Today I noticed Rhythmbox not playing some music files in Debian. After a bit of digging around, I noticed the warning “your gstreamer installation is missing a plugin” in the file properties. From there it wasn’t far to realize that MP3 files did not play in Rhythmbox (any more), and that I probably need a (new) plugin (it’s Debian ‘unstable’ after all, so this was probably introduced by a recent update). sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-fluendo-mp3 and restarting Rhythmbox was all I needed to do.
How to install the gambit GUI under GNU/Linux (Debian)
The gambit package for Debian (and consequently Ubuntu) is outdated, and not available for up-to-date releases. The website for gambit offers a download for Linux, which can be compiled using the standard ./configure; make; sudo make install.
On my machine, this did not install the GUI. There was actually an explanation on the screen, but I did not read it the first time around: Without the right wxWidgets on the computer, the GUI is simply skipped. The solution: Install libwxgtk3.0-dev (note the dev-suffix), and re-install/re-compile gambit.
Installing R package rgdal on GNU/Linux (Debian)
It’s common that GNU/Linux users have to compile R packages when installing them. For packages with dependencies, cran2deb offers a readily-packaged solution for some of the most common packages on Debian. rgdal doesn’t seem to be one of them, and install.packages(“rgdal”) led to a non-zero exit status. The solution: install the dependencies, of course.
sudo apt-get install libproj-dev libgdal-dev
On my machine this pulled a long list of further dependencies, but subsequently rgdal installed without complaints.
Overcoming Pandoc Issues in Debian
Debian doesn’t include a recent version of pandoc, unless you’re living on the hard edge (a.k.a. experimental). When pandoc threw errors for documents passed to pandoc-citeproc, I suspected that an update would resolve the issue, especially as the same document compiled fine under Windows and older documents also failed to compile. There’s an up-to-date Debian package from the official repository, but not for my architecture. Compiling it is, then. Downloading and compiling posed no problem, but somehow the symlink out of ./cabal/bin failed to work properly, as did creating a symlink to the pandoc installed within/alongside rstudio. I guess there’s a clean solution during the compilation stage, but the quickest workaround was copying the binaries in ./cavbal/bin to /usr/bin. Not pretty, but functional.
Didier Ruedin 