Quite a few updates moved for Debian's Wheezy testing branch today. I got a lot of GNOME bits and, for some reason, qemu-kvm.

The Debian Project is pushing Wheezy ever closer to release. The way things are going, counting the number of release-critical bugs and comparing it to roughly the same period before the release of Squeeze (the current Stable release), there are now 243 release-critical bugs remaining to be solved before Wheezy's release can happen. In September 2010, there were 126 RC bugs remaining to be solved.

Squeeze was released in February 2011, and if the RC-bug count is any indication, we won't see Wheezy go Stable this year, even though that was an early goal of the project.

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I bit the bullet and did some repartitioning of my Debian Wheezy-running laptop to give myself more space on the Linux side by taking it from the seldom-used Windows side of my dual-boot system.

I had wanted to make my existing Debian partitions bigger, but due to the fact that modifying LVM -- especially with some partitions encrypted -- is a bit too mysterious and difficult, I decided to work with the Windows 7 partitions on the drive instead. Once I shrunk Windows, I planned to use the freed-up space for a new Linux partition. After that I would configure my Debian system to use it.

When I set up this laptop back in 2010, I did a fresh, crapware-free Windows 7 Home Premium installation at the very end of the drive. Windows dumped its main partition and small boot partition right there. At the time I gave something like 100 GB (out of the 320 GB drive) to Windows.

That's where I got my "extra" space for Linux.

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I write a lot about encryption. I'm not trying so much to keep the government out of my business but to give myself peace of mind in the event my machine is lost or stolen.

I want to know that it would be way too much trouble for anybody to try to get any data out of the machine so I can confidently carry around a laptop and know that nobody else can get to that data if it leaves my possession.

But there's one problem with the kind of encryption provided by the installers for Debian and Fedora: The global (or individual) passphrase(s).

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Remember my recent problem with doubled icons in the Applications view in GNOME 3 on my Debian Wheezy system?

Running the command update-menus every time you boot takes care of the problem, but that's no solution.

It turns out that getting rid of the menus package fixes the problem permanently:

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge menu

This will most likely accomplish the same thing (though I didn't try it):

$ sudo aptitude purge menu

I know that on my system the menu package came along with the fluxbox window manager. Since I was losing the menu package, I opted to get rid of fluxbox at the same time.

Note on Xfce: Removal of the menu package did not affect Xfce, which I also have installed on this Debian Wheezy system.

Note on menu and Debian: I suppose this should be classfied as a bug, because menu and GNOME Shell should be able to co-exist, but I don't see a bug that addresses this issue filed against menu. Maybe the bug should be filed against GNOME Shell. This is one of those (many) situations where I'm at a loss.

Note on menu: If you reinstall menu, will the problem with GNOME 3 return? Yes, it will.