I want to leave VS Code behind me and move to using Emacs for mostly everything I write in the long haul. Emacs is the editor I use to putter around for any text editing I need to do, but most of my long form writing and coding were done in VS Code. And the more I use it (VS Code, not Emacs), the more uncomfortable I get, no matter how nice and shiny it is. ...
Sometimes, I want to share snippets of what I am reading with my friends. Kindles make it easy, with screenshots. The only issue being I want to share the full length of two pages, like I’d do if I was reading a book. And I need it often enough, that I felt I needed to go figure out some way to do it. It was an easy-ish hack on the mac with printing with Preview. But now, that I use Linux, I wondered if I could do better. ...
Listening to me bitch and moan about the new direction CentOS, CentOS Stream, is now going in, someone sent me this post to tell me why this was a good thing. It’s a lovely post and I agree with most everything the author says. But I do believe, he talks past the main reason folks like me use CentOS. (and the main reason, Rocky Linux now exists.) CentOS came into existence because sci/tech folk wanted a base to build on and became popular, because old harried sysadmins like me wanted to support small shops, who did not have the budget to run servers and wanted to get out of the ever tightening thumb of Microsoft. ...
That long winded message was what greeted me this morning when I did my morning update the computer routine. E: linux-firmware: installed linux-firmware package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 2 Nothing like a bug that sticks in your craw and prevents you from starting the day. And then leads you down that crazy path of figuring out what the error is. And then going down the rabbit hole of realising that this error happened because that went wrong. And then tracking it all down. And then going batshit crazy. And then trying to figure whether updating Linux was a good thing to do in the first place. And then wondering if even installing it was a good thing? And then questioning your life choices in general. ...
Ok, now that I’ve installed CentOS, I decided to install X Windows. And like Rip Van Winkle, I learnt that a lot has changed in 20 years :) A windowing environment was easy to install … sudo yum groupinstall "Gnome Desktop" and the trusty old startx & gave me a Windowing Environment (which I have yet to explore) However, switching permanantly to graphics mode (or vice versa) wasn’t so easy. I wanted to set my command line as the default startup environment and so I went to look for the default runlevel. I coudn’t find it. That’s because they don’t exist anymore. No inittab of old, nothing. ...
I got myself a new pc to learn Linux and do all my crazy experimenting on. What’d I use as my primary OS? Why CentOS, ofcourse. Two reasons … These are long term, slow stable releases, just the way I like my software to be. My last exposure to Linux was Red Hat Linux v5 & 6 way back when1. CentOS looks familiar enough to ease my apprehensions. First step on the way, was getting the OS installed on the machine. Slight hiccup though. I had the ISO and no optical drive! ...