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I came across this Ubuntu Development Guide by Daniel Holback while looking through Planet Ubuntu. It tells you all the things you need to do technically to get set up for development, as in creation and modification of packages for Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

In the comments to my article on Debian’s Mozilla team offering newer Iceweasel builds, I eventually wound around to an idea that I believe would provide an enormous benefit to Ubuntu users: There should be an official Ubuntu LTS Backports repository.

Speaking of Iceweasel, there’s an update to version 3.5.16 today for Debian. Mine just rolled in for Squeeze. The short explanation: "This update for Iceweasel, a web browser based on Firefox, updates the certificate blacklist for several fraudulent HTTPS certificates."

I’m no Backports guru, though I’d like to become one. And squeeze-backports is still in its early stages and doesn’t yet have a newer version of Iceweasel, the renamed version of the Firefox web browser that ships with Debian. So how do you get Iceweasel/Firefox 3.6 or even 4.0 on your Debian Squeeze, Lenny, Wheezy/Testing or Sid/Unstable box?

I've been getting closer and closer to needing a Dropbox-like utility on my Linux, Windows and Mac machines (one of each, really). I need access to a certain subset of my files on more than one computer. I could've gone with Ubuntu One, except that I'm not running Ubuntu (and the Windows client is in beta ... no Mac client as far as I know).

Now that I'm using Dropbox to keep my critical files synced between my Debian Squeeze-running laptop and Windows XP-running desktop, I thought I'd spend the day in XP to see how well things run. I have 1 GB of memory and a Pentium 4 at 3 GHz. Not a screaming rig to be sure, but not the worst either (depending on who you ask). At any rate, I'm not getting a new box anytime soon, so it is what it is.

It always amazes me when things don't work out of the box in Linux — even in Debian, where it seems like more stuff works with less effort than ever. In the past, I've had trouble getting our el-cheapo HP LaserJet 1020 printer to work not just with Linux but also with Mac OS X. Yep, it's not just Linux that has trouble.

I pulled out the Compaq Armada 7770dmt, circa 1999, with 144 MB RAM (fully loaded), a speedy 233 MHz Pentium II CPU and the original 3 GB hard drive. I had my CDs ready and loaded up Quirky and Wary — two of the latest Pups.

I’ve run Puppy Linux before. Many times. I started with Puppy 2.13 and still remember that release very, very fondly. I did the Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade on my 12-year-old Compaq laptop by the book (the release notes, that is), and everything went perfectly well. I can’t get the new Grub to work, but it’s still chainloading to grub-legacy, so I can stick with that if need be. But my Xfce environment on this aging laptop isn’t ideal. If any machine was made for a low-spec live distribution like Puppy or TinyCore, this Compaq laptop is that computer.

The 2.6.37 kernel I got from Liquorix has made Debian Squeeze a nearly perfect distribution. Liquorix tracks the kernel very closely, and as such there’s a new update every few days. Due to update fatigue, for now I’m “pounding out” the Liquorix entry in my sources.list. I have a good 2.6.37 kernel, and I want to stick with it for at least a little while.

I’ve been experimenting with other flat-file blogging systems, including Blosxom and Ode. Both Blosxom and Ode are based on Perl scripts, while FlatPress is written in PHP.

Steven Rosenberg has written a little article mentioning various self-hosted blogging platforms including Flatpress, Blosxom, PyBlosxom, Ode and others. I wanted to address a couple of his questions about Ode.

I've been relying on Google Chrome in Windows XP/7 and Chromium in Debian Squeeze for much of my web use because it's way faster, less memory-hungry and generally more pleasant than Firefox/Iceweasel. But in the past few days I've run into a few problems.

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.

You want a kerfuffle? Here it is. Canonical makes "affiliate" revenue from sales via its Ubuntu One music store, which works through the Rhythmbox music player/manager. Now that Ubuntu is changing to Banshee as its default music-management application — and Banshee happens to have a plugin for the Amazon music store, things have gotten a little messy.

I've been investigating tiny blog software — mini CMSes if you will (or even if you won't). I already have a blog running on Flatpress. I'm trying to use systems that are simple, radically small and efficient. To that end, I'm anxious to look into Blosxom, PyBlosxom, NanoBlogger and Ode.

This entry began out of a comment I made in an LXer thread that explains the reason not why I’m anti-Ubuntu but why I see a frantically waving red flag in the path Ubuntu is taking toward its bleeding-edge push for new technologies in what people are expecting to actually use on their desktops.

After a commenter on my entry about the Ubuntu Natty alpha called me "pathetic" for expecting basic functionality from an alpha release, I decided to go deep and look at a pre-alpha for Fedora 15 in the form of a nightly build of the distribution that won't have its official alpha release for another 12 days, nor its final release as F15 until May 10 (a full 12 days after Ubuntu Natty's scheduled ). Despite this live image of what will become Fedora 15 being a nightly build of a pre-alpha, I found it surprisingly functional and fast on the desktop, if a little homely design-wise. But work, it does.

I've been anxious to try the next Ubuntu release, which will be even closer to the proverbial bleeding edge than usual, opting for a new interface called Unity that is slated to knock Gnome out of its default spot in the wildly popular Linux distribution.

When you run Debian Stable, you get used to updates to the system being few and far between. While there is certainly some truth to the open-source OS adage that bugs related to functionality (and not security) at release tend to stay unpatched, the emphasis in Debian on releasing when ready means there are theoretically (and practically) fewer broken pieces in the system and not as much need to push updates for non-security-related issues.