A Few Debian Notes (live, wicd, and encfs)
I installed Debian Squeeze this morning and used a few resources I hadn’t known of before. The install went well and I’d recommend taking a look at these:
The Debian Live Project has rather nice live CDs for Debian. I tried out the LXDE desktop one and found I rather like LXDE, it runs rather quick on my really old Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop. The ISO won’t fit on a CD (boo!) but DVD-Rs or USB flash drives are rather easy to come by.
wicd, the wireless interface connection daemon, is a very nice replacement for network-manager. wicd will do basically the same thing as network-manager but without needing Gnome.
And lastly, encfs. Encrypt your home directory and have it decrypt automatically on login. Not super hard to setup, just be sure to read the instructions carefully. I prefer encfs over full lvm encryption as when installing on flash memory media (like an ssd or USB flash drive), you can simply create normal partitions aligned to the erase block size. Also, you can have a setup where you only have one giant root partition but want some directories within it to be encrypted, removing the need for lvm in order to get encryption.