I've been distro-hopping/shopping lately, and last night it was time for Crunchbang Linux, a Debian-based distribution that uses a very nice implementation of the Openbox window manager.

Crunchbang is appropriately minimal but with its Debian underpinnings can be just about anything you want.

I used the 64-bit Backports (aka "bpo") image of Crunchbang Statler because the Lenovo G555 likes a newer-than-2.6.32 kernel.

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I'm not saying GNOME 3 won't allow me to do what I just did, only that it would be a crime for it not to.

By that I mean using System - Preferences - Monitors to spread my session across two monitors of different resolutions. It's easy (and sweet)!

Why am I using two monitors in the first place? The LCD power inverter (the thing that gets hot at the bottom of the laptop screen) in my Lenovo G555 is not-so-slowly dying, and until the part warms up, I have no backlight on the laptop, so a second screen is nice to have (though I probably should be mirroring them so I'll always have the menu available).

Of course if the backlight never turns on due to the LCD power inverter dying and then said inverter never warms up because the screen is dark, you quickly get into a situation where the screen just plain doesn't work.

I've ordered a new LCD inverter and will attempt to install it when the part arrives.

But for now I'm happy to say that using multiple monitors in GNOME 2 is pretty cool.

In an unrelated matter, I'm testing Crunchbang, using Gigolo to edit this file via SFTP. Very sweet!

I know ... Ubuntu 12.04 is in beta right now, I installed a daily build, and my Thinkpad R32 is 10 years old and has only 512 MB of RAM backing up a single-core Pentium 4 CPU.

But this is not the hardware that can adequately run Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity.

Everything was slow, the laptop was swapping like mad, the Software Center crashed more than a few times, and I couldn't make HUD work (not sure what it's for, to be honest, if it works this poorly -- I couldn't make it actually do anything).

Trust me, Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 (which could only run in Classic mode) wasn't this bad.

I'm downloading ISOs of a Debian Wheezy daily (or is it weekly?) build and Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 to try now.

Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 is up next (again). I'll let you know how it compares to Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity.

Spending a couple of days intensely running Linux Mint 12 on a very nice desktop PC sent to me for review by ZaReason (much more about that later), I probably shouldn't have been surprised by the annoying bugs in Mint that made me a lot less productive than I am in the Debian Squeeze system I've been running on my laptop since late 2010.

Not that Debian is trouble-free. It's just that I've figured everything out. And I don't have to reinvent this particular wheel every six months. If I hadn't done so in the intervening year and few months since I began running Squeeze, I'd have moved on.

But you can almost always figure out Debian. It's set up the way I want it. GNOME 2.30 is solid in a way that GNOME 3-point-whatever-Mint-is-using is not.

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The Iceweasel 11.0 (aka rebranded Firefox) web browser just moved onto my Debian Squeeze system via the Debian Mozilla Team APT archive.

I'd like to thank the developers for providing this service. Having new Iceweasel browsers on a periodic basis is a great way to upgrade the application many of us use most without messing with the rest of a good thing (that "thing" being Debian Stable).

Newer versions of Iceweasel are available in the archive. Just go to the team's page to figure out how to set up your system for the Iceweasel you want.

While I always use Debian Multimedia to bring in those proprietarily oriented bits that make things like audio and video work in my Debian Stable systems, I wasn't sure how well Debian Multimedia took care of users of other Debian builds.

A check of the repositories shows that not only does Debian Multimedia provide packages for the Stable release, it also offers packages for the Testing (Wheezy), Unstable (Sid), Experimental, Old Stable and Stable Backports releases.

Theoretically anyway, that means you can run a Debian Wheezy system and get those bits you need from Debian Multimedia now -- and not have to wait until Wheeze itself becomes the Stable release.

Nice!

I'm always wondering about people who forget to spring forward or fall back when daylight saving time begins or ends.

Now I'm one of them.

I have a 10 a.m. conference call today, and looking at the clock on my GNOME desktop in Debian Squeeze, my operating system on this laptop since late 2010, I dial into the call.

There's nobody there.

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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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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 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.