Categories
Desktop Environments Distributions Your Choice

No shame in the Linux game

I admit it. In the past I have done a fair share of distro hopping.

If you’ve seen my recent posts, you see that I still do some OS installations to USB just to try them out. My most recent distros burned to USB are Manjaro and Ubuntu 20.04 main desktop version.

However, I’m down to one computer now. It’s a System76 Gazelle bought in 2017. I bought it pretty loaded up with lots of good features, such as the i7 and 32 GB of RAM.
The hard drive dual-boots Windows 10 and Linux without me worrying about running out of disk space any time soon.

But, one computer (UEFI disabled) still reaches a point where things are functioning well, and as expected with no headaches to occupy your time… You know you can get work done, and you do –no question about it. But, as we all know there is a difference between work time and play time. And right now I gotta get work done. Play time will come later. Or maybe when I replace this computer. Right now too much is working well, and I don’t want to mess with it.

I am curious about how Manjaro works. It’s one of the few popular distros I have not yet used. I used to run KaOs (I think it’s name has changed since) and it is a very cool spin of Arch. I quite easily broke it as I was learning all about pacman and other ways to resolve bleeding-edge breakage. It was fun, but the unexpected twists and turns of “It worked yesterday, but today it’s busted” was less-than fun.

I’m not hating on Arch. No. Arch gets my respect for sure.
But, I told myself that I’d try it out, and see if it could be “daily-driver” material. For me, it wasn’t. Arch style is not what I can depend on for stability for the work of my choice. Yes, laziness is included in my view of it as well. I simply don’t have the same amount of free time to learn by breaking it, or learn by having an update break it. Since Majaro is rolling, I know that when i’m ready to do so I can install it from the USB and that I can bring it up to date.

So here I am today, still running KDE Neon (I mentioned in other posts that it’s so fast). Faster than Pop_OS on this machine in my honest opinion, but that was before 20.04 version came out, so I’d bet Pop_OS is even faster today that previous versions. But for desktop environment. I have learned and retained muscle-memory keyboard shortcuts and what-have-you over the years and I like the way Cinnamon does not force to unlearn so many things such as switching virtual desktops, and having tap-to-click just work.

Plasma is nice, I do use it from time to time. Dolphin is a great file manager, and the available themes are very very nice. Plasma is also a lot faster than I remember it back in the Plasma 4 days too. Maybe it was slower due to the available hardware and RAM I had at the time. Maybe. Plasma is not known to be lightweight, and with 32 GB of RAM on the system, it’s not an issue at all.

So, even with the responsiveness of the computer, why not just use Plasma as a daily driver? Because I like Cinnamon a bit better. It too has some very nice theme choices and customization. The File Manager (Nemo) needs to let users increase the font size of the left hand panel. Other than that it’s fine.

Using Cinnamon made me ask myself why…. and should I feel shame for installing a Plasma system only to “not use Plasma” in favor of an environment that can be found (or installed/added to) many other Linux distributions.

Today I declared “No. There is no shame in setting up the bits and pieces of your computing environment that you use daily to be and work just the way that you want it.”
There is no shame in the game where choice is everything. I chose a rolling distro, and I added a well-known desktop environment and set it up to not get in my way. I update it regularly and I can run virtualbox if I want to check out another distro. Maybe down the road I’ll buy an older machine at a bargain and do some install and tests and funtime experiments. Cheers.

Categories
Applications Command Line (CLI) Using Linux

Burning Music CD Backup is not simple

Recently, I needed to backup a Music CD with my Linux OS.  Sadly, this was not simple.  This post discusses using Linux to back up a music cd. Nothing more, nothing less. I don’t intend to promote or sell my backups.  Yes, I am aware that

  • On Mac and Windows, music cd backup woes aren’t worth discussing since easily-obtainable programs exist
  • This is an area of computer use that can raise eyebrows

Why backup our music CDs?

Safekeeping in a familiar location; your personal computer

If I backed up my Led Zeppelin CD “In Through the Out Door”, then I wouldn’t be upset about it (it’s missing). Of course, music CDs are not as expensive as they were before the days of digital purchase, digital download, and youtube, but it’s the principal of it.

Easily encode & transfer music for different formats & players

For example, you make a digital backup of “In Through the Out Door”. Your wife wants to listen to it on her iPad in high quality audio format.  Your nephew would also like to listen to it, but has limited audio file type support and less storage space on his iPod Touch.  With a full digital backup of the cd, you can easily encode the songs to satisfy both requirements without having to take the original music cd out of its case multiple times.

You covered “why”, ? “how”

I will first give citation to the source of the solution that worked for me. See the first post from user noz in How to dump an Audio CD to ISO from the freebsd forums for the instructions. I found a “gotcha” (possibly) overlooked in the “Playing it” section;  Note: Playing the BIN without conversion will give you an earful of static.  This is notable, it also applies to the burn process.  You want to burn the converted (not original) bin file.  I got this wrong the first time. To avoid the mistake the 2nd time, I did the following:

  • Kept the file names the same for both original and converted bin files.
  • Used sed to replace the source (in TOC) to the converted bin file. Sed was quicker than a GUI text editor to accomplish same [find/replace] task.

For example, if your original bin = in-out-door.bin, converted bin = in-out-door-converted.bin, and TOC file is in-out-door.toc

sed -i -e ‘s/in-out-door.bin/in-out-door-converted.bin/’ in-out-door.toc

You might prefer to rename the .bin files and leave the toc as-is. It’s up to you.

Categories
Desktop Environments Distributions Installing Linux Using Linux Your Choice

Old Hardware, Old Software

Hello all. Feels like it was only yesterday talking about this old Emachines T-5048 computer.  This machine has been through a lot. Many distros tried, several distros failed.

The good news is, that in the process I learned that Old Hardware is just not going to be treated fairly by new software/OS Releases. It’s a reality that I used to think only applied to MS Windows users.  You may remember the days when you wanted to run Windows 2000, but it just would not work right until you made “some” investment in new hardware.  Me, I was lucky. I only needed to purchase a new video card.

This computer has been running Crunchbang 10 for a few months now.  While the response time is really fast, (due to its light resource footprint) I had to heavily modify the grub bootloader to get it to properly boot.  Changes such as turning off ACPI and LAPIC.  I thought the only downside was that I’d have to manually press a button to turn off the machine.  Sadly, I think it goes beyond that.  Playing sound files or CDs  produces a poor experience.  Music would sometimes start and then stop, or stutter (don’t know which is worse) and I attribute this to hardware on the machine.

To know for sure. I installed an old (yet still supported LTS OS version). I first chose Kubuntu 10.04 LTS for two reasons.  First, it is old (below kernel 3). Secondly, it’s KDE4, which I’ve never tried.  I enjoyed the depth of possible customizations, but disliked the slow performance.  I need a responsive desktop, and this machine cannot run KDE properly.

My next (and current) choice was to try one of my favorite “other” distros – Linux Mint 9 XFCE Isadora (an LTS based on Ubuntu 10.04). I chose XFCE version of Mint since I ran a dual-boot Xubuntu with Windows XP on an old DELL Laptop.  Now that I’m dual-booting with 2 Linuxes, I think I will leave Mint XFCE on here, as it seems a great balance of speed and visual appeal. KDE looks better (visually) than XFCE, but again, performance and the ability to get the most out of this aging hardware are crucial to me. Also, in comparison to Crunchbang– Crunchbang is faster, but with XFCE the programs I install wind up in the application menu.  In Crunchbang you have to add just about every program you install in a manual fashion. There might be a tool out there that does this automagically, but I haven’t found it yet.

Edit; Found it. And boy do I feel dumb. I’ve been using Crunchbang Linux for years, and the answer was only a Forum-search away. To access all of your installed applications, follow the advice to show Debian Menu.

So far, music playback works great, and hey, I can also issue the shutdown command and walk away, knowing the machine will power itself off. Yay!

Categories
Distributions drive setup Installing Linux MacBook

Ubuntu 10.10 on Macbook 6,2

Hello all, I write this from the OS-X side of the dual-boot Macbook 6,2

For a few weeks now I’ve been trying out different distros to replace Crunchbang 9.04 as my Linux OS.

It has not gone as well as I would have liked.  I first tried Mint Debian and liked that the sound worked right away but there were a few things that I didn’t like about it (or at least the current state of it):

  • I could not get wifi right away.  This was annoying but solved with a cable.
  • It never seems up-to-date due to problems with the update manager (Mint mentions this, but I proceeded anyway).
  • I didn’t think it would crash “that much”.  I’ve been using Linux since 2003 and the last time I remember crashing an OS was when I tried to run Mandrake on a Compaq 7360 with an AMD K6.  That machine ran Ubuntu and even Fedora Core 4 (slowly yes, but without crashing).  I crashed Yellow Dog Linux several times on a Powermac 7300, but I digress. The point is, maybe I should not depend so heavily on Mint Debian right now.  And again, the good people at Mint do specify that things may happen in the way of stability.  That, i guess, is the downside of using a bleeding-edge distro.  Crashes will occur. Hats off to you Mint, it is a cool distro, but not for me right now.

The next distro that I tried was Crunchbang 10 or “Statler” as I have grown to adore the lightweight Openbox environment and since I ran Crunchbang 9.04 already on this machine, I was thinking “this was the one” for a few other good reasons:

  • It was a newer version of Crunchbang
  • It changed from being Ubuntu-based to Debian-based (Ubuntu-based is NOT a bad thing)
  • Historically-speaking (9.04) was very stable, even though the #! site mentions it might make the system go “Crunch Bang”

So I downloaded the iso, checked its MD5 sum, and burned the installer.  Had some kind of issue where it would not boot after the HD install (maybe the media was a bad CD? dunno.  Maybe I’ll try it again on a new cd).

Next, I was thinking of trying out a different, unknown flavor of Linux altogether: Archbang Linux, which is basically Arch Linux with an Openbox as its default environment.  The only issue, is that I was surprised to find a text-based installer.  I’ve used text-based installers before, but since this is a macbook, there’s a “gotcha” when it comes to installing the boot loader.  You need to install it on the same partition that holds your distro (and not the MBR). So if you do install it on MBR it’s a bit of work to get the system back to where it was before.

The Archbang partitioner just seemed clumsy to me, and I did not want to lose time by accidentally hosing the MBR or deleting any of the mac partitions, so I just bailed out on Archbang.  I can always use the LIVE CD part of it, but I don’t think it’ll help much because it was really the package manager difference that I was planning to learn my way around.

Thanks for reading all the pre-amble (or pre-ramble).

Even though ubuntu has a planned release next month, I needed an OS immediately, so I went with Ubuntu Maverick.  I was impressed right away. I have not used Ubuntu since 7.04 in favor of trying other distros, getting away from GNOME in favor of speed.  I did need to run a cable to get connected to the Internet, but I knew this “Up-Front” as the installer GUI requested that I connect, plug in the AC Charger, etc.

So, I’m happy with 10.10 and will use the onboard tools to upgrade to next version when it’s available.  The boot up time I think could be faster, and for some reason I get a blinking dash for 5-15 seconds before I get to the login prompt.  But I think that’s the worst of my issues for now. It hasn’t crashed at all.

Previously, any ubuntu-based distro needed tweaking to get the sound working on this macbook.  This time, with Ubuntu, it was as simple as running apt-get on the command line to install gnome-alsamixer and the sound was good-to-go!

Cheers, and happy Linux-ing.

Adam