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I'm putting an old laptop out to pasture that's dual-booting CentOS 5 and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. And even though I'm updating both systems (for old time's sake, you might say), I'm turning to Lubuntu 12.04 for my next ancient-laptop Linux installation.

Icedove's recent history in the Debian Mozilla APT archive has been spotty. You can rely on the archive for either the latest stable Iceweasel (aka Firefox) or a development version. But Icedove has been in and out. However, as of today (OK ... as of March 31 through April 4, 2012, to be exact) Icedove, iceowl-extension, calendar-google-provider and calendar-timezones are all at 10.0.3.

First impressions may be fleeting, but I like what I see so far in Xubuntu 12.04.

You know what I'm doing? Using the Epiphany Web browser that ships with GNOME. In my case, that's GNOME 2.30.2 in Debian Squeeze. Why? I've been having trouble with one of my most-used web-delivered apps in Firefox and Google Chrome.

I've been careful with this particular Debian Squeeze installation on my Lenovo G555 laptop, and it's been running pretty much every day since late November 2010. And it's now April 2012.

I've been distro-hopping/shopping lately, and last night it was time for CrunchBang Linux, a Debian-based distribution that uses a very nice implementation of the Openbox window manager. CrunchBang is appropriately minimal but with its Debian underpinnings can be just about anything you want.

DragonFlyBSD is still finding its feet as a future-focused server operating system with not nearly enough attention able to be paid to going beyond the basics. The reliance on NetBSD's pkgsrc is both blessing and curse.

To a great extent, HAMMER is the reason to run DragonFly. Realizing during my first install that HAMMER doesn't perform well on drives of less than 50 GB in size took considerable wind out of my 20 GB-drive-installing sails.

Like any Linux/Unix system, you can learn a lot by poking around the filesystem itself and reading the FAQs, Handbooks and how-tos. I was able to add all the "meta" packages to get X working. I figured out how to start the moused daemon to get the Thinkpad's nubby-pointer thing to work (though a USB mouse worked out of the box). I figured out from the Handbook and man pages how to load the proper sound driver and get the speakers working (albeit at much lower volume than in subsequent Linux installs on the same hardware).

The first BSD I was able to get to boot on that old Maxspeed Maxterm's VIA C3 processor was OpenBSD (it had to be version 4.2). While following the extensive OpenBSD FAQ is a very good idea now, back then you couldn't get the disk layout right without a strict FAQ-tual reading.

DragonFlyBSD is a shining example of BSD-style operating-system diversity melded with (also BSD-style) project-to-project cooperation -- and (also BSD-style) one man's quest (with the usual hearty band of supporters) to bring his vision to servers, appliances and even desktops near you.

My DragonFlyBSD 3.0.1 review is finished. (Finally!!) It will appear here in Click in six daily parts starting the morning of April 4, 2012. A new part will appear at 3 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time each day until all six are exhausted on April 9. Read them all and I bet you'll be exhausted, too.

Spending a couple of days intensely running Linux Mint 12 on a very nice desktop PC sent to me for review by ZaReason (much more about that later), I probably shouldn't have been surprised by the annoying bugs in Mint that made me a lot less productive than I am in the Debian Squeeze system I've been running on my laptop since late 2010.

I have a 10 a.m. conference call today, and looking at the clock on my GNOME desktop in Debian Squeeze, my operating system on this laptop since late 2010, I dial into the call. There's nobody there.

I didn't think installing ownCloud would be so easy, but it was. I downloaded the software from ownCloud, uploaded it to the server, created a database, did a quick setup, enabled WebDAV on my local machine to access the files via my native file manager (Nautilus in GNOME in Debian Squeeze, in case you are wondering) and was off to the races.

Why would I do such a thing -- go back to Icedove (aka the Mozilla-coded Thunderbird e-mail client) version 3.0.11, which shipped with the now-aging Debian Squeeze, after months of using version 5.0 from the Debian Mozilla team APT archive?

One of the things I like most about the Fedora Project is the opportunity for people to move and grow in (and out) of different roles and responsibilities. The position of Fedora Project Leader, in particular, has never been a long-term leadership position, but one that regularly invites new people to assume the role and bring new ideas and new energy to the project.

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 system. The Firefox release pace has been extremely fast lately, and it's nice to get the latest releases packaged up for Debian.

I've had my Lenovo G555 laptop (AMD Athlon II at 2.1 GHz) for nearly two years, and recently I've been experiencing thermal shutdowns while running prolonged, CPU-intensive tasks in Debian Squeeze. Perhaps ironically but probably totally explainable, watching Flash video is not one of these tasks. I can watch Flash-delivered content in Hulu all night, and the Lenovo is fine.

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.