I have used virtualization in many different forms, OpenVZ, Xen, VMWare, for a number of years with great success. One thing I have been interested in doing is moving away from all applications that are not OpenSource. So finding a good solution for the Desktop virtualization has been a process.

Synaptic is a graphical user interface (GUI) for managing software packages on Debian-based distributions.

If you are using an OS based on the Synaptic Package Manager, you must have noticed by now that when trying to install a new package through Synaptic, it draws in miscellaneous packages that are needed for the program to work. These packages are called dependencies.

As you may already know, managing software in Debian is done through tools like Synaptic and apt-get. These are called packages and are (mostly) freely available on the internet. Linux software packages are held on online libraries called repositories.

Debian Lenny comes by default with OpenOffice 2.6.4, but in the meantime OpenOffice 3.1 was released. You can easily install it on your Debian box by using the Debian Lenny backports repository, which is a repository including newer versions of applications than the ones which come by default with Lenny. Just follow the steps...

When Debian issues a point release, as it just did with the current Stable distribution Lenny going from 5.0.3 to 5.0.4, it's no big deal. They happen. But you don't need to throw out your Lenny install CDs or do any kind of reinstallation.

Debian Lenny comes with Wine 1.0.1 included in the repositories, which is the stable release of Wine, but it is also a little outdated. Here are a few easy steps for compiling and installing the latest Wine release from source in Debian Lenny. This tutorial should work for the latest Wine release (at the time of writing, the last release is 1.1.17).

"It seems that the Debian team doesn't like to release minor versions anymore. After Debian 4.0 (code name 'Etch') released last year, the next Debian release (code name 'Lenny') will be numbered as Debian 5.0 as announced yesterday by Marc Brockschmidt: 'For reading this far, you receive the small reward of the knowledge that Lenny will be shipped as Debian 5.0.'

"Also interesting enough he mentioned that Lenny might be released with KDE4..."

Hunter goes from Debian 32 to Ubuntu 64 and eventually sticks with Ubunty Lenny 64. Learn about his experience with the Beta version of Debian Lenny for AMD 64