Icedove's recent history in the Debian Mozilla APT archive has been spotty.

You can rely on the archive for either the latest stable Iceweasel (aka Firefox) or a development version. But Icedove has been in and out. The "newer" version that the archive offered for quite some time was v.5, and that tended to break iceowl-extension and Google Calendar integration, neither of which were part of the Debian Mozilla APT archive themselves but which limped along from Squeeze itself.

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We users of Linux are a fickle lot. We flit here and there, from one distro to another, even to a BSD on occasion.

I've been "loyal" to Debian for a couple years now. It works. But it's time for a change.

Given the demise of GNOME 2 in favor of the radically reimagined GNOME 3, I've been "auditioning" everything from CrunchBang (Openbox with Xfce's Thunar file manager) and Bodhi (Enlightenment) to Fedora (GNOME 3 and Xfce), Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu and Debian Wheezy.

I go back and forth on GNOME 3 and Unity. Sometimes I think I can be productive in these very different environments. Other times I wonder what's wrong with having a traditional application menu.

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So I'm in the live environment for Xubuntu 12.04, which aside from the ugly wallpaper (including every alternative wallpaper on the ISO image) is a great-looking and -working Xfce 4.8 desktop.

My main mission in running the live distro from a USB flash drive: Checking networked-filesystem support in the Thunar file manager.

So far I'm using FTP in Thunar to write this post. And I didn't need the Gigolo helper program to open the FTP site and create and save the file.

That's a win.

After a few false starts, I also got Thunar working for sftp connections.

Another win.

What I "forgot" to do originally when trying to start an sftp:// connection in Thunar was to specify the port number when I opened it up. Here's how I did it:

• In Thunar, go to "Go" in the menu, then select "Open Location."
• In the Open Location dialog, enter this:

sftp://yoursecureftpsite.com:portnumber

In my case, that port number is 2222, so it would be something like this (I'm using a "fake" URL for demonstration purposes; use your real URL and real port number to make this work -- I can verify that it does work -- and you don't need Gigolo!):

sftp://yoursecureftpsite.com:2222

• Once you enter the sftp address with port number following the colon, you'll be prompted to OK the SSL certificate of the server.
• If you trust that certificate, OK it. Then Thunar will open a window to your server via secure FTP, and you can use the file manager to treat that server like a native filesystem, sorting the files in Thunar and editing them with the application of your choice. I used Leafpad, as it is the default text editor in Xfce (and in Xubuntu).

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People are always talking about how long they've had a particular Debian installation, some upgrading the same box through many subsequent releases.

On the desktop anyway, restless, tinkerish people such as myself have a habit of blowing out their OSes for one reason or another -- usually extensive modification/experimentation that breaks things. Others can't go more than a month without either distro-hopping to the next new release.

Since Linux distributions and BSD project releases and the thousands of software packages that are available in affiliated repositories don't cost anything, there's no incentive to hold onto an installation for years and years like with Microsoft Windows or Mac OS.

I think those with proprietary OSes hold onto their installations more to preserve their stash of pirated applications than the system software itself, which usually can be reinstalled easily from the discs that came with the computer. But that's another matter for another day.

In my case, the reasons for keeping this particular Debian laptop running uninterrupted include maintaining productivity (which I want) and not messing with stability (which Debian Stable has) coupled with my current lack of taste for distro-hopping and repeating the work involved in setting up things the way I like them.

I've been careful with this particular Debian Squeeze installation on my Lenovo G555 laptop, and it's been running pretty much every day since late November 2010. And it's now April 2012.

That's a long, long time for me. I thought I "broke" the system today during some OwnCloud client testing, but it turns out I just clicked something I don't normally click in Gthumb, making it impossible to shrink images while preserving their aspect ratio.

But I figured out what went wrong, Gthumb is working again, and this Debian Squeeze install continues to run.