I make the move to Debian Lenny
I've been working like a freaking dog at the Daily News, and in the middle of it all a not-insignificant crack in the LCD screen of my Ubuntu laptop spread across the whole of the screen, making it unusable.
Instead of swapping the screen from my identical Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop running Debian Lenny in a test with fully encrypted LVM, I instead decided to move my files over to it instead.
After lengthy rsyncs, hooking my Thunderbird/Icedove mail, Firefox/Iceweasel bookmarks, Pidgin accounts, gFTP bookmarks, networking configurations, etc., and moving the 1 GB of RAM out of the Ubuntu laptop and the 512 MB out of the Debian laptop and swapping them as well, the whole thing is ready.
I even figured out that a sub-$5 USB sound device could bring noise back to the long-silent Lenny laptop. I'll see if that works.
But for now I'm running Debian Lenny, I have my e-mail, bookmarks, development files, writing files, how-tos for everything from OpenBSD to Ubuntu — it's all on the Debian Lenny laptop.
Already I can tell you that even with full encryption, the GNOME desktop in a stock Debian Lenny installation is much faster and uses much less memory than a stock GNOME desktop in Ubuntu. For those of us with old hardware that means something.
Sure the apps are old. I'm back with OpenOffice 2.4, which I used to write a report. The Firefox/Iceweasel is 3.0.x, not 3.5.x.
It's not the shinier, newer NetworkManager but the old one (except that it's working).
I've had to add things here and there, everything from rsync and sudo to the Gedit plugins and htop. Nothing major. I already added Java from the repos and Flash direct in a .deb package from Adobe. I figured out the RT73 driver situation for my wireless NIC a few weeks ago.
Getting the Thunderbird mail moved over proved to be a little more complicated than I originally thought, but once I Googled and followed the command-line instructions, it went perfectly smoothly. I figured out the Firefox bookmark situation the last time I moved from OpenBSD to Ubuntu, so that was seamless. I even populated the Epiphany browser with those same bookmarks (exported from the Ubuntu Firefox into an HTML file).
I picked the "grass" wallpaper that's part of the default. I put eight of my go-to apps in the upper panel.
It's Debian Stable, and it's funny that I'm so damn excited. If I can manage get sound working and can then start using Audacity, I'll be that much more excited.
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I'm sure you know about this, but Debian Backports provide some updated packages for Lenny, such as OpenOffice 3.x and a newer Network Manager. They provide security updates for these packages as well.
http://backports.org/dokuwiki/doku.php
You can browse their packages here:
http://packages.debian.org/lenny-backports/
HTH
As HTH mentioned, OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 has been backported to Lenny:
http://packages.debian.org/lenny-backports/openoffice.org
In addition to using the backported OpenOffice.org 3.1.1, I also use Swiftfox 3.5.5, which is compatible with Lenny. Swiftfox is an optimized build of Firefox. Installing Swiftfox 3.5.5 on Lenny is easy because Swiftfox is available in an APT repository:
http://getswiftfox.com/deb.htm
The fact that Debian Stable has more backports than Ubuntu is one of the reasons I use the former. With Debian Stable, my system uses packages that are thoroughly tested, and I can upgrade (using backports, etc.) only the few packages of which I need newer versions.
When someone suggested that I run Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and use Ubuntu Backports, I checked out the apps available in that form and was extremely underwhelmed (meaning there was just about nothing there that I'd need in a newer version).
I suspect that Ubuntu's use of PPAs will marginalize Backports even further.
So yes, I will be looking into Backports for Debian Lenny.
Right now NetworkManager is working. Not perfectly (I couldn't even get the "new" one in Ubuntu 9.10 to do exactly what I wanted), but working well enough that I don't need a newer build.
If I needed to covert .docx files more often, I suppose I'd need OO 3.1, but that doesn't come up enough for that to bother me.
The apps I use the most are Web browsers, where I've gotten over FF 3.5 and am happy with FF/Iceweasel 3.0.x, and Thunderbird, which I don't think will be "stable" in the 3.x version for awhile. I'm contemplating a move from POP in Thunderbird to a combination of Gmail and POP for archiving only, or just Gmail, and that would make me much less dependent on a traditional mail client.
As I've written numerous times, the whole idea that Debian Testing is more stable than an Ubuntu release didn't exactly pan out for me when I ran Lenny in its Testing phase. I had quite a bit of stuff break. Most was resolved, usually in a couple of weeks. If I had figured out the xorg.conf situation at the time, I probably would have never moved away from Debian and back to Ubuntu (which in 8.04 worked perfectly with the Intel 830m video chip, after which I figured out the xorg.conf needed to make it work in Lenny and beyond).
So I'll consider Debian Backports, especially if I'm anxious to move from FF/Iceweasel 3.0.x to 3.5.x. And I need to start keeping tabs on Debian development to see where they are on their next release.