I'm assuming your experiences with GNOME 3 are based on 3.4, the latest available in unstable. Have you tried 3.8 at all yet? In particular, some of its new legacy mode extensions?

Honestly I didn't even notice which versions were installed, I just downloaded the mini-ISO for the current testing installer and went with that.

Looking things over I'm going to assume that I'm running 3.4.

Barring the rare backport I prefer to keep my systems running pure-stable, unless there is a really compelling reason not to - so I'm not going to be too interested in running 3.8, or anything later than officially-supported wheezy.

That means I'll stick with gnome for a while to confirm that I'm not happy with it, then look at something else.

Hi Steve,

It'd be great if pwsafe can be kept in Debian. Looking forward to see it (re-)appear.

If the GNOME (3.4) objection has anything to do with the default mode (gnome-shell), I recommend running its fallback mode. It presents an interface that is pretty much unchanged from GNOME 2, unless you go unda-da-hood of course.

I've cloned the current Squeeze package of pwsafe and uploaded to github here;

• https://github.com/skx/pwsafe

Binary packages will be built and uploaded to this repository in the next few days. Just making minor tweaks to the packaging and trying to tidy things up a little more first.

@Steve: You might consider downloading a live USB image and trying out GNOME 3.8 and its new legacy-mode extensions, just to see if it feels comfortable to you. You can also get some of that functionality with 3.4 extensions.

If you really liked GNOME 2 I suggest you give MATE a try. I'm using it myself and it's awesome!

http://mate-desktop.org/

Thanks for the tip - I've not tried the fallback mode yet.

With regard to MATE/live-distros, etc: I run Debian, I wish to keep running Debian. If I cannot get used to GNOME 3.x then I will use an alternative which is already packaged, supported, and maintained by Debian.

(That might be awesome, fvwm, enlightenment, or even KDE. I'll cross that bridge when I've lived with GNOME some more.)

Hi Steve.
How about trying Mate Desktop in those EEPC's? It brings back the good old GNOME 2.X.X with all the power of Wheezy.
I'am using it in an old computer and it brought it back to life ;-)
If you want to try it in their website they have all the info you may need to do so.

try mate-desktop:

deb http://repo.mate-desktop.org/debian wheezy main

I hope it enter debian (mate-common wait in new), and then go to backports before EOL of squeeze

clarification, mate is installable on wheezy from deb http://repo.mate-desktop.org/debian wheezy main

Test shellshape. A good bluetile alternative.

Cinamon is in debian too

Awesome rocks of course!!

Thanks for your work in debian!

Cinamon isn't packaged for Wheezy, but otherwise looks like it is nice.

I'll give gnome more of a chance, try the fallback mode for a week or two, then decide what to do after that.

(I'd almost try fallback mode immediate, but I want to be more fair, and I can only assume that fallback mode is a temporary/transitional thing..)

Like many others I've found a home with Xfce. It is perfectly serviceable and has been very stable of late in Sid so I'd expect the same of the current packages in Wheezy. It runs reasonably light on resources and still has some limited compositing capability in the WM.

It's quite easy to try.

you can try pass as a substitute for pwsafe

pass looks interesting, but also isn't in Wheezy/Squeeze.

Maintaining pwsafe wouldn't be hard, but if I were to look for a replacement I'd want something that used an sqlite/simple database rather than a lot of text-files. That way sharing is easier, as is syncing.

In the past we used GPG-encrypted files ~/.password.data and that worked well. I'm sure there are many wrappers with similar backends.

You should try XFCE. I have been using it for a few years on Debian. I like it better then the later 2.x versions of Gnome. IIRC the default desktop is pretty ugly, but it is quick to customize the panel layout to something useful. The only other thing I change is to use network-manager + nm-applet instead of the XFCE preferred wicd. While network-manager has its issues, it is IMHO better then wicd for managing WiFi and GSM connections on a laptop. (on a desktop I don't bother with either NM or wicd.)

I use my own password manager. It mostly consists of terminal, keyboard shortcut, bcrypt and flat text file database. It's portable [works on ALL of my systems - GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Open/Solaris, etc], it's lightweight and easy to use. Just a script regurgitating bcrypt's output to a terminal when asked. Of course, it reads the phrase to be searched and the password first [stdin]. It closes its terminal window after X seconds, and the terminal itself is configured to enable copying strings with weird characters as one words [which enables passwords like "\7H/S^gxGDA"hMv" to be copied over via double click and pasted using mouse wheel].

I use it because: a) I don't trust someone else's program to store my password b) there was no good password manager around that would work for me

Maybe you should try similar approach?

I recommend trying out i3wm(http://i3wm.org/) or Awesome(http://awesome.naquadah.org/) "tiling window managers". Lightweight, configurable and very effective for any unix-administrator with a vi(m)-fetish... :)

Awesome looks like the most obvious candidate for me, I already use bluetile under gnome on my other (squeeze) desktops and find it useful.

Why not just put pwsafe back into Debian (it was already removed)? Some links you may have missed:

http://bugs.debian.org/619704
http://bugs.debian.org/630422
http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pwsafe.html

I am not a Debian developer, and have no ability to get the package maintained again.

Even if the package were re-added immediately it would be kept out of the wheezy release; because that has frozen.

In conclusion my choices are:

• Use a different tool, packaged for squeeze/wheezy.
• Install from source beneath /usr/local, or /opt.
• Create/maintain my own package, based on the final squeeze upload.