Word that the copyright/trademark issues that have had Debian renaming Firefox as Iceweasel might be resolved means that some day new users won’t be confused by a lack of Firefox and Thunderbird and the substitution of Iceweasel and Icedove (not to mention Iceape, Iceowl and whatever others I can’t remember).

I distinctly remember being puzzled when I ran my first Linux live CD, Knoppix, in late 2006. It took me a while before I figured out that Iceweasel looked and acted just like Firefox ...

Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier writes a timely and thoughtful article on “Why Debian Matters More Than Ever” to coincide with the release of Squeeze as the Debian Project’s stable release.

It is well worth reading.

A couple of tidbits:

Yes, Ubuntu has appealed to a wider audience than Debian ever did — but it was Debian that inspired Mark Shuttleworth in the first place to create Ubuntu. As Brian Eno once said of The Velvet Underground’s debut album, “Only five thousand people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every single one of them started a band.” Likewise, Debian may enjoy a small percentage of the Linux market, but it’s inspired one hell of a lot of people to start their own distribution. … Debian’s most important contribution to the Linux community may be simply that it’s not controlled by a corporate entity. If 2010 taught us anything, it’s that having a single corporate sponsor can lead to a lot of uncertainty at best and total disruption at worst.

Now that this blog is running on Universal Time, I’m pretty sure that while it’s still Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011 in my particular time zone (Pacific), Monday has already been reached in UTC, and Debian Squeeze is now in its second day of being the Debian Project’s stable release.

And along with a “new” release, which many of us have been enjoying as Debian’s Testing distribution over the past months, there is also a brand new Debian web site. Even Planet Debian looks “refreshed.”

The best way to keep up with Debian news is via the project’s many mailing lists, a bunch of which I’ve been following of late. When that information is meant for the widest possible audience, it generally appears as part of the latest official news from the Debian Project.

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I’ve had this handy countdown graphic on Click for the past couple of weeks. Not that Debian is in the habit of setting release dates, but this particular image came about after the project itself announced that Feb. 5 or 6, 2011 would be the target date(s).

As I’ve written dozens of times by now. Debian Squeeze, still the project’s Testing branch, has been very stable for a very long time. To be sure, there have been little tweaks here and there, mostly in the design department from what I’ve noticed.

A lot of Debian users prefer running Unstable/Sid or Testing on the desktop. I may very well take that route myself. There’s also talk of a Constantly Usable Testing branch of Debian.

The last time I ran Debian full-time as my main desktop was with Lenny from late Dec. 2009 through mid-March 2010. I had everything running perfectly. If I had only known to (and how to) install a newer kernel before upgrading, my dist-upgrade to Squeeze way back then wouldn’t have gone as badly as it did.

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