The steps are a bit scrappy and gleaned from various blogs, but, basically what I did was:

Follow the steps in this blog to get wine installed on Debian Testing. i.e. (as root):

ARCH=`uname -m | sed -e s/x86_64/amd64/ -e s/i.86/i386/`
wget -r -A "*_$ARCH.deb" http://dev.carbon-project.org/debian/wine-unstable/
sudo dpkg -i dev.carbon-project.org/debian/wine-unstable/*.deb

then hop over to this blog, and follow most of the steps in that. Don’t need to install wine as we’ve already got that now, in theory, but cabextract definitely handy.

actually, thinking about it, the only steps I ended up using were these:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks corefonts

I was getting closer all the time but still it crashed. Until I found this tip on the wineHQ website:

To work around the msvcp90 bugs, delete or rename ­this file:

~/.wine/drive_c/windows/winsxs/manifests/x86_microsoft.vc90.crt_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_9.0.30729.4148_none_deadbeef.manifest

Note that Wine will recreate that file every time you upgrade. To avoid this, make the directory read-only.

and now it works.

The last couple of installations had a bit of weirdness during the software selection dialogue:

What the deuce?

Anyway I just continued and hoped for the best. And it was all fine. First time I’ve come across this though. Wonder what causes it.

What on earth is PC Sync 2 Synchronisation Extension? I would’ve googled it but there was a hole in the bucket, so I switched to another PC and binged it instead.

It seems it’s a Nokia thing, and not a particularly popular thing either. Installed itself without asking, and doesn’t want to be deleted. Ah well, the Nokia goes in the bin in May. Good Riddance.

motion_3.2.12-2ubuntu1_amd64.deb

this will get picked up by xfce too for ‘Web Browser’

Network options during install

Then after installation, the wifi had disappeared. I could’ve investigated, and this post certainly suggests that it is fixable, but installing stable had been an accident. Since I had a clean install, there wasn’t anything to lose. I went back to Old Kent Road, and threw the dice again. The current testing release is wheezy, so I decided to give that a blast.

The wifi options were slightly different this time. I was offered WPA2 and even though I had to manually enter the SSID of the router, network connectivity was a breeze.

Debian Wheezy Install

I’d read that it was possible to configure the IP address manually by selecting expert install so I chose that route and got a verbose and interesting journey through the install, which was, on the whole, a piece of cake.

Eject CD, reboot, and hello Gnome 3. Well we can deal with you later. But first, the network. Where’s my wifi gone? I’d used it to install, and now it was gone.

I might have given up around now. I toyed with the settings suggested here without much enthusiasm, and thought that LMDE had been working fine, I could just go back. Why make life hard for myself?

And it was a close thing. I knew it was almost certainly possible to get the wifi working again — it was just how much tinkering under the hood was required. It turned out just to be a loose wire, and the fix was really easy. The only difference I found between my system and the instructions in raghu’s blog, is that the config file is actually:

/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

and not /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf.

So what worked for me was to edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf, change:

[ifupdown]
managed=false

to

[ifupdown]
managed=true

then restart the network manager. i.e.

/etc/init.d/network-manager restart

(or reboot).

And Bob’s your father’s brother.

so thanks for your blog raghu … if I hadn’t stumbled upon it I’d be back on LMDE.

As it happens, the IP address was allocated using DHCP and I had to configure it manually again, so there was no advantage to using the ‘expert install’ option.

But recently I wanted to install Linux on a couple of clapped out old headless servers. They don’t have USB ports, at least, not bootable ones. They have floppy drives, and space-age CDROM drives. But LMDE is only available on DVDs. I’m sure there are ways of getting LMDE on a CDROM and doing a network install but I really can’t be arsed finding out. Why bother when I can just install debian?

So I installed Debian, and saw that it was good. Really easy. Then I installed it on another Clapped out PC, and that was easy too. Then I installed it on a laptop, and that wasn’t quite so easy. But still easy enough to be worth the effort. It is suggesting I use some abomination that calls itself Gnome 3 but I found it just as happy to use Xfce4 instead. It’s now being installed on an Acer Aspire One 753, and that is not without its problems. But not big problems. And I’ll have debian. It’s like putting on a big comfy pair of slippers.

The iplayer has caused me grief in the past, timeouts and freezing, solved only by the highly technical process of throwing away the router and getting another one. But that was a while ago now and it’s been great of ever such a long time. Until two days ago. Listening to iplayer then after about 10 minutes, it stopped. Probably just a fluke, I thought.

Over the last couple of days I’ve tested it a few times and sure enough, I’m getting the old favourite:

Not an uncommon error message for the E71. Various suggestions are offered, including manually setting IP address, DNS settings and tweaking router settings. All tried, all failed. I installed a nifty utility called IfInfo that told me my phone’s network settings, and the router was pretty sure it was there too. I tried a utility called Nokia Device Status, from the Beta Labs, but all I got was “Licence Expired”, so that was a waste of time.

More experiments showed that iplayer would run for a few minutes, then timeout with the Gateway error. Everything else on the LAN still happily connected to the internet. Interestingly, the E71 would then refuse to connect to the internet at all using any browser (tried opera plus the default), via the wireless router (Zyxel) or Wireless access points (Netgear).

One of the more promising avenues was installing a utility called HandyWi. This immediately got me connected and I thought my problems were solved. But then, after about 5 or 10 minutes the familiar Timeout and Gateway error messages. But I could still initiate new sessions, they just didn’t last very long. Which kinda suggests this might be something about the way the E71 default connectivity software doesn’t work. During all this I also reinstalled the firmware and restored from backup.

Curiously no-one has suggested climbing to the top of a very tall building and chucking the E71 out of a window, or placing it on a set of railway tracks, or hitting it many many many times with a very very very big hammer. My contract expires in a few months and I shall count the days until I can get rid of this wretched machine.

In the meantime, it’s Big Red Switch time. A factory reset, reinstall, then start again from a very early backup, and we shall see what we shall see.

Update: 10 Jan 2012

Hmmmm, interesting. I wiped and restarted from an old backup and the problem persisted. I tried using manual addressing instead of DHCP and the problem persisted. I gave up. And now, well, it’s working again. Someone, somewhere, is, as they say, having a laugh. I did wonder whether ‘something had changed’ at the BBC end given the problems watching video on some smartphones. It seems a bit unlikely, and wouldn’t explain the connectivity issues with my E71 and browsers. But it’s working for now, until it stops again. Ho hum.