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I’m a subscriber to Debian Developer Raphael Hertzog’s e-mail updates, which I recommend highly — as I do visiting his website when those updates come through. He’s a developer who has a great interest in helping out the end user, and I appreciate all he does very much. One thing in a recent entry caught my eye: Raphael is looking for people who want to start getting involved in Debian.

I’ve been running my Debian Squeeze LXDE system today, and all of a sudden the CPU was pegged at 100 percent during a Firefox/Iceweasel session. I opened up a terminal and took a look. Five Gnash processes were doing all of the damage.

There are 60-something updates waiting for me in Debian Squeeze at the moment, and such a large number of packages staring at me from Update Manager usually means a “major” Debian Stable update. Whether or not this is some kind of milestone (it's not, I think), it's a good time as any to assess where I've been on the Linux and BSD desktop over the past few years. Am I setting a personal longevity record with Debian Squeeze?

It’s not the least eventful package installation I’ve ever done in Linux and BSD, but tapping into Debian Backports to install the Document Foundation’s new LibreOffice suite and replace the formerly Oracle-controlled, now-in-limbo OpenOffice is fairly easy if you follow the steps, refrain from panic and just type in the letter “y” a few times.

If you wanted LibreOffice in Debian Squeeze until very recently, the package could be installed either from the Testing or Unstable archives. Now there’s a “better,” safer way for Squeeze users to run LibreOffice: The LO suite is now available in Squeeze Backports.

Mozilla is continuing development for Firefox not in the 4.0.x series but in 5.x. So there will presumably be no security updates for Iceweasel past 4.0.1, which is what I’m running now from the Debian Mozilla Team’s repository.

The Debian Project is so non-commercial, they don't sell T-shirts, although some are available ... in Europe ... at conferences. But true to the Debian way, the art needed to make your own shirt is open source and generally available. So I decided to make my own Debian Squeeze Space Fun (the theme for this release) T-shirt.

As you have probably heard, Oracle has followed through with their earlier promise to “move OpenOffice.org to a purely community-based open source project.” OpenOffice is moving to Apache. I’d like to offer you my own thoughts on this new opportunity and what it means. I recommend also the insights of my colleagues Ed Brill and Bob Sutor.

(Note: Rob Weir works for IBM as an "ODF Architect"; all the action in this post is in the comments)

This morning, Oracle announced that they are submitting the OpenOffice.org codebase to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator. At IBM, we see this as a strong validation of open source, open document formats, and market choice and flexibility in the office productivity arena. Since we launched Lotus Symphony in 2007, IBM has been an active participant in the OpenOffice.org community, and with the move to Apache, we plan to increase our efforts through human and code contribution.

(Note: Ed Brill is Director, Messaging and Collaboration, IBM Lotus software)

Earlier today, Oracle announced that they would be donating source code for OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation to start a new incubator project. It’s been an interesting road to get to this point over the decades, with well and not-so-well publicized twists and turns, but I’m glad we got here.

(Note: Bob Sutor is Vice President, Open Systems and Linux, IBM Software Group)

Oracle is to propose that OpenOffice.org becomes an Apache Software Foundation (ASF) project and enters the Apache incubation process. The proposal comes six weeks after Oracle abandoned commercial development of OpenOffice and said it was looking for a way to have the office suite managed by the community.

The first alpha of what will become Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" has been released by the Canonical and Ubuntu developers. This development milestone is the first on the roadmap which sees another two alpha and two beta versions before the final release on 13 October.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server, the first "Long Term Support" release of Ubuntu has reached its end of life and is now completely unsupported; there will be no more security updates or critical bug fixes.

As I reported on May 31st, 2011, Oracle has, with IBM’s encouragement, given the open-source OpenOffice office suite to The Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

The free, open-source office suite OpenOffice has been dying by inches for quite some time. Now that Oracle has "given" the project -- sans support, it would seem -- to the Apache Foundation, I'd say it's time to close the lid on the box and drop it in the ground. It's not like Oracle didn't kill it first.

Now that the transition to the new Alioth server is complete, The Debian Mozilla Team’s http://mozilla.debian.net site is back, as is the repository. I know because I got an Icedove update this morning.

Those Debian users (including myself) who use the Debian Mozilla Team APT archive at http://mozilla.debian.net for newer versions of Iceweasel and Icedove (aka Firefox and Thunderbird) may have noticed that the archive has been down for at least three (if not more) days.

I hoped Ubuntu would do the right thing and start an official derivative featuring the GNOME 3 environment. That has not happened. But there is a new project, the Ubuntu GNOME Remix, offering a PPA today and an ISO install image at some point in the near future.

I've always been an advocate for using the packages supplied by the distribution/project you happen to be running as an OS. Rarely do I go outside the "official" repositories for something shinier and newer. That's changing, and swapping the Chromium browser in Debian Squeeze for the Google Chrome browser directly from Google is my latest shift in this direction.

From free, open-source software user, to blogger, then Linux distro developer -- that's the path of 20-year-old Jeff Hoogland, who in 2010 started Bodhi Linux, a distribution based on Ubuntu that features the latest version of the Enlightenment window manager and key newer applications in a stripped-down base that lets users set things up the way they like them.