It's been nearly a month since I've converted back to full time debian and it's been going very well. Ubuntu has released 10.04 and they seem very happy about it, it's exactly what I feared it would be and I'm very glad to be back in control of my own OS. Over the last month I've made three significant changes I'll quickly go over now.
Locking the desktop
Where I work it's required that the desktop is locked or the PC is logged out anytime you aren't in your office. After the first couple hours of closing all programs and logging out of my machine I got pretty tired of reopening all my apps over and over. I searched the internet and easily found exactly what I was looking for.
I did a "aptitude install xscreensaver"and added this to my menu
[exec] (Lock Screen) {xscreensaver-command -lock}
And I found myself back in compliance again.
Email Client
OK I'd planned to use Opera and webmail to get by, but I played with Claws Mail again and got suckered in. I've put my main email account on it and setup my address book. Normal drill "aptitude install claws-mail" and an add to my menu:
[exec] (Claws Mail) {/usr/bin/claws-mail} <>
I've got one last thing to figure out regarding masking all addresses when sending to groups, but that will give me something to work on later today.
Another browser
I really love Opera, but I have a few websites that fail on it including my bank. The best choice for me was to just load iceweasel and open it only when I need to. It's another one already in the repos "aptitude install iceweasel" and a menu item:
[exec] (Iceweasel) {/usr/bin/iceweasel} <>
If anyone hasn't heard the history of iceweasel/firefox you can start your search for info on the wiki.
Backups!
Since this is just like any other production PC, I booted clean, logged in as root, mounted an external USB drive, and did a copy of my entire /home to that drive in a dated folder. Whatever OS you run, do your backups!
That pretty much wraps up the last month, everything is smooth sailing so I guess it's time to load up squeeze in a vbox and start evaluating that upgrade option.
