Debian unstable hints

Java

My suggestion is to install Java from following repository instead of official

deb http://jrfonseca.dyndns.org/debian ./
Then, install Java using following packages:
apt-get install j2re1.4 j2sdk1.4
Page about it is here.

hr_US keyboard

This keyboard is particularly (honestly, only) useful to Croatian users who are accustomed to US keyboard. You can get Croatian keys using ALT and normal keys with Croatian characters (and shift). Otherwise, keyboard will behave like normal US keyboard (and all programmers will be happy about that!).

For xserver-xfree86 4.3.0 you will need new version of symbols which is available at: http://ftp.linux.hr/lokalizacija/keymaps/. Just do tar xvfz of xkb file found there in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols and add Option "XkbLayout" "hr_US" to /etc/X11/XF86Config-4.

DBD::Oracle

If you would like to install DBD::Oracle (perl DBI module) to access Oracle from your box you would probably want better way than installing whole Oracle. I know I did for some production machines.

Since I didn't found any references on how to do that, I did my own research and it proved quite helpful. You will need to install Oracle on one machine, but that can be testing or development.
For this to work, you will need dh-make-perl package. Do following:

dh-make-perl --build --cpan DBD::Oracle
You will end up with libdbd-oracle-perl_1.15-1_i386.deb.

Aside from that, you will just need two additional shared libraries from Oracle which you can install in /usr/local/lib/ as I did:

/usr/local/lib/libclntsh.so.8.0
/usr/local/lib/libwtc8.so

That's it. DBD::Oracle will complain about ORACLE_HOME not being set, but you can connect and execute queries without any problems (or do something like $ENV{'ORACLE_HOME'}='/'; if your perl script).

unstable grave bug

So, you hit unstable grave bug? (like I did in apache on one occasion and in mod_perl on another) Well, simplest solution is to downgrade to testing (for a while) using following /etc/apt/preferences:

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 1060

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 50
Then, apt-get update and apt-get upgrade will downgrade all packages to testing. Also, dpkg --configure --pending is your friend if downgrade stops at some point.

Managing Gigabytes installation on Debian

First, install tcsh package if you don't have it allready.