Here's a growing list of simple tips and tricks which can make your life a lot more comfortable when running Debian on your desktop machine:

Kill mysql replication

There's tons of howto's on setting up mysql replication, however, I wasn't able to find a way to stop it. Here's how:

mysql> show slave status;
[... lots of info deleted ...]
1 row in set (0.04 sec)

mysql> slave stop;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.30 sec)

mysql> change master to master_host='';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.30 sec)

mysql> show slave status;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

and there you are!

Crappy sound with firefox, flash and alsa

Firefox with flash sounded like crap on my machine, until I found out how to get Firefox running with an alsa wrapper:

1. apt-get install alsa-oss
2. Change /etc/firefox/firefoxrc to

   # which /dev/dsp wrapper to use
   RUNTIME_FIREFOX_DSP="aoss"

joe keeps crashing, part 1

Modern versions of joe (joe's own editor) have built-in syntax highlighting. One way or another, this causes the editor to crash sometimes. Which is Not Good. Here's a simple fix:

1. egrep -v '^-syntax' /etc/joe/joerc >~/.joerc

You might want to backup your own ~/.joerc first though.

joe keeps crashing, part 2

Another thing which bothered me was that I had a problem with joe on remote machines crashing under sudo. Scary huh?
First trick I discovered was to use sudo -e <file> instead of sudo joe <file>
That however didn't please me. After some straceing, I found out the problem was something locale related. This allowed me to write down a quick and dirty fix:

1. Near the end of /etc/ssh/ssh_config, there's a statement which controls the the environment variables which should be forwarded to the remote server. I changed that statement to read

   SendEnv TERM

Presto, everything works.