Now that you have installed Debian 7.0 ‘Wheezy’ and got yourself comfortable with it, it’s now time to get some software installed on to your system system.
The first things you’ll need to do is update the repository source list. You can easily do this by performing the following with your /etc/apt/sources.list:
debian% su password
debian% nano /etc/apt/sources.list
This will bring up the APT repository source list in your terminal. Paste the following content in to the file:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian main contrib non-free deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib non-free deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free #Oracle VM VirtualBox deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian wheezy contrib non-free
Now update APT:
debian% apt-get update apt-get upgrade
Install any updates that are required. With the new repositories that we have added to your Debian system, you should now be able to install the software required to get your system ready for desktop use.
Most Debian installation configurations will come with at least Iceweasel web browser installed. Iceweasel is Debian’s unbranded and free web browser based on Mozilla Firefox.
Or if you prefer Chromium as your web browser, just use the same command but with chromium-browser:
debian% apt-get install chromium-browser
To complement your web browser of choice, it’s always a good idea to install Flash Player. You can do this by the following:
debian% apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
And of course, you’re going to need an email client to handle all your emails.
To complement Iceweasel, you should also install the email client based on Mozilla Thunderbird, called Icedove. This can easily be done by running:
debian% apt-get install icedove
To get you started with multimedia, we will install VLC Media Player. Enter the following in to your terminal:
debian% apt-get install vlc
And for image editing, you will probably want GIMP
debian% apt-get install gimp
For those spreadsheets and documents, this is easily handled by installing LibreOffice:
debian% apt-get install libreoffice
An often forgotten package that I find is essential for any Linux operating system is p7zip. You can install the p7zip package and additional packages to complement it and add extra compression functionality, use the following:
debian% apt-get install p7zip-full rar unrar xz-utils
This will keep you covered on most bases when it comes to the most common compression formats for archives.
And finally, you will have noticed that in the APT sources file, we added the official Oracle VM VirtualBox repository. This allows us to install and update VirtualBox directly using APT. You can install VirtualBox by using the following:
debian% apt-get install dkms virtualbox
Feel free to install any other software on your new Debian 7.0 ‘Wheezy’ system. With the repositories that we’ve added, you should find almost anything that you need will be available from them. But from what we have outlined above, it should be enough to get most users up and running with a basic Debian desktop system in no time.
