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The desktop-base package just updated on my Debian Squeeze desktop, and it brought with it the new wallpaper for the distribution's soon-to-be-stable release.

(By one estimate), 72 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 110 need to be dealt with for the release to happen.

Now that we have OpenJDK, I thought that Java was automatically part of the Debian Squeeze default install. But here I was running Iceweasel and needing the Java browser plugin to ... do some Java stuff. No go.

I've been keeping my eye on Debian Squeeze (and Sid) for the past few months via live images, and in the course of the release's life there have been changes in the application lineup. Notable inclusions in the now-frozen Squeeze are the Ubuntu Software Center as an alternative way of managing applications. Yep, you read right: Debian is using the Ubuntu Software Center. It looks like Debian's developers are in a more cooperative mood than they get credit for. I for one am glad to see such cross-pollination between Ubuntu and Debian.

I really did like Fedora 13. I liked it enough to solve more than a handful of problems. I liked it enough to use a proprietary graphics driver for the first time (didn't like that; not only was it outside the package-management system and hard to update, it didn't perform so well either). I love the Fedora community, the openness that's everywhere, the lack of pretense. But just as everything was roses, furry kittens and such when I first ran Fedora 13 with the 2.6.33 Linux kernel, it started to go dark with the change — in mid-cycle, mind you — to the 2.6.34 kernel.

I've been sitting on old kernels for too long in Fedora 13. First I kept 2.6.33.8-149 because I could use the open-source ati video driver, but then I moved to 2.6.34.7-56, where I had working and speedy video with the fglrx driver direct from ATI/AMD as well as the ability to mute the speakers fed by my Lenovo G555's Conexant 5069 sound chip.

I've gotten rid of a great deal of hardware over the past year and then some. I don't have any desktop systems left in my computer herd. We've just set up our home office in the home-office space we built more than 7 years ago (another topic, another time, another blog), and I elected to bring my Compaq Armada 7700dmt — circa 1999 — back here for the time being.

I'm running a daily build of Debian Sid (yep, the "unstable" branch, running pretty solidly by the way) in live form from an 8 GB USB flash drive. Debian is fast. It's always been so.

Now that I have a laptop that boots from USB, I've been using IMG images instead of ISOs when they're available to test new Linux and BSD systems because they're so easy to deal with.

I realize that all the problems I'm having with Fedora 13's new 2.6.34.7-61 kernel are potentially (and probably actually) of my own making. I've gone outside the Fedora and RPM Fusion repositories only when I absolutely needed to do so to bring or restore functionality to my system, but that's probably what made my particular system hard to upgrade thereafter. Think of this as a) a cautionary tale on running Fedora in production, b) a wild, geeky ride, c) sort of a learning experience (and I've got more to learn if I ever hope to make this all work correctly in the future), or d) all of the above.

It's a bit of irony, I guess, that there's no easily invoked option to encrypt the /home partition in the OpenBSD installer. I call it irony because the project is all about security and encryption, yet the developers seem to have a reason why encrypted user data isn't an option in the installer itself.

Even though I'm actively testing Ubuntu 10.10 (installed to a 4 GB USB flash drive) and find it extremely compatible with my current hardware (Lenovo G555), I expect I'll be sticking with Fedora 13 for at least the next few months. Everything's working too well to upset this particular apple cart.

I've been using Rhythmbox to drop stuff on the iPod, and I put a few albums encoded in the freedom-loving ogg format. I didn't expect them to play, but they do. I Googled for iPod and ogg, and this doesn't seem possible. So I dug a little deeper and started poking around the iPod's filesystem. You can do that sort of thing with an iPod in Linux.

Nobody writes much about the Debian Live Project, which went from a bunch of stable images for Intel architectures to offering stable and testing images not just for i386 and amd64 but also for PowerPC, the latter in a time when many distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu) have abandoned the Power architecture almost entirely.

I didn't want to do it, but I had to move from the 2.6.33 kernel to 2.6.34 to make both sound and video behave properly in Fedora 13 on my Lenovo G555 laptop with ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD graphics and Conexant 5069 sound.

While some users of the Lenovo G555 laptop and its Atheros AR8132 Ethernet interface report no trouble with networking in OpenBSD using the alc driver (courtesy of FreeBSD) that made its debut in version 4.7 of the operating system, that wasn't the case for me. The wired Ethernet interface shows up in the dmesg as alc0 but doesn't "light up."

Now that thing are somewhat stable in the "hates kernel mode setting" world of Intel i810 video in Linux (sort of), and I've moved on from 2002-era hardware to 2010-era hardware in the form of a laptop with ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD video, my problems with the evil evilness that is kernel mode setting should be over, right? Not so much.

The topic, "Should I try OpenBSD/FreeBSD?" came up recently on the Fedora Forum, and while I answered there, my answer is sufficiently long-winded enough to spin into a blog post.

Now that I know how to patch my OpenBSD-release installation and keep it updated as OpenBSD-stable, I pulled out the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 now running 4.7-stable, applied the latest patch, then rebuilt the kernel and rebooted. It was a step in the journey that culminated with an X session over SSH from the OpenBSD machine to a 1995-era Macintosh Powerbook 1400 with MacSSH and MI/X.

One of the features of gThumb 2.11 that I love is its memory for my last photo resize. New in 2.11, this feature is (thank you, Yoda). What this means is that if I resize an image, shrinking it from whatever large size to 600 pixels wide, gThumb remembers this, and the next time I resize a picture, 600px is the default value, and all I need to do is click a box and I'm done.