A quick note on wireless firmware in Debian

Installing Debian on my laptop, I realized that I need a non-free firmware for my wireless card. Apparently Ubuntu bundles this with its installation media, but not Debian. So after installing Debian, I downloaded this tarball from here and installed the .deb package with iwlwifi in its name (that's for my Intel wireless card).

The Host System

I tried using StumpWM on the same Ubuntu (Precise Beta) installation I'm using right now. I created a new xsession for it and tried logging in. I wasn't impressed. The graphics is for some reason garbled and I encountered several crashes.

I decided using Debian stable instead. I installed Squeeze on my laptop, then installed SBCL and the libraries I needed (cl-clx and cl-ppcre) and then I finally downloaded and built StumpWM, created the session file and logged into it. Now this is much better!

Debian stable is a bit outdated, so I added the backports repositories and upgraded Firefox (well, Iceweasel actually). I also installed Mouseless Browsing plug-in for Firefox. I quite like it. It does, every now and then, make a website less pretty than it usually is, but otherwise it makes the web experience a lot better for the folks who don't like taking their hands off the damn keyboard!

Another thing I really need is Emacs. I've been using Emacs 24 for quite some time. I use the packages from Emacs Snapshot. I then transferred a copy of Emacs Prelude from my desktop together with my own customizations. I'm ready to set off now.