Debian Lenny fixes Nautilus bug -- order is restored to my world ... and more Debian news

First of all, thanks to all of you who explained to me how the Debian Project works, how bugs are handled in Debian and GNOME, and how to do minor surgery on Debian, if needed, to get things working right.

But I'm happy to report that today the bug from which I had been suffering has now been fixed. Among the many updates I installed on my Debian Lenny (Testing) box was Nautilus 2.20.0. Now I can use Nautilus to get the properties of a file without the file manager crashing. In case you're really, really interested, here's the GNOME bug report.

Again, I really want to thank everybody along the way who helped me figure out how to determine the status of packages in the various Debian distributions (stable, testing, unstable ...). The Debian Web site is quite a repository of information, if you know where to look and what it means. I'm still working on it.

Penultimate note: When I ran Update Manager today, it told me that I had to go to Synaptic and Mark All Updates, then install them from there, to properly update the installation. I did so, and that's how I got the new Nautilus, as well as many other packages new to Lenny.

Final note: The Debian Project is, indeed, a great thing. I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again soon.

More on Debian: You didn't think that was it, did you? Via one of the best Debian blogs, the Debian User, I just found a) that Planet Debian -- an amalgamation of blog posts from Debian developers -- now has a search function. I also learned about a blog written by Debian package maintainer Miriam Ruiz. Half the entries are in Spanish (she's from Spain, after all), half in English, but in any case it's nice to see what Debian people are thinking, and it's very nice to see someone encouraging more women to get involved in open-source development in general -- and Debian in particular. Here's her bio.
Among other things, she's involved in the Debian-Women project and Planet Ubuntu Women.

I want to close out this entry by thanking the thousands of people all over the world who work on open-source software for all they do and for all they've given and continue to give all of us. At the risk of extraneous hyperbole, I'll just say that the technological world would be a much poorer, darker place without Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware and the many thousands of applications that go into these and other distributions of Linux, BSD and other computing environments. This non-coder salutes you.