I like the fish, but that's the Ode-is-simple fish.

I need to get my own image(s) up top. Consider this a placeholder.

It's a portion of the front panel of a 1970s Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11/20 minicomputer from Retrotechnology.com's PDP-11 page.

According to Wikipedia, the first officially named Unix ran on the 16-bit PDP-11/20 in 1970. The PDP-11 was succeeded by the 32-bit VAX, introduced in 1977:

I'm in awe at the moment.

I just added the Indexette and EditEdit addins to my Ode site. They both work. The documentation is detailed. The installation and configuration took about five minutes per addin.

I'll be back in that documentation very soon. Each addin's documentation includes a lot of detail and explanation.

I will go into greater detail later, but briefly, the addins do the following:

• Indexette: Allows posts in Ode blogs to retain their original (or arbitrary) post date even if the file and its timestamp has been modified.
• EditEdit: Provides a web interface to modify and create posts in Ode to supplement the usual writing and uploading of plain text files via FTP.

I'd like to thank Rob Reed, the creator of Ode for thinking so deeply about what he wants this project to be and then making it happen with code. And that code is always accompanied by detailed documentation, both inline and in separate PDF and text files.

It's not like I haven't used Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, Flatpress and Blosxom. Because I have.

There's something about this particular blogging system that prompted me to move over to it. More than a few things, actually.

It's complicated, but I hope to explain it all as I go along.

At times I've use web interfaces to access most or all of the various e-mail accounts I happen to be using.

This is not one of those times.

My work account, my "personal" account, even my Gmail account (half personal, half "other") -- I tend to use e-mail client software for all of them. I do occasionally dip into the terrible web interface for my work account, the not-terrible web interface for Gmail and the also-not-terrible Roundcube web interface for my own domain's mail account.

But for the most part I use mail client software.

Right now I have the following set up on my Debian Squeeze laptop:

• Thunderbird (aka Icedove in Debian)
• Evolution (the default mail client for the GNOME desktop)
• Claws Mail (lighter-weight GTK mail client for Linux/Unix)

I use Thunderbird about 90 percent of the time. My main work account is on a horrible server that does IMAP poorly and slowly -- and I do not use POP, it's IMAP or nothing for me. For one thing, it's just about impossible to run more than one e-mail client on a single account if you are using POP, which brings all the mail down to your hard drive. IMAP leaves everything on the server where you can access it any number of ways.

I can't use a mail client that doesn't make the best of a bad IMAP situation. Evolution is horrible in this regard. It doesn't seem to multitask well at all, and often a long IMAP operation locks the whole thing up for minutes at a time.

Claws is better. When I first installed it, I added a couple dozen extensions. When I didn't end up using any of them, I removed them all. Still, I like Claws.

As I say above, I use Thunderbird most of the time. This is where I occasionally save messages to the hard drive. It's where my address book(s) live. It runs as fast as anything I've tried. I don't think even Claws can beat it.

I'm writing this because today I tried all three programs. As usual, I was quickly frustrated by Evolution. I wish it was better. It looks great.

Claws ran better than I remember it. There are a million things you can do to configure the program, but I can't seem to wrap my brain around the ultra-configurability of Claws.

Yes, I'm on Google+. So are many of you. And more every day.

From what I can see, we're all captivated to some extent by its shiny newness. And that it's not Facebook.

We're more comfortable with Larry and Sergey than with Mark Zuckerberg.

There's no 140-character limit.

Hence, a lot of us are, in effect, blogging into Google+. Sure, we can get that content out of there at any time. But currently there's no "native" way to bring feeds from other sites directly into our Google+ streams.

This needs to happen.

And I need to get back to writing into my own sites. Including this one.

I'll try to post this entry in Google+. And Identi.ca (which will, in turn, post to Twitter, which posts to Facebook).

Look here (and not just there), I'm saying.

The versioning of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, and the rebranded Iceweasel browser in Debian, going from 3.6.x to 4.x and now 5.x and 6.x has Linux users (and Debian users in particular) constantly messing with their sources to make sure they’ve got the version of Iceweasel they want.

As I explain below, the Debian Mozilla team APT archive has got you covered. But first a little more informational whining:

Almost as soon as the Firefox/Iceweasel 4.x series started, it abruptly ended in favor of 5.x. This is going to keep happening. It’s not that changes in the software are that radical. It’s just version-number-creep on the part of Mozilla. I’m sure there’s a reason for it, but I could care less. I just want a recent, patched version of the browser (and the Thunderbird/Icedove mail client) on my Debian Squeeze system.

Good news for Debian Squeeze users is that Icedove is in Debian Backports. But not Iceweasel (to the best of my knowledge anyway).

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I’ve added a few packages from Debian Backports related to LibreOffice to my Squeeze installation:

libreoffice-pdfimport (on the chance that I’ll actually do this some day)

and more importantly:

libreoffice-gnome, which makes LibreOffice look like it belongs in the GTK/GNOME world I’m working in.

libreoffice-gnome brought along a couple of dependencies, libreoffice-gtk and libreoffice-style-tango

I also added the mozilla-libreoffice plugin.

Packages I didn’t add

I didn’t add the libreoffice-emailmerge and libreoffice-evolution plugins because I can’t see using them.

Disclaimer: I used the Synaptic Package Manager to install the new packages. Once you have a new repository (like Debian Backports) set up, you can pluck packages at will in Synaptic without any special command-line magic, if that’s your thing (avoiding command-line magic) — not that there’s anything wrong with it.

I’ve already made my move in Debian Squeeze from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, and a peek in my unread messages from the Debian mailing lists turned up this official announcement:

Debian moves to LibreOffice

Here is some of the text (a short how-to-install for Squeeze is included in the official newsletter):

The Debian project is proud to announce that the transition from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice has now been completed. LibreOffice has already been available for “testing” and “unstable” since March and has now been backported to Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”, too.

Rene Engelhard, Debian’s LibreOffice maintainer and member of LibreOffice’s Engineering Steering Committee, says: “I am sure Debian and its users will benefit greatly from this transition; I expect not only an improved collaboration but also quicker development cycles.”

If you’re going to subscribe to one Debian mailing list, I recommend Debian News.

I’m a subscriber to Debian Developer Raphael Hertzog’s e-mail updates, which I recommend highly — as I do visiting his website when those updates come through.

He’s a developer who has a great interest in helping out the end user, and I appreciate all he does very much.

One thing in a recent entry caught my eye: Raphael is looking for people who want to start getting involved in Debian. He has a page on the Debian Wiki on which he’s looking for people to help with dpkg, the developers-reference, the Package Tracking System, SAT-britney and the WordPress and quilt packages.

Skills needed range from coding in Perl and/or C (for dpkg) to a knowledge of good written English (developers-reference).

Having Raphael as a mentor sounds pretty good, if you ask me.

Raphael is also soliciting donations for the English translation of his Debian Handbook. He doesn’t have the donation mechanism set up yet, but once he does, I’ll let you know. Any book on Debian helps the entire project, and I’m eagerly awaiting this one.

It’s been a long time since I did a new Debian Squeeze installation, and I was just reminded about one essential step needed to make a functional desktop.

I’ve been running my Squeeze LXDE system today, and all of a sudden the CPU was pegged at 100 percent during a Firefox/Iceweasel session.

I opened up a terminal and took a look. Five Gnash processes were doing all of the damage.

Normally I’d enthusiastically support something like Gnash, a free alternative to Flash, but not when it brings my system to its virtual knees.

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There are 60-something updates waiting for me in Debian Squeeze at the moment, and such a large number of packages staring at me from Update Manager usually means a “major” Debian Stable update.

In this case it’s the second update of Debian Squeeze, 6.0.2. Check the link for everything changing in Debian in terms of bugfixes and and security updates.

As always, while new installation media is available for download, any Debian 6.x image will still install a system that can be fully updated via the usual tools (apt, Aptitude, Synaptic/Update Manager).

Whether or not this point release is some kind of milestone (it’s not, I think), it’s a good time as any to assess where I’ve been on the Linux and BSD desktop over the past few years. Am I setting a personal longevity record with Debian Squeeze?

If you don’t count Sarge, and I don’t because I’m running it on my Sun Sparcstation 20 now and not in the deep, dark past when Sarge was the current Stable release, Squeeze is third Debian Stable release I’ve run for significant periods of time.

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