I didn't think installing ownCloud would be so easy, but it was.

My continuing reliance on Google Docs, which is cheerfully offered up for free in exchange for Google's searching through your files and marketing to you based on what it finds, plus the plethora of similar privacy-sapping services, has me very interested in personal-cloud services such as ownCloud and the early-days Freedom Box project. The Freedom Box will happen eventually.

OwnCloud is here now, and while there is certainly a commercial component to the whole thing, it is basically a free software project with code that anybody can download and use.

And so I did.

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Why would I do such a thing -- go back to Icedove (aka the Mozilla-coded Thunderbird e-mail client) version 3.0.11, which shipped with the now-aging Debian Squeeze, after months of using version 5.0 from the Debian Mozilla team APT archive?

A number of things -- some pertaining only to me and my workflow, others more general -- made me revert to the older Icedove on my main Debian Squeeze laptop.

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I've seen writers with substantial followings on services such as Twitter and Google+ declare the open Web dead because they have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers either hard won or quickly garnered on one social network our other.

They may believe in the open Web. But that huge following beckons.

My Debian Squeeze system uses the Debian Mozilla APT Archive to bring newer versions of Iceweasel (aka Firefox) and Icedove (aka Thunderbird) than are available in the stock releases.

An update today brought Iceweasel/Firefox 10.0 into my Debian Squeeze laptop. The Firefox release pace has been extremely fast lately, and it's nice to get the latest releases packaged up for Debian.

That said, I'd love to see a newer version of Icedove/Thunderbird. The Debian Mozilla APT Archive version is stuck at 5.0, and even Debian Backports and Wheezy are mired in the 3.6.x era.

Disclaimer: I know, I KNOW I can go to Mozilla, install from there and have the Mozilla repository keep my Firefox and Thunderbird up to date. I know. I haven't done it. I guess I'm more comfortable with the packages made by and for Debian. No good reason, as I use Google packages for Chrome.

I've had my Lenovo G555 laptop (AMD Athlon II at 2.1 GHz) for nearly two years, and recently I've been experiencing thermal shutdowns while running prolonged, CPU-intensive tasks in Debian Squeeze.

Perhaps ironically but probably totally explainable, watching Flash video is not one of these tasks. I can watch Flash-delivered content in Hulu all night, and the Lenovo is fine.

The laptop overheats and shuts down when doing two things:

• Java-heavy tasks like listening to networked, software-defined-radio sites like http://w4ax.com

• Rendering videos in OpenShot

Two things that are very CPU-intensive, indeed.

So what did I do about this?

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I was reading this article in the Linux Weekly News that mentioned the site's coming UTF-8 capability, allowing it to more easily enter and display characters from many languages, and I noticed that not all of those characters were displaying in my web browser (I happened to be using Google Chrome at the time).

One of the commenters in that article recommended installing the xfonts-unifont and ttf-unifont packages to remedy the situation.

I went into the Synaptic Package Manager and learned you can install a single package -- unifont -- that brings both xfonts-unifont and ttf-unifont into your system, giving you way more Unicode capability than you had before.

I'm joining Identi.ca, O'Reilly, Wikipedia, BoingBoing, MoveOn, Mozilla, Reddit and scores of other websites large and small in going dark on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012 to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), which would allow U.S. copyright holders to shut down foreign web sites with only a suspicion of copyright infringement.

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Before I installed the 2.6.39 kernel from Backports on my Debian Squeeze system, I quieted the annoyingly loud system beep (aka system bell; it used to be a real bell back in the day) from startling me and waking others by "blacklisting" the pcspkr in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.

Since that stopped working in 2.6.39, and the beep returned (it is LOUD), I figured there had to be another way to shut it up.

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I've burned hundreds of Linux and BSD discs since I figured out what to do with an ISO sometime in late 2006/early 2007. I've saved many and gotten rid of many as well.

Nowadays my main laptop can boot from USB, so I tend to put the ISO images that allow both testing of live systems as well as installation straight onto flash-memory thumb drives. Now with the "hybrid" images that projects like Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora are using, it's easier than ever to use the cat command to copy the ISO to the USB thumb drive.

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Courtesy of Distrowatch, I learned about Tails, a live Linux distribution based on Debian Live that uses Tor and other cryptographic- and privacy-minded features to protect a users anonymity while using the Internet.

I've been interested in projects like this for quite some time. I used a live CD based on OpenBSD called Anonym.OS to do this some time ago (more to see if OpenBSD would run on my hardware, but I did appreciate the security emphasis of Tor then and now).

No sooner did I hear about Tails than did I download it and write it to a bootable USB drive.

Now I'm in the Debian Live/Tails environment, using the Iceweasel browser with Tor and excited about the possibilities of using Tails to operate computers (plural) on the Web in a truly free and (mostly) traceless way.

It all should be like this but isn't, of course. The endgame for me is a fully installable distribution that adheres to these privacy principles.

I'll write more about Tails later. Until then, download it yourself and give it a try. It runs great (it's Debian under the hood after all) in case you were wondering.