Though I had found workarounds for major video sites (including Youtube and DailyMotion), I have had a lot of issues with musical websites, most of them being still designed in Flash™.

To use Adobe® Flash™ Player on my amd64 desktops, I have used Bart Marten’s workaround described in the Debian wiki. It works fine though the player randomly crashes on some websites, and the browser needs to be restarted so that it works again.

This 4-week experience was fine, but I am a little bit puzzled that there is still no usable free flash player. Hopefuly, things will improve over time… the sooner, the better!

The previous releases contain a big security issue, which makes them totally unusable.

As I didn’t want to wait until the flashplugin-nonfree package to be updated to support the i386 plugin through nspluginwrapper (as suggested in #586273), I have decided to simply switch to the free alternative: gnash.

After a few hours with it, I am now able to use most of the websites I usually visit, including Youtube and Dailymotion.

Note that I use Iceweasel, which does not support WebM (for now), nor H.264 (which will never be supported by Mozilla).

Youtube support is brought by a Greasemonkey user script available at: http://turanct.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/gnash-youtube/
The only tiny drawback is that the videos load in pause mode. For now, everything else seems to work fine.

Users of other browers (Chromium, Safari, Opera) can try their HTML5 beta: http://www.youtube.com/html5

It is even easier for Dailymotion, as the videos on their HTML5 beta program are encoded in the Ogg Theora format, which is natively supported by Iceweasel/Firefox >= 3.5.

To ease things, I have written a small Greasemonkey script which simply automatically redirects www.dailymotion.com to openvideo.dailymotion.com. This script can be downloaded here.

The drawback is that videos won’t play before they are loaded completely, which is not a big problem anyway.

I still cannot play the videos avilable on Vimeo, and have noticed while wirting this post that the Flash™ file uploader of WordPress didn’t work with gnash (obviously, WP provides an alternative way for file upload).

I will go on with this experience as long as I do not see major issue with gnash.
I will also update this post, or add comments, if I encounter other issues, or find any alternatives.

I would be curious to read your comments if you have run similar experience.

I have followed Matt Zimmerman’s procedure, and it seems everything went well.
Now, I just need to not login to Facebook over the next 14 days, which shouldn’t be a problem at all (my last connection was something like 2 or 3 months ago!).

My aim is now to make more and more people use identi.ca as their primary social network. I will also follow the Diaspora project.

My identi.ca profile : http://identi.ca/julienvalroff

You can download the sources from the SourceForge project.

Unofficial Debian packages are being built right now, but will only be uploaded to my repository after a bit more testing, during the week-end I guess.
They are meant to be uploaded to the official Debian archive once they are considered as ready by the pkg-dspam team.

Hopefully, they will be part of Squeeze.

161 posts, only 190 comments, but the statistics shows a stable increase in the number of visitors (in average a bit less than 500 unique visitors per day).

During the week-end, I have worked on upgrading WordPress to the newer 2.9 release, and have just finished optimising my apache and mysql configurations. Access to my websites should now be somehow faster.

The migration has caused a downtime of more or less 4 hours yesterday, time for the data to cross the ocean.
The migration was successful, though you might still experience issues to connect to the services hosts on this linode due to the new IP adressess (both IPv4 and IPv6). Most DNS servers should however now be up-to-date.

Thanks again to Linode for their great service and support.

Ubuntu One: I wish we could have something similar for Debian users (ideally, it should be extended so that we could sync our calendars, contacts, liferea data etc.).

usb-creator: seems the easiest way to create a bootable usb stick containing a complete and customisable environment. I am aware of the existence Debian Live, but I must say I haven’t given it a try yet.

Desktop orientation: Ubuntu users are in a large majority desktop users. Ubuntu is imho desktop-oriented, and I particularly like the artwork coherence (from boot loader to default desktop).

rkhunter was moved to Alioth’s collab-maint project, and I have set up a personal GIT repository for the other packages.

This page on the wiki has helped a lot.

I now need to learn how to use this tool, but my first tests are very encouraging.
I haven’t had to change my packaging workflow, switching from svn-buildpackage to git-buildpackage.

I am even able to build i386 packages on my amd64 machine as before without the need to change anything in my ~/.pbuilderrc.

I first had to switch from dpatch or cdbs’ simple-patchsys to quilt, which was easy thanks to Romain Francoise’s old blog post.

Also note this quick adaptation for cdbs:

for i in $(ls debian/patches/*.patch); do \
    I=$(basename $i | sed 's/.patch$//'); \
    quilt import -P $I.diff $i; \
done

The rest was much easier than what I thought, thanks to the related page on the wiki.

I have already tried uploading a package to my personal repository, and reprepro just worked as expected.

I have had to found the right way starting it for my session, anf finally found the following was the easiest and cleanest solution:

echo export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/bin/compiz >> ~/.gnomerc

Writing it here so that I can find it again…