After cloning a working Debian virtual machine, the new system would not bring up its Ethernet interface. This is because I checked VirtualBox's dialog, "Reset MAC address for network card" and got a new hardware Ethernet address.

Trying "ifup eth0" didn't work. I did an "ip addr" and saw that the only configured interface was now called eth1.

This is simple to solve. Edit the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and move the new MAC address (like "00-0F-35-01..." and so on) from the eth1 line back to eth0, erasing the previous address in the eth0 line. Then delete the remainder of the eth1 line, save, and reboot.

You should now have your eth0 back.

This turns out to be amazingly easy, at least with Debian 7.3.

First, instead of MySQL, I followed instructions at the MariaDB site: Setting Up MariaDB Repositories. Then:

$ sudo apt-get install libcatalyst-modules-perl

which installed over 200 modules, but what do you know:

$ catalyst.pl Foo

creates a Foo Catalyst application under the current directory. Everything *Just Works. *Thanks to Debian and the folks who bring you Catalyst.

Further reading:

• An Introduction to Application Development with Catalyst and Perl May 14, 2012 by Henry Van Styn in Linux Journal

• Some functional Catalyst examples on the Catalyst Framework site

• Using Catalyst::Plugin::AutoCRUD: Tutorial with Examples for Newbies on Perl.org

UPDATE (April 2014): Catalyst seems a bit heavy for most of my needs. I'm exploring mojolicious.

See the instructions at http://backports.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=instructions

1) Add the backports repository by editing /etc/apt/sources.lst (must be root) and adding the following line:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian/ lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Run the following:

#aptitude update
#aptitude install debian-backports-keyring

(Ignore any warning that occur with the above 2 commands, the install will correct those) If you run #aptitude update again the warnings should be gone

2) Install Adobe Flash

#aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree

3)You shouldn't need this step, but just in case run

and make sure the correct one (/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so) is selected. It should be the current default.

4) Start Iceweasel and go the location about:plugins and you should see the latest Flash.

See also my comments of installation of Virtualmin on a Centos linode... these are just the additional issues.

GD under PHP not installed by default

Wordpress and other PHP systems were reporting errors about "imagecreatefromjpeg not defined" ... that's a PHP built-in function... what gives? Somehow I didn't have the GD image manipulation module loaded into PHP. Here's how to do that.

# sudo apt-get install php5-gd
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Locales not installed by default

(reported solved in Debian 5.0.2)

Apt-get was reporting huge batches of errors like:

perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
/usr/bin/mandb: can't set the locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct
manconv: can't set the locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct

The solution is to:

apt-get install locales
dpkg-reconfigure locales

and I added the locale: en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

dpkg-reconfigure locales