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I'm just setting up the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA OT) on my Debian box, and I thought I'd take notes. This isn't really a how-to, but maybe it will help someone.

1. Go to the DITA Open Toolkit webpage.
2. In the left pane, click on Download
3. Two choices - dita-ot releases under the CPL or the dita-ot released under the Apache ASL . Use whichever you prefer, the content of both packages is the same. I chose the Apache license.
4. Look at the Linux Install Guide
5. Extract the archive somewhere. In its current incarnation DITA is hard to share, so take that into account.
6. Debian and Java have challenges. Make sure you install Java, at least 1.4 (there have been some problems with JDK 1.5, more on that later)
7. Install (using apt) ant, ant-doc, and ant-optional.
8. Install xalan, libxalan2-java and libxalan2-java-doc
9. If you want to make PDFs, install fop.
10. Go into the DITA directory and type "ant all" and you should be set to go.

Optional things:

If you are doing this for personal use, get RenderX's xep instead of fop. You can't really compare the two - xep is the better solution. Their free edition includes a little footer telling everyone about xep, but that's okay by me. They are giving me something free. I don't mind giving them some advertising for it. People pay $50 for a $5 t-shirt advertising Tommy or DKNY and they feel like they got a good deal.

Install eclipse. Managing ant projects can be a real pain. Take advantage of eclipse for doing that.

If you can afford it, buy oXygen. It's worth the $50 they charge, and their license is really good. Things may have changed, but the last time I tried the free XML editors on Linux, they left a lot to be desired, especially debugging support for XSL transformations. Really, I wanted to use emacs. I've used emacs for years, but I was wasting a lot of time and switched back to oXygen.

Use source control. Install CVS or something similar. It's too hard to manage XML projects without source control.

I installed the ATI binary drivers on my debian system. Everything seemed to be okay, but I was getting lousy GL performance. So I had to figure out why.

First step is to see which OpenGL drivers are being loaded. Open a command prompt and type fglrxinfo. You should see a vendor string like this:

display: :0.0  screen: 0

OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.

OpenGL renderer string: RADEON 9600 Generic 

OpenGL version string: 1.3.5461 (X4.3.0-8.19.10)

I didn't. Mine said I was using the Mesa drivers. Mesa is great, but those aren't the drivers I wanted to use.

Next step, why is Mesa getting loaded rather than the ATI drivers. Take a look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log. There's lots of stuff in here, but don't be too intimidated. Look for things that say error. In my case I saw an error that told me DRI wasn't loading. Hmm, that would explain it. DRI is the Direct Rendering Infrastructure. ATI's Gl depends on DRI. Here's what it looked like:

(WW) fglrx(0): ***********************************************

(WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed! *

(WW) fglrx(0): * (maybe driver kernel module missing or bad) *

(WW) fglrx(0): * 2D acceleraton available (MMIO) *

(WW) fglrx(0): * no 3D acceleration available *

(WW) fglrx(0): ********************************************* *

So I searched for the error message I was getting. Not a lot of help was out there, really, but I eventually found a website that told me that Composite doesn't work with ATI's DRI implementation. Turning off Composite is pretty easy. In your /etc/X11/xorg.conf add the following:

Section "Extensions"

      Option "Composite" "false"

EndSection

Bingo. That did it for me. I'd like to be able to use Composite (it allows you to do some interesting things with transparency and xfce), but I'd rather have a fast driver.

BTW, I've seen some posts suggesting using an option in your xorg.conf called AllowGLXWithComposite. Sorry to inform you, but that's a nvidia option, not an ATI one.

I finally found a good repository for Unofficial Debian Packages that includes mplayer and mencoder.

They also appear to have MythTV binaries there. I'm looking forward to checking that out, too.