Debathena Beta was rolled out to something along the lines of 10% of formerly RHEL-based computing cluster machines about a month ago. I talked about the plans for this some time ago, and it's exciting to see it actually occurring on vaguely the intended schedule. Now I can tool on campus on Debian (well, almost), and thanks to a generous application of magic**, I can even install any package in Ubuntu's universe repository on cluster machines if I need it (the machine will be restored to a good state on session logout). Rock on.

** I hear it involves schroot and LVM snapshots, but at any rate it appears to be approximately indistinguishable from magic.