Kicking the tires on Debian Squeeze

Today I booted the Debian Squeeze daily build I grabbed recently, used rescue mode to put GRUB on the root partition (instead of the Master Boot Record of my primary drive, which runs Fedora 13 and Windows 7) and booted into the Debian Squeeze installation on my 8 GB USB Flash drive.

Thus far everything is working well for the most part. I'm using Epiphany now, and Squeeze ships with Gnash, which right now is eating more CPU than it should. In my opinion Gnash isn't ready to be shipped in the default of any distribution. Better to let the user choose it than foist it upon them at this stage of development (that stage being Gnash's unsatiable appetite for CPU).

As I've noted recently, I find it interesting that at this stage in the cycle (close to release, presumably), Debian Squeeze ships with the mono-powered Tomboy Notes and the Shotwell photo archiving app (which Ubuntu is also shipping).

Squeeze includes not only Shotwell but the GIMP and Inkscape. It also includes OpenOffice and what's known as GNOME Office, the latter including Abiword and Gnumeric.

I'm running a big update right now, and I'll see how the system reacts after that.

Later: Squeeze was super slow while running from the USB Flash drive, but I did manage to test the sound situation. I couldn't get the speakers to mute, no doubt due to the ALSA 1.0.21 bits that co-exist with the 1.0.23 version of the sound system. Full 1.0.23 generally means I can get the Conexant 5069 chip to mute the speakers when headphones are plugged in. I still think I can make this happen in Debian Squeeze, but it'll take a bit of doing.

I had a bit of a problem with NetworkManager. The Debian installer never configures (or even uses) this particular network properly. I then had to force NetworkManager to actually manage the wired Ethernet interface, and every subsequent boot NM reverted to the unmanaged default, which couldn't be edited. I could subsequently change to the "good" wired configuration, but needing to do this every boot would be a pain. This is yet another thing I'm sure I could figure out ...

Video was great, probably due to Debian's conservative choice of kernel and Xorg packages. I forgot how fast the open-source ATI driver could be with my chipset.

Squeeze remains a definite possibility for my system. It's a very nice, lean implementation of GNOME, just as it's always been.