... or user agent spoofing with Iceweasel. I've started using Debian again recently (Lenny on my eee pc) after several years of solid Ubuntu use. Everything is working great but there are a couple of annoyances, one being that my bank doesn't let me use Iceweasel to bank online. if you've not followed the Debian Firefox/Iceweasel saga, I'm not going to re-hash it but you can get a good re-cap from wikipedia. The good news is that it's easily fixed, all you need to do is pretend to be running a supported browser. Web browsers identify themselves to web servers by sending user agent strings. My bank's internet banking site was kicking me out because what it's seeing (Iceweasel) isn't on it's white list of supported browsers. Firefox is however and the thing is, Iceweasel is Firefox by another name. All I had was get Iceweasel to lie about who it was, a technique called user agent spoofing. I knew this could be achieved via a plugin and got all excited about writing one. I spent a microsend googling though and discovered this problem has already been solved using such a plugin. I guess I don't have any new ideas... Essentially all you need to do is install the plugin and restart your browser to activate it. You will then be able to switch your user agent profile on the fly via the tools menu. By default you will be able to spoof as IE, Opera or Netscape all on Vista. I tried Netscape and was able to login to internet banking as normal. However I still wanted to tell my bank that I was running Linux so I downloaded and imported the Linux/Firefox user agent profile from here. Little things like this can be frustrating, especially for new users. Yet one of the things I like about Debian is that there is no compromising principles. Besides, I enjoy working these things out and there's no shortage of Debian based distros to choose from.