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I remember writing about the novelty of the Debian Live Project’s inclusion of PowerPC among the architectures for which it was producing Squeeze alpha images. If you look at the Debian Live releases page and click through the links. You’ll see that live images for the PowerPC architecture were made for 6.0 Alpha 1 and Alpha 2. But the betas, the release candidates and the final release are i386 and amd64 only.

Suspend/resume. Or in words that non-geeks can understand, sleeping/waking up. It’s one of those things that not just Linux but also BSD and even Windows have been trying to get right for years.

I’ve had this handy countdown graphic on my Click blog for the past couple of weeks. Not that Debian is in the habit of setting release dates, but this particular image came about after the project itself announced that Feb. 5 or 6, 2011 would be the target date(s).

If you're like me, you find out about a cool open-source software project that's totally in line with what you're already doing (in my case that would be blogging and messing around with the Internet) and you have to try it out right away. I did just that with FlatPress, with which I created the I, Debian blog. It helps if you have FTP access to a shared-hosting account or a full-fledged web server.

FlatPress is a very easy-to-install blogging platform that uses PHP, stores the entries in flat files instead of a database (hence the name), runs extremely fast, takes up very little disk space (1.9 MB for the default after the files are uncompressed) and is refreshingly simple. I eventually get around to writing about Debian Squeeze, which is three days away from its Stable release.

If you are unfamiliar with the HeliOS Project, I can tell you that Ken and Co. are doing a great thing — they get old computer systems, put Linux on them and then give the machines to kids who need them for school and to families in need of a working computer but unable to afford one. Ken contacted me about an event called "Rock a Charity." It sounds complicated (and Jeff Hoogland explains it better than I can), but the idea is that the three nominated groups that gets the most "likes" on Facebook between 7 a.m. PST Feb. 1 and 7 a.m. PST Feb. 3 will be eligible to get some much-needed funding from Austin's Rock A Charity.

I was reading the Splitbrain.org blog, which I quite like by the way, and when I see a blog that I like, both content-wise and design/execution-wise, I try to figure out whether or not the software behind it is WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, etc. Well, it turns out that Splitbrain.org is done with DokuWiki, which is a wiki platform that doesn't rely on a database, with all the data stored in regular files on the server.

ZDNet ran an article titled "Happy Birthday, Macintosh" yesterday, and I clicked, somehow thinking it would be a significant birthday. Nope. It's No. 27. Not 30, which we'll all be enjoying in three years' time. But just as I turned from Macintosh to Unix in the 1980s, I do as much of my computing as I can these days in Linux.

I've been thinking about the Liquorix kernels for some time. They've been mentioned to me in the comments of my blog. I've read about them. They are built for Debian.

Debian is reliable. Did I say fast? I did. And it's ready now (and has been extremely stable for the past many, many months even though the project itself will only call it as such sometime in the next two weeks, give or take).

Announced in Debian News: The new Squeeze installer is now out of beta and into Release Candidate 1 status. It's another milestone on the march to Stable for Debian's current Testing distribution.

I've been chuckling. Inside. Silently. OK, not so silently. Never mind that little show called CES. The big tech news today is Qualcomm's $3.2 billion (with a "b") acquisition of WiFi chip maker Atheros.

Anybody running Debian Squeeze whose desktop-base package has updated in recent days might notice a change in the wallpaper on their Grub 2 screen as they boot up. Previously the Debian logo in the lower right side of the Grub screen tended to cover up the portion of the boot message that tells you how many seconds are left until the machine boots automatically.

The Linux Mint Debian Edition — built from Debian Testing, unlike "regular" Mint editions that start with an Ubuntu base — just released a new image that pushes the project forward much more quickly that I expected.

The entries in this blog flow through my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and once in awhile a friend of mine who has nothing to do with the open-source software world wonders what the hell I'm talking about. Just this weekend, somebody asked me, "What's this 'DEEE-bee-en' you write about?" Would the question be any different with the word "Ubuntu" in there? I don't think so. When it comes to desktop Linux (not to mention BSD, which is even further in the geek ghetto), nobody knows what we're talking about.

I have received a mail regarding the early development of the OpenBSD IPSEC stack. It is alleged that some ex-developers (and the company they worked for) accepted US government money to put backdoors into our network stack, in particular the IPSEC stack. Around 2000-2001.

I just saw the Linux Devices article about the new Google Chrome notebooks, the arrival of which I've been anticipating for about a year. I'd love to get my hands on one of these devices, and through Google's pilot program maybe it'll actually happen.

I wrote yesterday about the "whimsical spaceship" (that's a good name, don't you think?) theme coming to the Debian Squeeze desktop and Grub screen and wondering why the login screen still was so Lennyish. Today a new gdm3 package rolled into Squeeze, and once it installed I logged out and saw yet more spaceship whimsy. This theme does have a "real" name: SpaceFun.

I wondered why my formerly favorite open-source-focused blogger Matt Asay has been so ... silent lately. He became Canonical's COO not so long ago, his Cnet blog went into hibernation, his personal blog not so much (but not exactly bursting with activity, either), and he didn't exactly cut a large profile media-attention-wise at Canonical.

YouTube is running an HTML5 trial that will allow those with compatible browsers to enjoy the site's millions of videos without the Flash Player/plugin. The fact that maybe 99 percent (I don't know the exact figure, but it's huge) of web-delivered video comes wrapped in Flash, a protocol controlled by one company — and only available on platforms that company deems worthy — is a major disturbance in the Force.