Done.

Installing Flash 9

I installed Flash Player 9 by downloading the FP9 installer from Adobe Labs. Moved the file to /opt and unpacked the archive. From there I just copied libflashplayer.so to the Mozilla and Firefox plugin folders. Ran Firefox, tested Flash, it works. Done.