Debian's latest stable release has been out since last May 2013 and I'm very eager to make it the main OS on my computer.
I have used Arch Linux in the past and I liked its K.I.S.S. approach where everything is built from the ground up. But since I decided to limit my Linux explorations to Debian-based distros for now, Arch will have to wait. That's where I got the idea to do a minimal install of Debian and build it up from there.
For the past few years, I have been using my trusty D-Link DWA-125 wireless dongle on my PC to connect to a wireless network. I have written about how to connect to WiFi via the command line but that was for unsecured networks. Recently, I've been fumbling around with Debian and did a minimal netinstall (to build it up with a GUI desktop) -- sort of a "from scratch" installation, like how Arch Linux installation is done. Since netinstall without a desktop environment drops you off at the CLI on first boot, I needed to find a way to connect to a WiFi network without the use of GUI network managers.
One of my hobbies is Linux distribution hopping. If you don't know what that means, it's that I regularly browse DistroWatch for news about new Linux releases. If something catches my interest, then I download the ISO, try out its live session in VirtualBox, and then finally, if impressed, install it to one of the partitions in my PC. And if it's that good, then I use it as my main OS.
The medium I use most when creating the installation media is a USB thumb drive. It's usually a no-brainer; just plug-in the thumb drive and the OS does its thing and auto-mounts it. The next part involves unmounting the thumb drive so that I can use the dd command to write the ISO to the thumb drive. I don't use the right-click » "Unmount" via the File manager because I just like typing in the command line
$ sudo umount /dev/sdb1
and unmounted goes my thumb drive. Now I can proceed with
$ sudo dd if=/path/to/file.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M; sync
and after some time, it finishes and I know that the distributions installation media is freshly baked. But sometimes I want to check the contents of the USB thumb drive, so I usually pull-out the drive, put it back in again and let the OS auto-mount it. So I thought to myself, "Isn't there a way to mount the USB thumb drive via the command line after dd command finishes without me pulling out and plugging back in the drive?" Apparently there is. And the command, in Ubuntu, is udisks. And using it is easy, it's just
$ udisks --mount /dev/sdb1
and the USB thumb drive is remounted. Apparently, this same command can also be used to unmount the USB thumb drive
$ udisks --unmount /dev/sdb1
Note that there is no need for the sudo superpowers to use the command.
That's it! Hopefully this will be useful for somebody out there