I'm making a best effort to turn my Windows XP box at work into a usable system. I'm tired of lugging the laptop to the office, and I have neither desk space nor a network connection for it. I've run CCleaner and Defraggler. I used the freeware version of Revo Uninstaller to clear out a lot of applications I no longer needed and couldn't otherwise get rid of.

It is running quite a bit better. The 1.2 GB of RAM helps. Even Linux can be hell on the desktop in 512 MB of RAM, depending on what you're doing. Windows more so.

I run a lot of free, open-source applications in Windows. It would take me a good half-hour to list them all. Then I have a few critical free-as-in-beer apps.

I'm trying to make my environment as OS-agnostic as possible, hoping that XP will get out of the way (i.e. not stall so damn much) and let me work.

This means a whole lot less time running Debian, though I did set up a second machine at home running Squeeze with LXDE to see how that works for me. I still have the Lenovo G555 dual-booting Debian Squeeze (with GNOME) and Windows 7 (for Netflix streaming purposes ...) but am using it a lot less for the time being.

Buried in the late-June "Bits from the Release Team" minutes is the news that the Debian Project will aim for a time-based freeze for the next stable release, Wheezy. At the moment that date is June 2012:

After some discussion at the sprint, we have looked again at the concept of having a time based freeze. I'd like to thank the DPL for progressing a consensus on debian-devel on a way forward for this proposal. The release team would like to support the idea of a time based freeze.

Its main advantage seems to be the clarity that people will get knowing when we will freeze. For this reason, we need to pick a date. This is one that not everyone will be happy with, and caused quite a bit of discussion. However, we had to make a decision, and have picked on June 2012 as the current proposed freeze date for the next release.

This means that the current Debian Testing release, which is Wheezy, is set to be frozen at that time (no new versions of packages, just bug fixes) in preparation for the next stable release.

And given the recent history of Debian releases, I think that means aiming for a February 2013 release to follow Lenny's February 2009 and Squeeze's February 2011 releases, continuing the pattern of two years between stable releases.

Add the extra year of maintenance as Old Stable, and that gives Debian releases effectively a three-year support life.

For users who aren't already running Debian Testing (and that includes me), the prospective June 2012 freeze is a good time to migrate from Stable to Testing in anticipation of Wheezy becoming Stable early in the following year.

Debian Developers in favor of the freeze have said that users appreciate the ability to plan for the future knowing roughly what will happen to the stable Debian release (in contrast to the "ready when it's ready, and that's it" way of thinking). I agree. I'm already thinking of Debian Stable in terms of the two-year release cycle, substituting newer bits from Debian Backports, the Debian Mozilla Team APT archive, Liquorix, Google and Dropbox as I need them to keep my Debian Squeeze installation a bit fresher between now and then.

I'm in the same situation now with Debian Squeeze that I was in back when Debian Lenny was the stable release:

I can't think of a system that allows me to do so much, so efficiently and without trouble as Debian Stable.

Debian Stable can be boring. Nothing new enters the archive. Except this time I'm using Debian Backports, the Liquorix kernels built for Debian, the Debian Mozilla Team APT archive, Google's Chrome browser repository and Dropbox's Debian/Ubuntu repository in addition to Debian Multimedia to shape Debian the way I want and need it.

So as much as I'd like to give some of my other favorite operating systems a try (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenBSD ...), I'd be crazy to give up Debian as my daily workhorse operating system. It works without complaint. And that means I work without complaint.

I can't help but think that a key component of all of this is the GNOME 2 desktop, which is on the way out in favor of the still-controversial (and not all-the-way functional/finished) GNOME 3. That will come into Debian by the next stable release. Let's hope it works.

Back when I was running Lenny, I got bored and tried to dist-upgrade to Squeeze (then the Testing release, and I don't think there were release notes for Squeeze to help me do the upgrade right). I blew out the installation and then moved on to other systems.

I'm going to try very hard not to make that mistake this time around. Squeeze is running so very, very well that I am extremely reluctant to mess with it on my hardware (Lenovo G555 with AMD Athlon II at 2.1 GHz, 3 GB RAM, 320 GB SATA hard drive).

I don't write as often as I'd like, and my aim is to write less about what OS I'm running and more about everything (and anything) else. But I've been working very hard lately, using Debian to do it, and I thought it deserved a mention.

I tend to write more when things aren't working right, but with Debian, that's seldom the case.

I'm calling this the 1.0 release of my Ode blog. I have all of Rob Reed's "extra" addins working (that's persistent-dating addin Indexette, web-editor addin EditEdit and the Disqus commenting addin).

I'm also using the core Jumper addin to shorten some entries in the index and provide a link to the full, individual entry.

I've made some small changes in the template to allow the blog title and main image to link back to the blog home page from any other page in the blog.

Now it's time to start filling the blog with content, old and new.

I'm also going to work on a version of the Logic theme (what you see here) to produce a "pages"-like theme that displays content without the traditional blog trappings of publication dates. That should be easy.

It's time I started delving into the ode.cgi script (preferably the annotated version) and seeing how the system works. Ode project leader Rob Reed has been very encouraging both in my putting this site together and in learning Perl, the scripting language with which Ode is built.

Right now I'm focusing on the HTML and CSS in the themes, but I plan to work my way into the Perl of the main script and the addins as I go.

Thanks again, Rob, for hacking on this project. There are dozens of blogging/CMS systems to choose from. Even though it derives much inspiration from Blosxom, Ode is unique in many ways, inspired in many more -- in function and mission. That's why I'm using it. Poke around the official Ode site if you want to know more.

Thanks to readers who responded, Service Pack 1 successfully installed on my Debian-squeeze-running laptop.

Here's a chronicle of what I've done to the machine:

Those who read my previous entry on this topic know that SP1 refused to install on the Windows 7 Home Premium portion of my Lenovo G555's hard drive.

And it probably had something to do with my running Linux (specifically Debian Squeeze) on the same drive.

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I just got my Android phone, the LG Optimus V from Virgin Mobile, and I'm naturally looking for my two most important apps -- text editor and FTP client.

Trying AndFTP and Text Edit. As far as an editor goes, I need something that helps with typing HTML tags. This simple editor looks nice, but typing <p> is murder.

AndFTP works acceptably well. Once I get my paths typed in, it'll be quicker and more painless.

(Note:This entry began on the phone but continued at the computer so my typing/thinking speeds match more closely.)

I'm noticing many writers calling the decluttering of their lives "minimalism," instead of "simplicity," or "simple living." Is there a difference?

A quick Google search yielded the following (we can read together; I'm just link-dumping at this point):

• Organized Geek: Minimalism vs. Simplicity
• Modern Simplicity: Minimalism vs. Simplicity
• Watch Us Rework: Simplicity vs Minimalism (more about web design, less about life)
• Design Thinking: Simple or Minimal? (more about industrial design, less about life)
• the_uncomplication_project: Simplicity vs. Minimalism (at least relevant; but I'm left thinking that any definitions are the opinion of the definer)

Is this tempest/teapot time? I'll gather more intelligence on this lexical battle as time permits.

Five minutes later: These entries didn't help much. All I seem to get from this small blogospheric sample is that minimalism is more hard-core than simplicity.

But as I say in the short comment after the final link, it's all semantics. Call what you do what you wish. As for me, I'm still thinking.

I'm doing an update today on my daughter's Ubuntu 10.04 LTS-running Gateway Solo 1450, the 2002-era laptop that I upgraded from 8.04 in a not-seamless but doable operation for someone with a bit of experience in these matters.

I've done a lot of upgrades. I'd say maybe half were successful. That doesn't say much for upgrades. But when it comes to Ubuntu upgrades, I can generally make them work with a bit of Googling.

I've been hard on Ubuntu 10.04 over the life of the release. (I could find links, but I'm just going to keep writing.) While the UI changes in 11.04 (GNOME giving way to Unity) are bigger, I thought the changes from 9.10 to 10.04 were too huge and unproven for an LTS release. My opinion was and is that 10.04 needed to be 9.10 with bug fixes and not a total reworking of the GNOME theme with buttons on the other side of the screen and lots of unproven, slightly broken Ubuntu-coded (or -ordered) enhancements.

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The recent BoingBoing post about the busy/huge web site's changes focuses on the move to Disqus comments, but the bigger news is that it's dumping Movable Type for WordPress. Even Matt Mullenweg of Auttomatic fame mentioned it.

A few years ago, BoingBoing, which does something like 1 million views per day, made the move to Movable Type from whatever it is they used until that point. The reason behind the move to MT, as I remember it, anyway, was the high availability of a statically built Movable Type site and its ability to handle the kind of traffic BoingBoing was drawing.

Well fast-forward to now, and BoingBoing's Movable Type days are over. It's still plenty popular but is now running on WordPress. I guess this means that WP is more than able to function in extremely high-traffic environments like that of BoingBoing.

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