Pengy Power

With credit (or blame, if you prefer) to MAL for the inspiration, as well as the number one reason.

Not exactly sure what got it working, but after a lot of downloading yesterday and two restarts today, the second hard drive was recognized and I am now copying over many gigs of data. Wish I knew what happened, but I’ll take the success even without the knowledge/understanding. More to come tomorrow ... right now I have Swedish meatballs cooking.

Sigh ... Well, I thought I had things pretty well in hand when I went off yesterday afternoon to meet up with MAL and head for the Big City. Alas, once again I was overconfident.

Yep, you guessed it: I attempted to upgrade my Linux OS yet again. That required more maneuvering than I’d anticipated, but I finally got all the preliminary steps completed, and slipped the install disc into my machine. Actually, I tried three discs—each of them sent to me from the Ubuntu Overlords (I think the real name is Canonical)—and failed with all three.

No matter what option I choose from the initial menu, after the "kernel active" message appears in white text, the screen goes blank; then, after a few seconds, the disc stops spinning. And nothing else happens. I had thought this was happening because the discs weren’t set up to handle my nice wide screen monitor; but today I plugged in an old monitor and got the same result.

I can’t download what I’d need to burn my own disc because it exceeds our satlink provider’s niggardly “fair access policy” limit. Exceeding that slows one’s connection to under dialup speed for 24 hours.

I really, really want to have a newer Kubuntu install on my system before I leave ... but I am completely out of ideas as to why I cannot get any of their discs to work in my machine. (Well, I know why the PC one didn’t work—I have a 64-bit machine. But neither of the 64-bit install discs work.) One more try and then I’m going to hit the bottle.

Arrrgh! What was an intermittent problem has ramped up to a persistent one, and I’ve no idea why, nor how to fix it.

I use Swiftfox as my web browser, because that was the easiest way to get Flash enabled on my machine. When I’m working on web pages, I like to preview them in it so that I can spot errors more easily, etc. I have been using Bluefish for html editing, and also Kate sometimes. I used to be able to (intermittently) use the relevant menu selections in each to preview my document in Swiftfox, but that has completely stopped working. When I browse Krusader, and select “open with Swiftfox”, that also fails now. What does happen when I try any of these actions is this: Swiftfox opens a new window, containing a tab that goes to my home page. And that’s it.

Anybody got some ideas on how to fix this? Or work around it? (I’ve never tried to open a local document from a browser’s address pane. Guess it’s time I learned how.) Thanks in advance for any ideas contributed!

I don't own a laptop/notebook computer, but have wanted one for a while. In the future I plan on building other types of computers myself from parts, but I've heard putting a notebook together that way presents more of a challenge than I want for my first attempt. So I've been looking for other options that don't involve paying Microsoft for Windows.

Today PC World offers an article with this headline:
Dell to Offer Ubuntu Linux on PCs, Laptops.

I have an old keyboard. It’s filthy and banged up, but it does the job, and best of all, it doesn’t have all those unnecessary extra keys in the middle keypad area (i.e., “sleep” and all that). My keyboard also has a lovely, firm feel to it – none of this mushy softness that seems to plague newer keyboards.

But now that I’m running Linux, there’s a key I don’t have that I’m starting to miss.

I am continuing to make good progress on getting things working on my machine. Late last night, I got my PGP keys imported successfully, and appear to have them working with KMail again; that was the last “must-have” functionality on my list. So now I’m going to turn my attention to trying to get various projects back on track; but that said, many items have fallen behind schedule. Sunni’s Salon will be late, for starters; and despite having many ideas nagging me for release via blog entries, I expect substantive blogging will be light until my workload lightens up.

Okay, with a few exceptions, I’ve spent much of my day trying to get my Kubuntu install working the way I’d like. The primary challenge remaining (as far as I know right now) is to get PGP working.

And in trying to get it working, an embarrassing, dispiriting thought came to me ... what if I’m a luser who isn’t capable of handling being outside the proprietary corral?

Late yesterday afternoon—after enjoying the warm, wet (of the melty fashion) outdoors for a while, MAL installed the new hard drive, and got its basic structure working. A few tweaks this morning, and here I am, back using Firefox, and trying to get things set up the way I like. That’ll take a while, I know, so for now I’m focusing on getting essential software and moving my data over to the new drive.

Meanwhile, we’ve had a few other firsts lately ... the day after I wrote about pregnant, waddling cows, the first calf arrived! It was born in the early morning hours, before we were awake, but the snolfs still enjoyed seeing it; they’re also wanting to witness a birth. Given the number of cows around, that seems easily doable. And this morning, as MAL and I were working on my computer, I saw a crane fly by—a very welcome harbinger of spring.

Okay, back to work I go. My day was shaping up to be plenty busy before the computer migration and settling in was made necessary!

So far I’ve had no more computer meltdowns, but then again I didn’t shut it down last night. I have mostly been trying to organize files in preparation to back up everything in case we need to drop a new hard drive into the box. I currently cannot access the email I had on Thunderbird, which includes a lot of stuff that had languished in my “to reply” folder for too long already. I don’t think it’s lost, but I don’t have any sort of word processing software working to test that. I also do not have PGP/GPG working, which hampers comm further. My Firefox is dead, but I was able to extract a backup of my bookmarks file, so that all the basics for the next Salon are still preserved somewhere. Unfortunately, I’ll have to wait until I can read the file to complete the issue, which is probably just as well. In short, I do not trust this machine in its current state to do much of anything beyond web browsing. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to solve the problem this weekend.

When fast forwarding through the commercials tonight while watching The Daily Show (one of the very few items I TiVo), I noticed one of those Apple commercials with John Hodgman as the PC and Justin Long as the Mac. Although I'm not a Mac user, I've usually found the ads in this series entertaining enough to watch, at least once anyway. Tonight I saw a new Hodgman/Long Mac/PC advert. I liked this one enough to search it out at You Tube for embedding here. I hope you like it.

I figured that ad would be out there since it hits an important nail. Linux may also benefit greatly by gaining new users as a result of many coming sad realizations about Vista. Here's a search link to YouTube for some more Mac and PC videos, as well as some knock-off style parodies. Some of the parodies seem pretty good too although most cover a different topic. Enjoy !

Well, I’m back on my machine, thanks mostly to the Super SuperUser MAL. We’re still not sure what all happened, but it turns out the nVidia driver situation was the least of my problems. Something else (maybe multiple something elses) still aren’t right, and a good bit of it seems to center on internet-related stuff. For example, Firefox says it’s installed, and I can see all the folders and files for it, but it won’t run nor uninstall. I also cannot install other browsers. A program called “Ekiga” is getting blamed for a lot of this, but I don’t understand why.

Anyway, it’s late, I’m tired, and now that I have a backup of my Firefox bookmarks in a safe place, I’m going to try to get a good night’s sleep so that I can try to wrangle with this mess more tomorrow. Thanks to all who offered help — it was much appreciated!

[Update 3/1:] MAL suspects a hard disk problem, so I’m not sure how much time I’m going to invest in troubleshooting today. It isn’t as though I’ve a shortage of things to do ...

There are situations in which it isn’t a good idea to ignore “the rules”, by which I mean those kernels of wisdom that often come after tangling with Mr. Murphy. To wit, the rules for running Linux include: backing up one’s system before making changes; and around here, wait until the weekend before tweaking one’s system.

Well, I ignored them last night.

Since moving over to Linux, I’ve been using Thunderbird as my email client ... and I don’t like it very much. If it has some capabilities I need (templates, creating and using lists of recipients), I haven’t been able to find them; and there are some other minor annoyances I have with it.

Yesterday I looked over several possibilities, and have narrowed the field to three: KMail; Sylpheed; and Evolution. Anybody have experience with one or more of these? Any advice is welcome; they all look pretty good. For what it’s worth, my Windows email client was Calypso, which I happily used for many years. I’m not expecting to be able to import all that stuff, but if I could, that’d be mighty tasty icing on the cake.