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Debian with legacy ATI graphics and ATI's proprietary driver in 2017, use Wheezy

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My ATI laptop works fine with Debian Buster and Bullseye in 2021.

The problems in 2017

My Sony Vaio VPCEA1ZIE laptop is old, but it remains capable for everyday office and graphics computing - it has 8 Gb of RAM, a 4 thread 2.13GHz Core i3 processor, 1TB hard drive and a Blu-Ray disc reader.  It isn't yet ready for disposal, and shame on AMD for poor product support.

My plan for the future is to avoid ATI graphics.  By the way, I already choose Intel in favour of AMD CPUs due to AMD's rapid changing of platforms and brisk removal of support for their quickly obsoleted hardware.

If you are reading this and are starting with a fresh install, then Gentoo with package masking will give you a better optimised mix of new and old (this is the true advantage of Gentoo, speed optimisations are a myth).  I reinstalled Debian Wheezy because I'm familiar with its configuration.

Installing the the proprietary ATI legacy drivers on Debian Wheezy
Follow the instructions on debian-wiki, but add APT::Default-Release "wheezy"; to /etc/apt/apt.conf to avoid upgrading all packages to backports (this would cause dependency problems)

Installing newer software on Debian Wheezy

Libreoffice 5.3.5

.deb files downloaded from libreoffice.org work.
You'll need to unzip the .deb.tar.gz, go to the DEBS directory and run
for i in `ls *.deb` ; do  dpkg -i $i ; done
or dpkg -i *.deb several times

Owncloud client

Do not install the owncloud client from backports, because it has dependency problems.

The version downloaded from the official website works.

Dropbox

Downloaded version works.

Lyx 2.2

First install the dependencies for compiling the version of Lyx on Wheezy.  Have a deb-src line for Wheezy available in /etc/apt/sources.list and then do this with

aptitude update
apt-get build-dep lyx

Download and tar -xvvf the source

cd lyx-version
aptitude install autoconf automake libtool
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
su
make install
exit
lyx

A surprisingly painless and successful compilation. Even the icon appeared in my xfce menu!

Enpass 5.6

  • The packaged 64 bit .deb produces a GLIBC error when run. I think this is due the version of libc6 in Wheezy. This is a central component which broke my system when upgraded to a mixed Jessie/Wheezy version - I was unable to downgrade libc6 or to install compilers. The packaged 32 bit .deb produces other errors.  I've asked the developer for a version compiled on Wheezy but have not had a reply.
  • To reiterate, do not upgrade libc6 to the version in Jessie!
  • The Windows version of Enpass 5.6 via wine: this worked initially but later produced an unexpected error and terminated.  I am now using wine staging and this seems to work.

Java 8

References:
https://wiki.debian.org/Java/Sun
and
https://wiki.debian.org/JavaPackage

Install the backported version of java-package
apt-get install -t wheezy-backports java-package
Download the latest JDK file from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html

make-jpkg jdk-8u131-linux-x64.tar.gz # Should be done as normal user not root
 
# Then as root: 
dpkg -i oracle-java8-jdk_8u131_amd64.deb
update-java-alternatives -l
update-java-alternatives -s jdk-8-oracle-x64

The downloaded JabRef now works :-)

R

If version 2.15 has the packages you need, then just use this default version.

If it does not, then using R on a different computer is going to be more hassle-free than trying to install other versions.

R 3.1

Remove any R packages already installed, including lme4, Rcmdr, car

Add the following line to sources.list:

deb http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R//bin/linux/debian wheezy-cran3/

Install with

aptitude -t wheezy-cran3 install r-base r-base-dev r-base-core r-recommended

Problem: Rcmdr is not available

Solution yet to try:
library(devtools)
install_version("Rcmdr", "2.3-2")

R 3.2

This is a suggestion from http://jenzopr.github.io/bioinformatics/2016/05/03/r-wheezy-build.html.  I'm yet to try it because seems like too much hacking to bother with. 

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.48.0.tar.gz
tar xfvz curl-7.48.0.tar.gz
cd curl-7.48.0
./configure --prefix=~/Downloads/curl
make
make install
 
cd /tmp
wget https://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-3/R-3.3.0.tar.gz
tar xfvz R-3.3.0.tar.gz
cd R-3.3.0

export LDFLAGS=-L~/Downloads/curl/lib
export CPPFLAGS=-I~Downloads/curl/include

./configure --prefix=/prefix/to/r/3.3.0 --enable-R-shlib
make
make check
make install

Skype 5 and above

  • Native.
    • I was unable to compile the dependency libfontconfig1 version 2.11 or better on my broken Jessie/Wheezy system. 
    • Let's try it again...
    • apt-get build-dep libfontconfig1
  • Web
    • Skype web on Seamonkey - the cursor turns into a no-entry sign when hovered over the call button  
  • Wine
    • Downloading the newest Windows version via wine produces a never-ending 'Please wait while Skype is installed.  This may take a few minutes' which ultimately gives up with 'We are having problems connecting to the download server.  To download an alternative installer for Skype, click the Download button.' The download button just goes back to where we started.
    • https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=26917 has a link for an MSI installer for version 6. Actually, this downloads version 7.38.  WineHQ warns this is very unreliable, often crashes, video does not work.  Am trying it anyway.
      wine msiexec /i SkypeSetup.msi 
      It didn't work.
      Here are the errors:
      fixme:heap:HeapSetInformation (nil) 1 (nil) 0
      fixme:advapi:RegisterEventSourceW ((null),L"FoxitCloudUpdateService"): stub
      fixme:advapi:ReportEventW (0xcafe4242,0x0004,0x0000,0x00000000,(nil),0x0002,0x00000000,0x74e9a8,(nil)): stub
      fixme:advapi:DeregisterEventSource (0xcafe4242) stub
      err:module:import_dll Library MSVCP140.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\skypert.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library VCRUNTIME140.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\skypert.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\skypert.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-string-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\skypert.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-utility-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\skypert.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-environment-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\skypert.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-time-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\skypert.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-stdio-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\skypert.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-convert-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\skypert.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-heap-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\skypert.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-math-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\skypert.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-filesystem-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\skypert.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library skypert.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\SkypeSkylib.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library MSVCP140.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\SkypeSkylib.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library VCRUNTIME140.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\SkypeSkylib.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\SkypeSkylib.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-string-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\SkypeSkylib.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-stdio-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\SkypeSkylib.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-heap-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\SkypeSkylib.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-utility-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\SkypeSkylib.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-convert-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\SkypeSkylib.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-time-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\SkypeSkylib.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-math-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\SkypeSkylib.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library api-ms-win-crt-filesystem-l1-1-0.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\SkypeSkylib.dll") not found
      err:module:import_dll Library SkypeSkylib.dll (which is needed by L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\Skype.exe") not found
      err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"C:\\Program Files\\Skype\\Phone\\Skype.exe" failed, status c0000135
A better plan is to give up and use your and use your Android phone instead.
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