How's your Day? - September 2013

If you're coming to Texas, make sure you get your shots. The weather shouldn't be too bad in January if you're going to South Texas.

 

That was truly awful. I'm going to have to post another NickelBack video.

 

Only 2,470 for me! Unless of course, one or more of my kids decides to go to graduate school or can't find a job and moves back home.

 

This was truly thunderstruck. I'm sure that lady from Hell had on a genuine Utilikilt..if it's not Utilikilt..it's crap..

 

He was a finalist on Australia's Got Talent. So, he can't be too bad.

 

Apropos of nothing, I was cleaning through one of my file cabinets (ie: junk repository) today and found a Windows NT installation CD.

Maybe I can put in up on eBay as vintage and rare. lol.

 

Australia has the BadPiper, Canada has Justin Bieber, the US has Miley Cyrus. What more can I say?

 

Seriously it might be worth something. They used to toss out old razors...

 

After a long busy day, buying a car. Today was much more normal and quieter. It is fun getting acquainted with a newer car. Our Corolla, was on life support it was time to get another vehicle. We bought a 2008 Dodge Caliber, we are quite happy with the car.

 

End of day orders sucked.
1) Tomorrow I'm briefing the CO on the new network deployment, which hasn't even been finished yet but I somehow pulled out of my rear end; some sexy looking network map that hopefully he won't ask too many questions about. Fortunately before we go, I can have it done, just wasn't able to cut it with 4 minutes notice.
2) Parade for tomorrow morning stood down, so there's a slightly unhappy Lance Corporal who is still waiting for his Corporals promotion that is now 2 months overdue

I think I need to go relax and have a scotch...just 24 more years and change and I can retire....and counting LOL.

 

but I somehow pulled out of my rear end in some sexy looking network map

Please don't post the map

 

I promise NOTHING! ;P

 

Announced the Junior High game yesterday. Boy was that painful. 72 to zip. yeesh. Our High School boys played their closest game ever last Saturday though, and they have a real chance at winning tomorrow. I have no frame of reference yet, but I suspect that announcing is much more fun when your team wins.

 

Been offline for some time. Computer issues: the PC has internet issues: open a page and have some coffee before it starts to load (Firefox), Chrome crashes 'bout every minute. Shall I go on?
One laptop blew it's video board or video processor or whatever. Anyhoo: no picture. Another laptop refuses to get a connection with the internet. A third laptop has a cracked screen. It's fairly new, but no insurance on a (probably) self inflicted crack. I'm posting with that one now: hooked it to the TV screen. So everyone in the room can read along. I almost can't as the TV is at the other side of the room. Not the best way to work... The same laptop has Windhose 8 issues: first it took me weeks and many factory resettings to have it up and running. Then Win8 got updates and ... crashed. Again.

I don't trust it very much anymore. I'm thinking of getting rid of Windows and installing Linux (but which one?) and hooking it on to the screen of the PC.

Any thoughts as to which Linux version I'd use best?

 

It just hit the net over here that the latest Win 8 updates are a major F-up... breaks a lot of different things. If you can roll back, that would be a good option.

As for Linux... I'm a die-hard Fedora fan having been on board with them since Red Hat 8. But, that said, my two latest installs (my netbook and my new desktop) have both been Kubuntu. Fedora hasn't caught up yet with EFI booting and it won't run on some ATOM processors. Kubuntu (if you want KDE) or Ubuntu (Unity and gnome) seem to run on almost everything and get high marks for user friendliness. Personally, I hate unity and & gnome, but each to his own.

Linux MINT (derived from 'buntu or Debian) also gets high marks for easy of use and for having proprietary drivers already available.

My suggestion is to download a couple and write them to "live" flash drives and boot them off the flash drive without installing. Then you can take each distro for a spin and see what you like and what works. Then, you can install from the flash drive. Be sure to test your hardware (wifi, printer, etc.) for compatibility ... just in case. Some all-in-one printers and some newer general printers do not yet work under Linux. Same goes for some wifi adapters.

 

Thanx, great idea, Richard! I'll get me a couple of flash drives, so I can easily swap distro's. (as opposed to using only one drive and having to empty it again and again for the different distro's). The Win8 came with the laptop, so there's no rolling back to former versions there.

 

Oh, I meant rolling back to a pre-update system, not rolling back to win 7. There should be a recovery CD that you can use or maybe even a recovery partition on the HD that you can access through the boot menu.

Also, have a look at distrowatch.com which is dedicated to tracking linux distros from around the world. I think there are a couple of native Dutch releases that you might find worth looking at too. Although, I know nothing about them. And, not that you need a Dutch-only distro. I tried searching for you and ended up with the site translated to Dutch somehow. I took 2 years of German in school and remember little of it, so you can imagine my Dutch skills. Tho, surprisingly, I did pick out a few words here and there.

 

ftfy.

 

Oh, sorry. Done that to get it to working mode again, but to get there I had to do the full factory reset, which meant erasing all I had done. Such as installing programmes (chrome, itunes, Open Office, Gimp and what not, in every case: hours of installing) and all documents I had started to load onto the hard drive. I don't like to do that every few weeks. As I was forced to to a few times. No fun in that. The result is I don't trust the bleedin' thing anymore. So now I've installed as little as possible programmes (only chrome, that is, I don't like hate IE - and there's not much I hate).

Thanx again! I was just busy taking a peek on techradar.com (*click*). Don't read the verdict on Fedora (ouch!). It surely are only their opinions, but at least it's comprehensive. They might add the YMMV warning, though.

Mint looks promising, as does Sabayon (if that doesn't work out, it tastes nice at least!) and Manjaro (there's a nice comment about that one).

 

Fedora has, and always has had, a number of haters for being too technical and/or not for beginners. I started out on Red Hat which morphed into Fedora and I never found it beyond me. But, maybe for someone who can barely use Windows... yeah, I could see that. Linux is, to some extent, a different way of thinking and Fedora doesn't dumb things down for your average Win user. And there are those, like myself, who don't mind and at times even prefer, to use the command line.

And of course, there are always those who will hate gnome (myself among them). But, as with any linux, you can install any desktop you like. And in actuality, the differences between distros is becoming smaller and smaller as everyone usually gets to share in the advancements of others. Yes, there are still issues, but those are mostly down to things beyond linux control such as proprietary drivers or companies not releasing specs or changing them.

The main attraction, imho, to the distros like 'buntu is that they will go out of their way to handhold win converts* and try to make things as "no brainer" as possible. That, and they seem to support just about every CPU you can find and are working on as much hardware compatibility as they can muster.

* for example, "traditional" linux/unix considers auto mounting anything as a security risk. So, earlier linuxes had the user type in a mount command. Not a big deal, but you have to know how to do it. Now, most linuxes will automount anything you plug in. Root authority.... huge security risk and possibly dangerous to the system. So, traditional requires you to either have a root password or to have the admin add you to a sudoers group ("wheel"). Now, everyone gets to sudo to their hearts content. And so forth.