Statler comments & questions: Installation, Skype, NVidia

Hi all,

I finally bit the bullet and installed Statler 64-bit XFCE. I was curious, but had been holding off, because both Debian proper (I tried Lenny and Squeeze) and every other distro based on Debian that I'd tried (e.g. Studio 64, Dream Linux) would not install on my box; I always got errors in the installer saying that it could not detect any CD-ROM drive -- even though the CD booted fine, the installer, once started, would claim that it didn't exist. Sometimes I'd be offered the chance to install drivers from a floppy, but my optical drive didn't come with any drivers, and my box has no floppy drive anyway. I was never able to figure out what the problem was, since other distros like Ubuntu/Mint/#! 9.04, Fedora, etc. would all install with no issues. So anyway I was afraid that with the move to Debian, Crunchbang would no longer work for me. But to my surprise and delight, it had no problem with my drives and installed fine, and fast to boot -- the whole installation took less than 10 minutes. And WOW! I'm blown away by the speed and responsiveness. My curiosity is still quite piqued, however, to find out exactly what the Crunchbang CD has that Debian and other Debian-based distros don't, that allowed it to install. Are there some drivers or firmware files that have been added which aren't a part of Debian? Could it have something to do with the fact that my optical drive and HDD are SATA rather than IDE?

I followed richs-lxh's instructions here for installing NVidia drivers, and it worked fine, I've got my proper screen resolution and compositing and all. I was wondering, however, why envyng is no longer on offer -- that's what I used in Crunchbang 8.10 and 9.04, and it was simple and worked wonderfully. I was just wondering if there might be any way to get that included in the final release of Statler, when it happens, as it would certainly make things easier.

Finally, I'm having trouble with Skype, which for me is a necessity as, in addition to using it to talk to family and friends in far-away places, I also use it for music lessons (via Skype video call) with my teacher in Canada. It didn't appear in the repos, so I tried downloading the deb from the Skype website and installing with gdebi, but it's not working. First I tried the deb marked for Debian Lenny, but when I tried to install I got an error message saying that it was for i686 only and couldn't be installed on a 64-bit OS. So I tried the only 64-bit deb, which was marked for Ubuntu 8.10+, and it installed with no errors, but won't run; when I launch it from the menu nothing happens, and when I type "skype" into a terminal I get an error saying "skype: error while loading shared libraries: libQtDBus.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory". Can anybody help out with this? It's the only showstopper for me so far -- apart from needing to get Skype working, Statler is absolutely amazing! I'm really impressed.

Any ideas about the Skype especially, or also the install question (just for my edification) would be most appreciated. Thanks!