I know ... Ubuntu 12.04 is in beta right now, I installed a daily build, and my Thinkpad R32 is 10 years old and has only 512 MB of RAM backing up a single-core Pentium 4 CPU.

But this is not the hardware that can adequately run Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity.

Everything was slow, the laptop was swapping like mad, the Software Center crashed more than a few times, and I couldn't make HUD work (not sure what it's for, to be honest, if it works this poorly -- I couldn't make it actually do anything).

Trust me, Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 (which could only run in Classic mode) wasn't this bad.

I'm downloading ISOs of a Debian Wheezy daily (or is it weekly?) build and Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 to try now.

Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 is up next (again). I'll let you know how it compares to Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity.

Spending a couple of days intensely running Linux Mint 12 on a very nice desktop PC sent to me for review by ZaReason (much more about that later), I probably shouldn't have been surprised by the annoying bugs in Mint that made me a lot less productive than I am in the Debian Squeeze system I've been running on my laptop since late 2010.

Not that Debian is trouble-free. It's just that I've figured everything out. And I don't have to reinvent this particular wheel every six months. If I hadn't done so in the intervening year and few months since I began running Squeeze, I'd have moved on.

But you can almost always figure out Debian. It's set up the way I want it. GNOME 2.30 is solid in a way that GNOME 3-point-whatever-Mint-is-using is not.

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I can't say I really, truly need it just yet, but I'm thinking of getting a virtual private server (aka VPS).

While shared hosting is doing the job for me right now, the ability to know exactly what kind of resources I can rely on and set up services exactly the way I want is compelling.

I would consider a BSD-based VPS provider, but right now I'm looking at Linode, which allows users to run a number of different Linux distributions.

On the other hand, a good shared-hosting provider (like Hostgator, which I use) does tend to take care of you in terms of maintaining things. You don't get to chose what version you want of many things (though you can jump from PHP 5.2 to 5.3, as I did to tap the Calendar app in OwnCloud).

And for good or ill, Hostgator has been very forgiving, technically, in allowing me to run Perl scripts, create MySQL databases, etc., with less fail than other servers and sites. And though it may be boring, the CentOS Linux distribution upon which Hostgator builds its servers is extremely reliable.

But what if I wanted to experiment with nginx, thttpd (or Perl 5.12 or 5.14)? For that, a VPS would be perfect.

I've only been using Firefox 11.0 (known as Iceweasel 11.0 in the world of Debian GNU/Linux) for about a half-hour, but I get the feeling that it's a whole lot faster on the desktop than Firefox 10.

I'll report back when I've been using it for a few hours.

A few hours later: Nope, same old Firefox. After a few hours, it eats enough CPU and memory that you need to quit and restart.

The next day: My first Iceweasel start of the day and the thing hangs. I have to force-quit out of it. Lovely. I'm now using Google Chrome (and will probably be using freer, less-spyish Chromium when I upgrade to Debian Wheezy).

The more I see Rob Reed's new version of Ode's default Logic theme, the more I like it. I'm thinking of giving it a tryout on this site.

Ode is magical, all right. Click here to see all 110 posts in the blog on a single HTML page.

Or see all 110 posts on a single page as RSS.

The Iceweasel 11.0 (aka rebranded Firefox) web browser just moved onto my Debian Squeeze system via the Debian Mozilla Team APT archive.

I'd like to thank the developers for providing this service. Having new Iceweasel browsers on a periodic basis is a great way to upgrade the application many of us use most without messing with the rest of a good thing (that "thing" being Debian Stable).

Newer versions of Iceweasel are available in the archive. Just go to the team's page to figure out how to set up your system for the Iceweasel you want.

While I always use Debian Multimedia to bring in those proprietarily oriented bits that make things like audio and video work in my Debian Stable systems, I wasn't sure how well Debian Multimedia took care of users of other Debian builds.

A check of the repositories shows that not only does Debian Multimedia provide packages for the Stable release, it also offers packages for the Testing (Wheezy), Unstable (Sid), Experimental, Old Stable and Stable Backports releases.

Theoretically anyway, that means you can run a Debian Wheezy system and get those bits you need from Debian Multimedia now -- and not have to wait until Wheeze itself becomes the Stable release.

Nice!

Dlvr.it was pushing RSS to Identi.ca and Twitter, and since I have the Twitter bridge connected between both services, I was getting one entry in Identi.ca and two in Twitter.

I removed Twitter from dlvr.it, so now dlvr.it updates Identi.ca and Identi.ca updates Twitter.

Problem solved, I think.

I'm constantly looking at situations where a bevy of services like Ping.fm, dlvr.it, Hootsuite, Shoutlet, RSS Graffiti and who knows what else are sending updates to various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca and Diaspora.

And often the social networks themselves are interconnected and exchanging feeds and posts.

It can get confusing.

The primary purpose of this post is to see if I've successfully untangled things for this particular blog.