Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.
I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.
Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
As you can see in the previous entry, I was running my old Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop with its recent Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade working well — except for one thing.
Grub2. Debian handled the upgrade well. It doesn’t remove the old Grub, now known as grub-legacy. Instead the old Grub gains an entry chainloading to Grub2, which is installed by the grub-pc package.
This way you can test Grub2 while still retaining Grub1. It’s a very nice way of doing what could be a system-breaking upgrade.
Ever since I first heard of Bradley Kuhn, formerly of the Software Freedom Law Center and now the [Software Freedom Conservancy], on Linux Outlaws, I’ve been interested in what he has to say about (did you guess it?) software freedom. I try to listen semi-regularly to his Free as in Freedom oggcast.
Here is an article from Bradley’s blog on why he returned to Debian recently after years running everything from Red Hat to Ubuntu.
The 2.6.37 kernel I got from Liquorix has made Debian Squeeze a nearly perfect distribution. The stock 2.6.32 kernel works great, except for sound, where plugging in my headphones doesn’t mute the speakers. This muting works with no configuration change in 2.6.37 from Liquorix.
I also finally have suspend/resume working for pretty much the first time ever in Linux, and I really like using it. The success of suspend/resume might be due to my installing the Debian nonfree firmware, which enabled DRI, which somehow factors into kernel mode setting. My understanding of the whole thing is a little vague, but what I do know is that suspend/resume works great, and this Debian Squeeze installation is running as well as anything I’ve ever used in the world of Linux and BSD.
Blosxom, PyBlosxom, Nanoblogger — hell, even WordPress and Movable Type are available as Debian packages.
I wondered, was I missing other blogging platforms, both flat-file and database-driven?
I went to Debian’s web software archive and took a look.