Now that I've got Debian working on the house laptop, it'll stay there for now

When I told Ilene that I could probably fix the USB flash drive problem in Ubuntu and could then switch her back from Debian Lenny, she told me it would be better to stick with Debian for now, since there are enough little differences between environments to make it confusing, and she was and is doing well with Debian.

She did say she liked Ubuntu a bit better, but for the sake of productivity, Debian was doing more than well enough to keep until I fix her iBook G4.

Among the problems I'm having with Lenny that I don't have with Ubuntu are lack of control over the Alps touchpad by individual users. I can turn the touchpad's tap-to-click function off as the primary user, but my other users can't use the Touchpad configuration feature in GNOME. When they do, a dialog pops up about SHMConfig not being enabled in X.

Except that it is. That's how I am able to control the touchpad in my primary account.

I wouldn't care if all the users had their touchpad tapping controlled by me, the main user, but every once in a while, it seems that the tap-to-click turns on for a split second in Ilene's account.

Since we're using a USB mouse more than 95 percent of the time, this isn't much of an issue, but it is annoying.

This could be a GNOME bug that doesn't allow for different Xorg configurations in each account, but this is nothing more than conjecture on my part.

Otherwise, Ilene is quite amused by Firefox being renamed Iceweasel due to the copyright restrictions imposed on the Firefox name and logo by the Mozilla Foundation. It's one of those things that really confuses new users to Debian.

I remember seeing Iceweasel in Knoppix and having no idea why it looked exactly like Firefox but had a different name. Now I know about Debian's reluctance to use copyrighted material, and while I agree with it, I do acknowledge that it's awkward and confusing to those who don't know the story.

One thing that I did do for my three users is customize their desktops to some extent. In this case, that customization is limited to putting icons for each user's favorite applications on the upper task bar.

Since I use Epiphany a lot, I kept that there, but added Iceweasel (which I use sporadically) along with all the text editors I'm testing or using (Geany, Bluefish, Gedit) the terminal, the root terminal and the network-configuration app.

In Ilene's, I have Iceweasel and the OpenOffice apps she needs (for text documents, presentations and spreadsheets).

The little girl's account has Gcompris, Childsplay and TuxPaint.

I've said it before, and it bears repeating here: Another reason for keeping Lenny over Ubuntu is the fact that all the children's educational games we use work better in Debian than in Ubuntu. In Ubuntu, sound is spotty on all three apps, and Chidsplay is hobbled by a woeful lack of games. Maybe those additional games are available as packages in Ubuntu, but I'm not sure. All I know is that they are all there in Debian.

Before the rant is over, let me add that all three of these education packages are also in great shape in OpenBSD. You don't normally think of OpenBSD and "the education distribution," but it works very well for us in this regard. All I need is some additional memory on the 1999-vintage Compaq Armada 7770dmt to make the experience that much better.