A Linux bank holiday

The bank holiday Monday weather was poor and discouraged us from making the effort to go out anywhere. There wasn't much of interest on telly, so I whiled away the time downloading and trying out different distributions of Linux on the little Acer machine Kath returned to me - Ubuntu, Fedora Manjaro and Mint XFCE. All worked well, but the first two were not as lively as the latter two, as the notebook has only 2GB of RAM which isn't quite enough given demands they make on memory. 

I occupied myself with this, having discovered that the trackpad wasn't recognised when I made the first install of Mint with the Mate desktop. I thought it might be an operating system deficiency, but as the fault is reproduced on each of the distros, I can only conclude it's a hardware fault. I may have knocked the machine stowing in the boot for the journey home, as up until then with WIndows 10 on it, there was no problem. Not that it matters much, as I habitually use a mouse with portable PCs.

In the end, I settled for Mint XFCE for the simple reason that there's a minimal amount to learn. I've been using Mint now for several years, with Mate, Cinnamon and even KDE versions on time. This will do all that I need it to without getting in the way. I wish I had introduced my sister to Mint many years ago. Once she'd got used to the differences with Windows, it would have given her far more confidence and control, and in turn spared me from trying to explain to her so many irrelevant things which distract Windows users from getting the job done.

Sub zero days

It was around freezing point when we walked energetically to St Catherine's Sunday morning, where I celebrated the eight o'clock Eucharist. We returned home, and didn't go out for the rest of the day, although the weather was bright. With such a chilling wind neither of us felt like venturing far. Even though the days are lengthening noticeably, even though we have plenty of warm outdoor clothes, we seem to lack the motivation to go far. Except in imagination that is. My mind drifts south toward Málaga, where it's eighteen degrees by day at the moment.

Monday morning, I had to take the car in early for its pre-MOT diagnostic at our Golf specialist garage N G Motors in Splott. If it needs lots of costly work doing, we really will have to make the effort to buy a new one in the coming week before I leave for locum duty in Málaga. I caught the 61 bus back from Adamsdown as I couldn't establish where the nearest stop was over in Splott, so I had to walk about a kilometre to where I knew I would find one. There were three women waiting at the stop, and I let them board the bus before me. The last one, a lady about my age turned to me as she got on and said: "Thank you there aren't many gentlemen around these days. No please and thank you either" lamenting the lack of common courtesy that seems to pervade some aspects of life today.

Tuesday morning, I had a phone call from Mike's widow Gail, in response to a letter I'd posted to her yesterday with my written personal tribute to my oldest friend. She said she'd like it to be read at his Memorial Service, as she felt that I'd well captured the person she knew and loved, and expressed it beautifully. Indeed, as part of my mourning him, I put time into crafting and editing the text, so it would be beautiful. As a poet and writer, he so loved words. It was our shared delight. I wanted to do him proud. 

I suggested making a recording of my text for use in church. Gail liked this proposal, so I did just that, using the Windows 10 voice recorder app, and the Audacity sound editor to render the output into an MP3 file. I tested in on PC and Smartphone, and played it through my office HiFi, to check sound quality. I was pleased with the result, and emailed it to her straight away. Happily she thought the result was fit to use, and asked if I'd be willing to contact the Vicar, Fr Andrew Todd to arrange it with him, once she'd obtained his email address.

Later in the day, the garage called to say the car didn't need as much attention as I'd feared, given that it's 23 years old. With one minor welding repair, it passed its MOT and is fit to be re-insured and taxed again for another six months. This gives us longer to consider a replacement, and find a keen DIY enthusiast who might be glad of it for a restoration or race 'modding' project. After receiving the call, I had call from Fr Rufus to bring me up to date with his parish news. We chatted for so long that I no longer had enough time to go by bus and retrieve the car before the garage closed, so it had to wait until this morning.

I had to be out of the house and on a 61 bus by eight thirty to make the 45 minute trip to Splott, amid flurries of snow at minus four degrees. Still, the bus was warm, and this was far more relaxing than having to drive through rush hour traffic. The return trip in the car took twenty minutes, and Fr Mark arrived for a chat, and to hand over church keys, just after I got back. I was good to talk face to face, before I went to St Catherine's to celebrate the Eucharist on his behalf. It frees him for other duties in a crowded schedule, working without a colleague. I feel somewhat ashamed of my divided loyalties, going away to do similar duties abroad, leaving him here overburdened. There's need whichever way you look.

While I was out collecting the car, Gail called with her Vicar's contact details. This meant I could email the MP3 voice file to him. A little later, I had a reply, asking if I could provide it on a CD. He explained that there were few people around he was confident would be able to manage an MP3 player with the church public address system during the service. Having a CD guaranteed to play of typical church legacy equipment would be for him the line of least resistance. This is something I understand only too well, from bitter experience. 

Thankfully, I still have a small supply of blank writable audio CDs so was able to set about the task promptly, and post it to him later in the day. My only problem was working out how to burn an audio CD in Windows 10. This aspect of the system interface has changed considerably since the last time I needed to use Windows for CD burning. In fact, I have relied on a Linux driven computer to burn CDs for ages, as its old fashioned app interfaces are simpler, more straightforward, although just as feature rich. It's fit for purpose if you understand how it works and can control it without needing to spend too much time learning new features and layout. That's half the trouble with a lot of Windows products.

It's minus four tonight. Probably too cold to snow, even though it's overcast. Many parts of the UK have been disrupted by snowfalls. All day rolling news coverage about the weather makes this sound like the major crisis it isn't. Snow has always temporarily brought normal life to a halt in Britain and we moan and worry rather than do something about it. We don't manage adverse weather conditions to make daily life weather resilient as they do in the Alpine. It's a huge anxiety generator, along with brexit, if you listen to the news reportage. No wonder so many people resort to medication to cope with the impact on their emotions.

      

Tribute to the Linux collective

It's a long while since I last had a good rant about the virtues of Linux. Windows has meanwhile seen many improvements in its development, but can still often be frustrating to use in comparison.

All that computer tinkering yesterday got me to bed later than I needed, so I slept late this morning, and eventually returned to the task of getting the Acer to work again by installing Linux Mint properly. It's  half to three quarters of an hour from boot to a fully working system. Better than Windows. You're then advised to update, but can do so at your leisure. Update runs for half an hour, bringing the latest version of the operating system and software. It does so without preventing you from carrying on with work, and usually without asking you to reboot. Utterly brilliant if you're busy. 

All you need available for productive working is there. If you have additional software needs it's easy to top up with your favourites to complete the job. All made possible by the core design of Linux at the outset. It's one of the greatest collaborative social enterprises of our era. Fortunes are made by companies offering Linux software services, yet it's available for free within a global community of volunteers and professionals, for anyone to adopt - especially when Windows dies on them. It's still hard to find Linux driven computers readily available in the consumer marketplace.

I discovered Linux working in Geneva twenty years ago, learned to use it and become intrigued by it on hardware that wasn't really powerful enough to do it justice. I have watched it evolve and diversify into an ecosystem of related products that can get the best out of all kinds of equipment, especially in the scientific community. Now it's being introduced to systems running on the international space station. In some regions it's used to run whole departments of government and for the trading engines of the economy. 

MS Windows and Apple Mac have had their hold on consumer markets for decades, but the innovation of Android on smartphones and tablets has changed habits of digital consumption radically irreversibly. The Android operating system is derived from Linux. It has not only risen to meet expectations, but also helped shape expectations of what is possible to do with a powerful pocket computer. Admittedly this vision of the possible was generated by Apple with its iPhone and apps, and the challenge taken on by Android, but Apple operating systems developed, from origins in the BSD operating system with many of the same characteristics and philosophy as Linux.

These days, I don't do much more than enjoy using Linux, where once I enjoyed tinkering, learning how to use its own command scripts. It was always hard work, paying attention to that kind of detail, and nowadays easily configurable user interfaces remove the need to tinker unless desperate. The modest amount that has stuck in my brain, however, makes life easier when it comes to diagnosing and troubleshooting problems. 

Before I consigned the broken Windows 7 to Microsoft Hell, I figured out that essential files were missing, deleted either from the boot partition which performed essential start up functions, including linkage to a main partition where most Windows 7 software is installed. This killed access to the recovery partition, making impossible a factory re-set or an independent re-install. There was nothing to suggest hard disk damage by a surge. Files had been irretrievably deleted without which not even a minimal operating system could fire up and facilitate a repair. Whether by accident or sabotage, this shouldn't be possible, but it happens. The world of work is less efficient, less secure as long as vulnerabilities due to poor design remain.

Sure, over the years I may have wasted a lot of time trying to learn things for which I may well be temperamentally and intellectually unsuited, perhaps a bit like my shoddy efforts to learn how to sight read music or speak other languages fluently over the years. Yet, I do feel enriched by these minor efforts to understand what changes are going on in our era and how they work.

For what it's worth, such a waste of time has been lots of fun in a perverse sort of way. I remember when I first got an early version of SUSE Linux to boot to the command line, during our Swiss sojourn, seeing a message displayed when reaching the command line saying something like:

' You are now running Linux. Have lots of fun ! '

Thanks to all those who have contributed to making it so.