Pengy Power

A very special friend has spent the day installing Linux on my new computer, as I have wanted for a long time. It's wonderful. Now just have to install the GPG so I can use my encryption keys, and I'm all set. Just so you all know... Mama finally did it! :)

And it is largely thanks to two wonderful gentlemen: MAL and the Happy Curmudgeon.

Despite driving all over two counties yesterday—and getting a later start than I’d wanted on my day—I got a fair amount accomplished yesterday. I’ve already hinted at the first ...

Yes, I know (or I think I do) what you’re thinking: Sunni doesn’t run Windows, so why’s she going off on it again? There are two Windows machines in the house: one of the Snolf computers, which rarely goes online; and one of the teenagers runs it on his machine, because he’s deeply into gaming.

We got FAPped last Friday. We had been getting FAPped fairly regularly on Friday, so I asked everyone to check their machines to make sure auto-updates are really, truly disabled, and to check for other potential leaks. They all pooh-poohed me ... and so [you can see this coming, right?] I’m on deadline today ... and we’re FAPped again. And this time, probably because Lobo’s home, they did check—and it appears Mr. Windows has a virus or trojan, as 200M of something was uploaded in the wee hours of this morning (and yesterday morning).

Once I get my copy written, my plan was to try to catch up on my mounting email backlog ... that may or may not happen, as I don’t think I’ll have sufficient patience left for sitting and waiting while pages load agonizingly slowly. Sorry. Blame Windows and the careless teenager.

P.S. Now that the few kinks in my Kubuntu upgrade are behind me, my machine is probably the most solid one in the house—and that includes the three Macs that live here. The only problem I (rarely) have is Firefox freezing under heavy load—but I’m talking a seriously heavy load for that to happen. Pengy power FTW!

Nice way to start the morning, eh? I hadn’t intended it to go this way, of course, but I shoulda known ... trying to update my system has never been straightforward.

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!