In the late 1990's, my friend Doug introduced me to `xsnow`, its a simple little program that makes it snow on your desktop. Ever since, around Christmas time, I have waxed nostalgic and run `xsnow` in honor of the on-set of winter and Advent. I was surprised this year when I ran `apt-get install xsnow` and was bluntly told that there was no installation candidate for xsnow!
I did a little digging and discovered that `xsnow` is still in the source repository! w00t! Unfortunately, it's VERY infrequent that I actually build a package from source, so I had to do a bit of reading to help me do it. I figured, if I had to look it up, it might be of value to others if I provided the synopsis of how to build the package.
First, make sure your /etc/apt/sources.list file includes the following:
cjs@hp8540w:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list | grep deb-src
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
Next, run `apt-get update` followed by `apt-cache showsrc xsnow | grep Build-Depends`, which will reveal:
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 7), dpatch (>= 2), libx11-dev, libxext-dev, libxpm-dev, libxt-dev, xutils-dev
Now you'll need to make sure these dependencies are installed, with `apt-get install debhelper dpatch libx11-dev libxext-dev libxpm-dev libxt-dev xutils-dev`.
Now you should be ready to build from source. You build the source via `apt-get -b source xsnow`. This will build a .deb and dump it in /var/cache/apt/archives.
You can install the .deb via `dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/xsnow*.deb`.
Note: I had to build from source because in Sid there's only an i386 binary for xsnow. If you're running Sid on a 32-bit x86 box, you should just be able to do an `apt-get install xsnow`, provided you have the non-free repositories in your apt sources.list.
You can run xsnow from an `xterm` OR, whatever means of launching you prefer (e.g. synapse or gnome-do, etc.)