The Site With the Lamp

July 29, 2008

All right, All right, the title should be Iceweasel on Debian. Call a rose by any other name and it would be just as hard to install on Debian. I think I am beginning to regret giving up Fedora.

Iceweasel 3.0 hasn't made it's way into the debian stable repositories that wouldn't really matter if it was possible to install the precompiled binary from mozilla.com unfortunately things don't quite work out like that because I got an error with the installer (unfortunately forgot to note it down)

So if you are keen to use firefox 3 the only option is to switch to the unstable repository. The documentation advices against mixing the two but sometimes there is no choice.

Adding the unstable repostory to synaptic (which is really adding it to apt) is easier said than done. When you reload after adding the new repo, it errors out.

E:Dynamic MMap ran out of room
E:Dynamic MMap ran out of room
E:Error occured while processing scim-modules-socket (NewVersion1)
E:Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/
http://us.debian.org_debian_debian_dist_sid_main_binary-1386-Packages
E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

The web is full of pundits and some of them have commented that this error is because there are two many repositories. How rediculous is that? fortunately there are some really knowledgable people out there too. One of them suggested that this is because the default space allocation for the cache is too low.

I reckoned it might be something like this when I first so the error and initially thought of changing the ulimit (this is what needed to be done with k3b on Fedora), but it turns out that on debian ulimit by default is unlimited.

The solution is to add something like the following to the apt configuration files:

The number of course being the new limit. You can choose something appropriate.