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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Courtesy of Distrowatch, I learned about Tails, a live Linux distribution based on Debian Live that uses Tor and other cryptographic- and privacy-minded features to protect a users anonymity while using the Internet.

I've been interested in projects like this for quite some time. I used a live CD based on OpenBSD called Anonym.OS to do this some time ago (more to see if OpenBSD would run on my hardware, but I did appreciate the security emphasis of Tor then and now).

No sooner did I hear about Tails than did I download it and write it to a bootable USB drive.

Now I'm in the Debian Live/Tails environment, using the Iceweasel browser with Tor and excited about the possibilities of using Tails to operate computers (plural) on the Web in a truly free and (mostly) traceless way.

It all should be like this but isn't, of course. The endgame for me is a fully installable distribution that adheres to these privacy principles.

I'll write more about Tails later. Until then, download it yourself and give it a try. It runs great (it's Debian under the hood after all) in case you were wondering.

If the notion of a Constantly Usable Testing version of Debian is something you might be interested in, keep an eye on the project's web site, http://cut.debian.net.

Read the Original Manifesto to get up to speed. And follow the mailing list.

It was news to me that there is actually something there -- monthly Testing snapshots and even nightly builds.

I don't know yet how I feel about CUT. I've run Testing before, generally right around the freeze before the next stable release, and for the most part I haven't suffered from too much breakage. CUT aims to deal with that very problem.

The biggest problem I've had has been upgrading an existing Stable installation to Testing. I've had more trouble than not, and I recommend either installing Testing from scratch, or waiting for the official Debian release notes for a new Stable release.

Anything that gets more people using Debian is a good thing. If you've read this blog even a little, you realize that most of the entries consist of me telling why my Stable/Backports/Selected Outside Repos setup works for me.

After months spent pondering the installation of a post-2.6.38 kernel that's actually being patched when needed for my Debian Squeeze system, I finally figured out how to add the Debian Backports 2.6.39 kernel without the operation removing every other kernel in the process.

That's what threatened to happen every time I used Synaptic or Aptitude to attempt to add the newer kernel from Backports. Since the 3.1 kernel from Liquorix panics in this machine, I was loathe to add a new kernel from Backports and not have my older kernels to fall back on if that should panic as well.

It didn't. Now I have 2.6.39 from Debian Backports, 2.6.38 from Liquorix and the original 2.6.32 Squeeze kernel to choose from.

And presumably the Backports kernel will be patched if/when needed.

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When I did my initial tests on this Debian Squeeze installation back in 2010, I had trouble with OpenJDK. I only use Java for two web-based things, and one of those -- GoToMyPC.com -- wouldn't successfully open up a Java client window.

So I replaced openjdk-6 with sun-java6, found everything working and left it at that.

Now that Oracle is changing the license for Java that restricts the ability of Linux distributions -- including Debian and Ubuntu -- to redistribute the Oracle-created binaries to users, distributions are removing Sun Java from their archives and only offering OpenJDK.

I was worried. It had been many months since my last tests. What if either OpenJDK itself, or the sites I'm dealing with that use Java, fixed things so the open-source IcedTea Java browser package suddenly worked?

I didn't want to delete Sun Java, install OpenJDK, run into trouble and not be able to re-install Sun Java.

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I'm spending the day at work -- you envy me, I know it -- running two computers, one of which happens to be my Debian Squeeze laptop.

I decided to run the Epiphany web browser that comes along for the ride with GNOME.

I have a modern (as in up-to-date via the Mozilla Debian APT Archive) Iceweasel/Firefox browser and a Google-maintained Chrome browser, though I removed the other GNOME browser, Galeon, a while back.

I just thought it would be nice to give Epiphany a run. Haven't done that in awhile. It seems a bit sluggish even compared with Iceweasel, and I don't remember that being the case back when Epiphany used the Gecko rendering engine rather than the current Webkit that also powers Chrome and Chromium.

So what am I doing running Debian Stable on the desktop? I'm sure there are a few applications that might offer more features if I ran them using a newer Fedora or Ubuntu system, but for now everything works sufficiently well that I'm going to stay put.

The Liquorix kernels I've raved about over the past year don't seem to work now. I'm stuck on 2.6.38 from Liquorix, which runs great, but everything I try in the 3.x series of kernels from the repository now panics on boot. I guess I'm missing a dependency or something.

I'd like to try 2.6.38 or 2.6.39 from Debian Backports, but Synaptic insists on deleting all other kernels, including 2.6.32, as part of the installation operation.

Maybe I'll do a full backup of /home and then give that a try. I could either save the box with the rescue features of the Debian CD, or I could start all over again.

I've never seen this kind of thing before: I noticed that the Flash plugin that Debian installs from the flashplugin-nonfree package hasn't updated in quite some time. I've been stuck at Adobe Flash 10.2 for a long while.

I wouldn't have noticed except that Google Chrome is complaining about out-of-date Flash (and Java, too -- but that's too complicated in my case to take care of so quickly).

(Note: This could have something to do with the vagaries of 64-bit Linux support for the Flash player from Adobe. For all I know, this isn't a problem in 32-bit Debian Squeeze. All I know is that I run 64-bit and it's a problem for me.)

I checked Debian's package repository, and my flashplugin-nonfree is indeed up to date. But my actual Flash binary from Adobe is not.

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I give much credit to the developers who, early on, brought LibreOffice to Debian Backports. Once you add Backports to your sources.list, you can install LibreOffice, which just happens to remove OpenOffice from your system at the same time.

I've been using LibreOffice extensively in both Windows XP and Debian GNU/Linux, and for my work, the killer of killer apps in LO (and OO for that matter) is LibreOffice Draw. And I don't use it for drawing.

Instead I use Draw to import PDFs, JPGs and other kinds of content into a single document, re-arrange them, edit them, add to them, and then either print out a completed report, or export it as a PDF.

Think if it as an MS PowerPoint/LO Impress-style presentation, except optimized for paper or PDF. It's extremely powerful. And did I mention I use it all the time?

Anyhow, the secret weapon, of sorts, in LibreOffice Draw (and OpenOffice Draw) before it is the ability to open PDFs in LibreOffice Draw, then either copy/paste them into your main Draw document and edit the text and images in the PDFs to help you "tell your story" better. I gave up all my PDF-arranging apps for LO Draw, it's so good.

But ... the PDF import function for LibreOffice Draw in Debian Squeeze, if you're using the libreoffice-pdfimport package from Debian Backports, is broken. Doesn't work. LO wants to open PDFs as text files in LO Writer, not as editable PDFs in LO Draw.

So how do you fix this? For me, I needed the PDF importer function to work immediately (today, in fact).

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When you think "free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux," I bet CentOS comes to mind.

But a look at the CentOS project over the past few years shows a considerable lag between when RHEL releases and CentOS catches up.

That lag continues, and it's at 200+ days, according to this recent Phoronix article.

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