Life is easier when I use Firefox. But lately it's been very crashy in Debian Squeeze. It often just freezes, and I have to wait, let it freeze some more and then finally kill it.

Thus I've been using Google Chrome more and more. It supposedly eats more memory over time, but it's much, much faster, doesn't bog down so early in my session, and pretty much just works.

That's what I need: A browser that doesn't slow down to nothing. I'd like that browser to be Firefox (aka Iceweasel in the Debian world). But now that browser is Google Chrome (and could very well be Chromium when I move to Debian Wheezy).

I've been distro-hopping/shopping lately, and last night it was time for Crunchbang Linux, a Debian-based distribution that uses a very nice implementation of the Openbox window manager.

Crunchbang is appropriately minimal but with its Debian underpinnings can be just about anything you want.

I used the 64-bit Backports (aka "bpo") image of Crunchbang Statler because the Lenovo G555 likes a newer-than-2.6.32 kernel.

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I'm not saying GNOME 3 won't allow me to do what I just did, only that it would be a crime for it not to.

By that I mean using System - Preferences - Monitors to spread my session across two monitors of different resolutions. It's easy (and sweet)!

Why am I using two monitors in the first place? The LCD power inverter (the thing that gets hot at the bottom of the laptop screen) in my Lenovo G555 is not-so-slowly dying, and until the part warms up, I have no backlight on the laptop, so a second screen is nice to have (though I probably should be mirroring them so I'll always have the menu available).

Of course if the backlight never turns on due to the LCD power inverter dying and then said inverter never warms up because the screen is dark, you quickly get into a situation where the screen just plain doesn't work.

I've ordered a new LCD inverter and will attempt to install it when the part arrives.

But for now I'm happy to say that using multiple monitors in GNOME 2 is pretty cool.

In an unrelated matter, I'm testing Crunchbang, using Gigolo to edit this file via SFTP. Very sweet!

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.