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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