I'm here downloading a bunch of videos from DebConf12, held this month in Managua, Nicaragua.

Phoronix has done a great job of summing up the sessions -- Michael Larabel was there.

But I'm anxious to see the presentations myself. There are plenty of .ogv files there -- Spanish on top, English below that.

Just a quick note that I changed my /etc/apt/sources.list to pull updates for Debian Wheezy from a more local "secondary" mirror rather than the primary Debian mirror for the U.S.

I'm not sure whether or not this site at the closer-than-not University of Southern California will be faster than Debian's primary U.S. mirror, but I'd like to think I'm taking just that much pressure off of Debian's primary infrastructure by using this secondary mirror.

So how did I find the new mirror? They're all right here.

Here's my sources.list before:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free

And after:

deb http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb-src http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free

No big deal.

Though I'm very much a fan of the "traditional" menu, I had an inkling that I'd enjoy using the "type to search" box to start applications in GNOME 3 (or, more specifically, GNOME 3.4 in the just-frozen, still-Testing Debian Wheezy).

You see, even though I really like the "discoverability" of a traditional desktop menu system, when I know what I want, it's easier to either click an icon (like the long row of them I had on my upper panel in GNOME 2, or the many I now have in the GNOME 3 icon area on the left side of the screen) or start typing in what you want, getting it as soon as what you type is unique enough to give it to you.

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Despite not being able to render Flash content without excessive (too much so for me) tweaking, the Epiphany browser (which the GNOME people are half-heartedly trying to brand not as Epiphany but as Web) has gained some speed in execution (or "feel") but remains light on the CPU.

It's a nice way to skitter around the web a bit more simply. It starts quickly, responds quickly, and seems to work as well as Chrome (or Chromium). Since both (or all three, if you want to separate Chrome and Chromium, though I do not) use Webkit as the rendering engine, this isn't surprising.

While still unsure overall about GNOME 3/Shell, I endorse Epiphany/Web as a light, alternative browser when you're tired of Firefox and Chrome, or just don't need all that full-featured firepower.

Debian developer Ingo Juergensmann reports that addition of a 'leap second' to clocks made apps that include Firefox consume all the CPU on the system.

That sounds like as good an explanation as any for my troubles yesterday with both Iceweasel/Firefox and Google Chrome both pegging my two CPU cores at various times, especially since I didn't reboot the system, which was in suspend overnight.

I'm on my second day of intense use of my Debian Wheezy (aka Testing) system, which I upgraded from Squeeze (aka Stable) on Friday.

While I'm getting the hang of GNOME Shell, with its "hot corner" mousing technique, creation of virtual desktops as needed, plus the overall newness of transitioning from GNOME 2.30 to 3.4.2, today I decided to work in the GNOME Classic desktop as opposed to the full GNOME Shell.

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Though my track record with in-place upgrades of Linux/Unix systems is far from positive, I decided to do just that with my long-running (since late 2010) Debian Squeeze laptop today.

It went surprisingly well -- and by that I mean I'm using a fully upgraded Debian Wheezy laptop to create this post in Nautilus via sftp.

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My Debian Squeeze system has been swapping a lot lately. I think web browsers -- mostly Google Chrome -- are to blame. I'm not sure switching entirely to Firefox will solve the problem. Web browsers eat resources.

To speed things up, I decided to reduce my "swappiness" to see how that affects system performance.

It's been a very long time since I've done it, so I Googled "swappiness in Debian," and came across my own entry from 2010 when I was running Ubuntu 10.04. I got my information from the Ubuntu community Swap FAQ, and you can too.

I followed the recipe on my Debian Squeeze system, changing swappiness from the default of 60 to 10 so the system will use swap less often.

So far, so good.

The next day: This is totally working. After six or so hours of my usual workload, I'm only using 1.2 MB of swap. Nice!

The next week: After a full day of computing, with lots of Google Chrome windows and tabs open all day (I barely used Firefox/Iceweasel today), doing some photo edits but no video editing, I'm using 1.4 GB of RAM and 24.8 MB of swap. I'd say the experiment in changing swappiness is a success.

I came across Debian project leader Stefano Zacchiroli's Bits from the DPL on Planet Debian -- the most recent bits also living on Stefano's blog and on a Debian mailing list.

The more interesting bits this month include a controversy over duplication between the Debian Multimedia archive and Debian proper.

Stefano suggests that what package belongs where be worked out, or that Debian Multimedia shed its Debian name and move on.

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I finally got Iceweasel 13 installed out of the Mozilla Debian APT archive on my Debian Squeeze system. For at least a week I've been stuck on Iceweasel/Firefox 12 due to dependency issues. dWhile a Debian Forums article didn't provide the exact solution to my problem, it did give me a clue:

Reinstall Iceweasel.

I did that, and I got the new Iceweasel/Firefox as well as the needed dependencies, and thus far nothing appears to be broken.

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