I'm in the process of moving the entries from my old Debian blog running on FlatPress to this blog running on Ode.

I'm slowly moving the entries, and once I finish and get them to all show up at http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog/linux/debian/, I'll shut down the old Debian blog.

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Chromatic, author of "Modern Perl," writes in a recent blog post anybody interested in programming should read, How to Learn Perl, these words to live by:

Find something that interests you. Find a way to automate it. Keep a list of changes or improvements or new techniques you might apply. Write down what you think about when you're commuting or walking or falling asleep or bathing. When you can't get it out of your head, break it into small pieces, test and experiment, and see what happens.

Programming well requires knowledge, certainly, but like anything else it requires passion to keep you practicing in a disciplined way. The resources I've mentioned here can give you knowledge and will help you develop your discipline. (They're not the only resources, but I believe they're great resources.) What's left is up to you.

Just because I'm writing about how I'm editing these videos in OpenShot (including this one a few days ago), don't think that I'm some kind of video-editing expert.

I'm learning. And I'm excited about it. Beats the alternative, don't you think?

In the video I just cut today, from footage provided by L.A. Daily News reporter Susan Abram, I used OpenShot 1.4.0 in Debian Squeeze, I am refining the way I use multiple tracks to organize and edit the video.

First, here's the video itself (delivered by Brightcove):

Here's a screen-grab of my OpenShot window as it looked after the video was edited. Notice that I "name" the clips in the filenames. Once I gather the clips together, I watch all of them and label those I'm going to use.

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Here's a video I put together today with OpenShot 1.4.0 in Debian Squeeze (I've been using the OpenShot .deb package from the OpenShot Launchpad page to make sure I had the latest version):

It's of the new Muse School in Calabasas that Suzy Amis Cameron and husband James Cameron (yes, that James Cameron) created, and it contains a mix of video, audio and still images shot by Los Angeles Daily News staff photographer Dean Musgrove.

Once he brought me the raw footage and I saw that it featured children from the school singing a song, I knew I wanted to mix stills and video over the audio track.

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As I said in a recent entry, I don't consider myself a "GNOME user," though I find myself using GNOME all the time.

I guess that makes me ... a GNOME user. Since I run Debian Squeeze, that means the now-all-but-dead GNOME 2. Version 2.30.2, to be exact.

Though I've flirted with console e-mail in the form of Mutt and Pine, I came to the realization long ago that GUI mail clients are the thing for me. I've used Claws Mail, and I pretty much centered my mail-client universe on Thunderbird, running it on every platform I can.

But I have kept a fully configured Evolution mail client at the ready on my Debian laptop.

And lately I've been using it -- with IMAP so I can go back to Thunderbird at any time.

You know what? Evolution is pretty good. It's calendar integrates with Google Calendar. (And it that calendar is integrated into the app, unlike the plugin-based Sunbird/Lightning/Iceowl plugin that Thunderbird/Icedove uses and which doesn't work at all in the Debian Backports/Debian Mozilla APT Archive version of Icedove).

It looks great. I can actually understand how to configure it.

But as much as I'm liking this mail client, knowing that my future may very well be outside of GNOME, I'm keeping Thunderbird on the front-burner right next to Evolution.

By way of Planet Debian, I found Vincent Sanders' article on the HP ProLiant MicroServer he bought for use at home instead of a dedicated NAS appliance.

This is by no means a blade server. It's a squat little box. And the HP ProLiant MicroServer line starts at .

Here are general specs from HP:

What's new

• Faster processor -- AMD Turion II Neo 1.5GHz
• Choice of preinstalled OS's includes Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials

Features

Simple to Own and Easy to Use

• Server performance but at a PC price
• Designed to make adding drives or peripherals a minimal effort
• At a 22 dBA noise level, it is quiet for ergonomic working environment
• Space-saving; ideal for the small office

Proven HP Dependability and Support

• HP has built a reputation of dependability by conducting some of the most rigorous and thorough testing in the industry
• System testing and process control ensures only the most dependable products for the customers
• Worldwide network of HP trained service

Reliability and Expandability

• Error checking and correction (ECC) memory minimizes the likelihood of memory corruption
• RAID 0, 1 prevents data loss and ensures around the clock reliability
• Up to four LFF SATA pluggable hard disks and up to 8 GB of RAM

That's pretty interesting. It's small, all right. The ECC memory is very server-ish. And not everybody wants or has a rack set up to stuff a server into. This can sit on a table or shelf somewhere.

While there is a model, the best deal seems to be the version with double the RAM (2 GB). The system ships with a smallish 250 GB drive, but the whole point is that you can buy drives for the four bays and just plug 'em in.

Vincent bought his HP box to run Debian, which is what I'd be doing. The HP PDF lists the following as "supported" OSes:

• Microsoft Windows 2008 Standard Edition R2
• Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

It doesn't say which versions of RHEL will run, but I imagine that 5.x and 6.x are good to go. And if it runs Debian Squeeze, it will probably run a current Ubuntu release as well.

Looking back at Vincent's original article, he has what looks to me like a somewhat complicated RAID setup for his four 2 TB drives, with 1 GB of ext2 in RAID 1 across four drives for /boot, ext3 with LVM in RAID 5 for the rest of the data, plus a small partition at the beginning for GRUB. I'm a little bit hazy on exactly how one does this.

He cites reports of reliability problems in ext4 as a reason for choosing ext3 for the big RAID partition. I'm running ext3 with LVM in my Debian Squeeze laptop, and it has been 100 percent solid.

I really need to read up on RAID and configuring Linux servers with RAID and LVM ...

I never really considered myself a GNOME user. Though I am. I've used Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm2, LXDE, even JWM (Joe's Window Manager) in Puppy and FLTK in TinyCore. But most of the time I stick with the default desktop environment offered by a given distribution.

And more often than not, that's GNOME 2. And I've been using Debian Squeeze with GNOME 2 since November 2010 -- almost a year now -- and using it for more of my work than ever.

I don't consider myself a "power user," but I am pushing this desktop environment and this distribution pretty hard. I've got a lot of software installed -- most from the Debian repositories, some from other repos and a few packages from third parties (usually the upstream developers themselves). I run Dropbox. I create, edit and mix audio, I edit video. I crunch hundreds of images. Code web pages. Write. Browse the web with Iceweasel and Google Chrome. Watch TV shows from Hulu and various other sites, including CBS.com.

I can suspend/resume without rebooting for days at a time. That's probably the best thing about this particular instance of Linux and my particular hardware (the not-terribly impressive Lenovo G555). I've never had this level of functionality before in Linux or BSD.

NetworkManager has been great. I've used it to connect to wired, WiFi and 3G networks, all seamlessly. My old-school ext3 filesystems managed under encrypted LVM have run perfectly the whole time. I do backups via rsync.

It all just works. It's Debian Stable with the now old and abandoned GNOME 2.

What will happen to Debian's default desktop environment by the time the current Testing distribution, Wheezy, itself becomes Stable sometime in early 2013? Will GNOME 3 have settled down by then, or will Debian turn to another DE, maybe Xfce, for its main desktop? I'll worry about it then. If this hardware holds out, it'll probably do so with Debian Squeeze and the 2.6.37 kernel that handles this hardware perfectly.

GNOME's supposed to be slow. I've really never found that to be true -- and certainly not on this laptop made in March 2010.

It's not "pure" Squeeze. I have Debian Backports, the Mozilla Debian APT archive, Liquorix (and now newer kernels from Backports if I want them), Debian Multimedia, plus repositories for Google Chrome and Dropbox. But the core is a distribution that "froze" some time in mid-2010 and released in February 2011. It keeps on working, and so do I. Can't argue with that.

Should I (and should you) have a presence on every damn social network favored by both geeks and civilians?

When a particular uber-geek (I'm thinking about you, @fabsh) leaves one social network (Identi.ca) for another (Google+), do we follow suit? Or just follow. Or not?

I've heard a lot of "well-followed" geek-types comment on how much more quickly they've been "circled" by followers in Google Plus in contrast to their Twitter following and are using the rapid uptake of their Google+ musings as a sign to put more emphasis into the new social network while doing much less with the old (Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook).

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I already have the Widgets Plus Google-Plus (aka Google+) widget on my official Los Angeles Daily News-sponsored, Movable Type-running blog, and today I added it to this blog, which runs under Ode.

I had to tweak more than a couple of parameters to fit the widget in the 178px space in Click, but for the 235px space at

Posted: Oct 24, 2011 2:51pm UTC

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I’m in the process of moving the entries from this blog into my new site at http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog. Eventually I hope to have the Debian posts on that blog, running under the Ode platform, appearing with their own theme, something (i.e. different themes for different parts of the same site) that is very possible to do in Ode, a system developed by Rob Reed to use flat files like FlatPress, but in a less-WordPress-ish and more Blosxom-y way.

Today I turned off comments for all of these FlatPress blog entries because they have been attracting a significant amount of spam.

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