Voyager is an interesting distro that is basically the work a French team. For some time they have been producing a polished version of (x)ubuntu. However, I’m not that keen on ubuntu: I don’t trust Canonical, and I want minimal binary blobs. I also want something easy to use. Manjaro is good, but the main machine I have is slow: and besides, it’s time for a change.
So when I found that they had worked out a system for porting the goodness of xfce with functionality to a Debian base — even as an experiment — I had to try it. To do this I’m using a three year old Sony Viao. So I downloaded the 1 GB file and burned it to a cd. Then opened it up as a live distro: and found the install script would not work as the wifi was being used. I then did an install, but had capslock on when I wrote my root password. Once that was fixed you end up with this as a base.
The screen has the appropriate things to monitor on it. It is a highly modified version, but I don’t like light backgrounds. However, that was easily fixed. I opened synaptic (which I prefer to the ubuntu style software centre, which is also there) and started an update, using one of the stock smart backgrounds.
Note that I have revman up as I was downloading this at the same time. A quick install of the default Java (which is still Java 6 in Debian wheezy) and we have revman running. 
Other stuff? Darktable is in the Debian repo. So is Libreoffice. So is R. I’m basically set with about a half hour of work to be productive. Moreover, there are brandless and stable versions of Firefox (Icefox) and — much more importantly, my favourite email reader thunderbird (icedove). Having used kmail, geany, and sylpheed-claws and (worse) evolution lately, it’s a relief to get the favourite back.
I will refrain from mentioning what I have to use for the work mac… which is much worse than all the above, but needed for collaboration.
Now the real challenge is to get the one or two windows programmes I use up and running. The main one is Gradepro. This is supposed to require a windows machine, but I’m cheap. It needs .NET, and winetricks has .NET — will experiment some more.
But this is going on the server basically now.
UPDATE
If I have read the Voyager people, they recommend that you move to jessie or testing and use your local mirror: their recommended sources.list looks like this.
# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 7.0.0 _Wheezy_ - Official Snapshot amd64 LIVE/INSTALL Binary 20140122-22:58]/ wheezy contrib main non-free deb http://ftp.nz.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib deb-src http://ftp.nz.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contribdeb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free deb-src http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free# Plank # deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~ricotz/debian-plank sid main
Once you have that correct install arandr (it is in the Debian repositories) if you have dual screens as that will allow you to have two screens running
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On other news, Disqus is keeping most of the spam away in the current system so I’ve switched moderation off as a trial
