Finch is a powerful text user interface instant messaging client based on libpurple, and it comes included in the Pidgin source, the popular GNOME IM client. Finch supports various protocols, including AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and IRC.

This tutorial shows how to set up a USB-over-IP server with Debian Lenny as well as a USB-over-IP client (also running Debian Lenny). The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB I/O messages" into TCP/IP payloads and transmits them between computers.

This article explains how you can set up an SSL vhost under Apache2 on Ubuntu 9.10 and Debian Lenny so that you can access the vhost over HTTPS (port 443). SSL is short for Secure Sockets Layer and is a cryptographic protocol that provides security for communications over networks by encrypting segments of network connections at the transport layer end-to-end.

By the end of 2004, I'd been running Debian ‘testing’ on my laptop since around early 2003, but after 6-8 months of woody, I was backporting far too much and I couldn't spare the time for upkeep. At just about that time, a thing called ‘warty’ was released.

Keryx is a portable, open source and cross-platform package manager for APT-based (Ubuntu, Debian) systems. It provides a graphical interface for gathering updates, packages, and dependencies for offline computers. It is similar to "Sushi, huh?", but easier to use and with a nice GUI.

I do tend to go on. But here's the short version of why I'm running Debian instead of Ubuntu.

I bet many of us have been trying to pound square pegs into round holes at one time or another. It's the same for me with operating systems.

The Debian GNU/Linux project is looking at a development freeze in March. Earlier this year, the owner of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, had proposed that Debian sync releases with Ubuntu so that the work could be spread.