Ever since I first heard of Bradley Kuhn, formerly of the Software Freedom Law Center and now the [Software Freedom Conservancy], on Linux Outlaws, I’ve been interested in what he has to say about (did you guess it?) software freedom. I try to listen semi-regularly to his Free as in Freedom oggcast.

Here is an article from Bradley’s blog on why he returned to Debian recently after years running everything from Red Hat to Ubuntu.

I’m on the lookout for more small blogging systems, and via Planet Debian and a post by Debian Developer Kai Wasserbäch, I just found Steve Kemp’s Chronicle.

You can see the system at work in Kai’s Chronicle blog and Steve’s Chronicle blog. Like many of these smaller (and larger) blogging systems, it’s packaged for Debian.

This is another one I’m going to look at.

Blosxom, PyBlosxom, Nanoblogger — hell, even WordPress and Movable Type are available as Debian packages.

I wondered, was I missing other blogging platforms, both flat-file and database-driven?

I went to Debian’s web software archive and took a look.

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The 2.6.37 kernel I got from Liquorix has made Debian Squeeze a nearly perfect distribution. The stock 2.6.32 kernel works great, except for sound, where plugging in my headphones doesn’t mute the speakers. This muting works with no configuration change in 2.6.37 from Liquorix.

I also finally have suspend/resume working for pretty much the first time ever in Linux, and I really like using it. The success of suspend/resume might be due to my installing the Debian nonfree firmware, which enabled DRI, which somehow factors into kernel mode setting. My understanding of the whole thing is a little vague, but what I do know is that suspend/resume works great, and this Debian Squeeze installation is running as well as anything I’ve ever used in the world of Linux and BSD.

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I wondered why the official FlatPress blog shows the number of views per post, and mine did not.

The “xx views” at the end of every post is enabled by the PostViews plugin.

To enable the PostViews plugin, go to the Admin Area, click on plugins, then go down to PostViews and click enable.

The per-post counter starts when you enable the plugin.

I’ve been experimenting with other flat-file blogging systems, including Blosxom and Ode.

Both Blosxom and Ode are based on Perl scripts, while FlatPress is written in PHP.

Blosxom is pretty much dead, though there are many offshoots, including the Python clone PyBlosxom, the above-mentioned Ode and more, the list of which you can see at Blosxom’s Wikipedia page.

Ode has in its favor an excellent default design/theme, its mission of teaching the user Perl (since it was developed with the now-classic “Learning Perl” O’Reilly book in mind and includes two extensively annotated extra versions of the main Perl script), good documentation and an enthusiastic and inclusive lead developer in Rob Reed (Ode has its own Twitter feed as well).

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I got an OpenBSD shell account on devio.us. Here’s what I have in my web directory.

It won’t be long before I drop a FlatPress install in there.

FlatPress has been working great, but I’m still exploring other blogging/CMS systems. I already have one WordPress install on my Hostgator shared-hosting account, and I used Hostgator’s automatic system to install another WordPress instance in a different domain.

That all went well, but what I really wanted was the ability to manage multiple blogs from a single WordPress instance. I made the first configuration change needed, but I couldn’t go further.

Why didn’t it work? I think that as part of the automatic installation of WordPress in Hostgator, it used the same database as my other WordPress instance, and due to that bit of database sharing, somehow I couldn’t get the “networked” blog feature to work.

The automatic installs, whether with Fantastico or Hostgator’s newer tool, are great because you click, click, click and have a service installed, but you then have no idea about how things were done unless you dig into the configuration files.

My database knowledge isn’t exactly broad, and I think the way to learn more is to create the database myself and install and configure the blog/CMS software the traditional way.

That’s what I like about FlatPress — besides not needing a database, you drop your files on the server via FTP, make a few changes, do some configuration (it’s not all text files; there’s a lot GUI in it) and you’re going. You can move it easily, back it up easily and look at the text files that hold your individual entries.

But I still want the multiblog, and I could do it with WordPress, Drupal, or even Movable Type, which I know very well. However, I don’t think that WordPress or Movable Type will allow me to do the one thing I really do want: the ability to write an entry and than target it to my choice blogs, moving it from one to the other (or running it in more than one) at will. That’s what I want.

I got a deal on an Epson Perfection V330 scanner. It runs great in Windows 7 with the voluminous amount of software on the install CD. I hoped that it would work out of the box with Debian Squeeze. No such luck. Sane/Xsane doesn’t recognize it (although it's in the dmesg).

I Googled for and found a few packages that got me going. (Here's a report of this method working in Ubuntu.)

I downloaded, unpacked and installed the driver and scanning software from Avasys, and with a reboot I was able to scan from my Debian Squeeze laptop.

It all works great. Thus far I've only used the Image Scan! software (yep, the name has an ! in it), which does work fairly well by the way.

I imagine these same packages would work for Ubuntu. There are also packages for Mint, Mandriva, CentOS, Fedora, PCLinuxOS and a few others.

You would think that scanners, especially those by companies such as Epson, would either work out of the box or have packages within the Debian (or Ubuntu) repos, if only in non-free. Guess not.

But since the solution was fairly easy to come by, I'm accepting (and now using) it.

How's that for an incendiary headline? Before I continue, here's how I got here:

First I tested the Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Alpha image, which I thought way too raw for a release two months and barely two weeks away, with the Unity layer on top of GNOME barely functional.

Then I tried a pre-alpha of Fedora 15, due May 10, a full 10 days after Ubuntu Natty, and found that while I didn't seem to be running GNOME Shell, it was GNOME 2.91.6 and pretty much worked as normal, and anchored a live system that was functional and responsive, though pretty darn ugly.

The comments on both entries were mostly written by Ubuntu defenders, telling me how wrong I was to judge Ubuntu by this alpha image, how it was going to rock at release time, and how I should a) do some research, b) screw my head on right and c) basically realize that Ubuntu can do no wrong, so shut the f* up.

I'm not a Ubuntu basher.

I always say that Ubuntu holds a very important position in the world of free, open-source software as well as in the wider world of all computer operating systems and environments, and for that reason I hold the Ubuntu project and its corporate entity Canonical to a higher standard than other software projects and companies.

I even run Ubuntu, albeit on one computer and not some or all (but certainly not none).

And I went back into my past entries and found a couple of reviews of previous Ubuntu alpha releases that … actually were functional, and Ubuntu Natty at this point in time running a desktop window manager (is that what it is?), Unity, that is untried, barely tested and not terribly functional does not bode well for a release in under three months time.

Here is my comment from a thread in LXer that explains the reason NOT why I'm anti-Ubuntu but why I see a frantically waving red flag in the path Ubuntu is taking toward its bleeding-edge push for new technologies in what people are expecting to actually use on their desktops:

What I'm saying is if you can't deliver basic functionality in an alpha release of the distribution you hope to deliver to end users in two months time, maybe you should consider holding the troublesome features until the next release so you can provide a better user experience. Fedora did this with systemd, which they could have put in Fedora 14 but instead chose to hold for Fedora 15. Debian is extremely conservative as to what they'll put in a Stable release. Testing is frozen very early, and development then focuses on eliminating bugs in those frozen packages. And yes, Gnome Shell has had considerably more development than has Unity. Along with that "edge" in development, Fedora is releasing AFTER Ubuntu. Fedora gets a reputation for being too "bleeding edge," and I am among those who have been burned by changes in Fedora mid-release. I left Fedora after F14 when I couldn't get my video to work. Now with the same hardware, F15 displays perfectly. And I don't think it's anything Fedora did; the bugs were fixed upstream. I'm still not happy that Ubuntu made a big deal about pulling from Debian Testing instead of Unstable to create the 10.04 LTS, yet they pushed many new or newish features/services such as Ubuntu One and the Me Menu which clearly could benefit from a lot more development before going into a release that is supposed to last three years on the desktop. More care and more conservative package choice should be the guiding principles behind a release with such a long support life. I'm sure that Ubuntu One and the Me Menu features have been improved for 10.10 and will be even more polished in 11.04, but that leaves LTS users to either turn off the features or be forced to jump on the six-month cycle to get better versions. Pulling from Debian Testing is just lip service if you're shoving a bunch of stuff on top of it that has not been through as careful a development process. I want to like Ubuntu, I still use it on one machine, and I support many of the project's goals. But when Fedora seems more conservative in its releases, you know there's something that's not quite kosher. I don't think newbie users are well-served by such raw software. I hope I'm wrong and Ubuntu 11.04 turns out to be a rock-solid, fast and functional release that gives those new to Linux the minimum of trouble. Of course, there's always Mint …

I'm on the record as thinking the Ubuntu 6.06 and 8.04 LTS releases were great ones, but I'm not as happy with 10.04 LTS (though that's the version I run on my remaining Ubuntu machine), which was advertised as conservative in the way packages were pulled from Debian Testing rather than the usual Unstable but which ran off the rails by incorporating features added to the Debian base and other upstream packages by Ubuntu developers that were in no way ready for what I think a long-term-support release should be.

And I fear that Unity is another piece of software for which Ubuntu is both the upstream and downstream, with what smells to me like a mandate to release in distribution form before GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell is allowed to get any traction via other distros such as Fedora and Mint.

Question for you: Do you think there will be a Canonical-supported "spin" of Ubuntu featuring GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell? GNOMEbuntu? Or will it be Linux Mint?