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.

Before I installed the 2.6.39 kernel from Backports on my Debian Squeeze system, I quieted the annoyingly loud system beep (aka system bell; it used to be a real bell back in the day) from startling me and waking others by "blacklisting" the pcspkr in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.

Since that stopped working in 2.6.39, and the beep returned (it is LOUD), I figured there had to be another way to shut it up.

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I've burned hundreds of Linux and BSD discs since I figured out what to do with an ISO sometime in late 2006/early 2007. I've saved many and gotten rid of many as well.

Nowadays my main laptop can boot from USB, so I tend to put the ISO images that allow both testing of live systems as well as installation straight onto flash-memory thumb drives. Now with the "hybrid" images that projects like Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora are using, it's easier than ever to use the cat command to copy the ISO to the USB thumb drive.

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