📷 Here's a fun photo from last year's 'Critical Mass' book tour. After wrapping up a wonderful book signing event at Books Inc. (Palo Alto), friends and fans joined up to carry on the night. It was a great evening full of lively conversation and stories to share.
*Photo: Gavin, Daniel, Kevin, Jim, Jordy, Joseph, Michelle, Mark
I've setup a few installs of Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) for family, friends, and myself. I really like it! Mint's Cinnamon desktop comes with sensible defaults, is easy to customize, and intuitive to use for new and old Linux users alike.
MintyFresh is my setup script for the latest release of LMDE 6 aka "Faye". It is ideally run after the first boot into a fresh LMDE install:
I like to create encrypted storage space to hold the contents of my home directory that is separate from the root filesystem. This makes it easier if I decide to re-install Linux on the target system while preserving user data.
LMDE offers an "expert-mode" install option that is considerably more flexible in handling a custom partition layout of disk storage. I use it to create encrypted partitions for root and home (no LVM):
My copy of "The New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen" by @SexyCyborg has arrived with "Shenzhen speed"!
The city is an amazing place, and looking at the book's maps of Hua Qiang District and reading the captions makes me want to return for another look and play with some electronic components!
@glynmoody Your articles and especially "Rebel Code" introduced me to Linux and this whole idea of Libre/Open Source. Thanks for providing the new book as a downloadable DRM-free epub. Looking forward to reading!
"Every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion."
-- Hermann Hesse
If you've promised yourself that this is the year you'll be learning #Python, then I have great news for you: You can!
Check out my free, 15-hour course, "Python for non-programmers," at https://buff.ly/3uuDSWZ. Many thousands of people have taken it, gaining a valuable (and fun!) skill.
I've been on a bit of an Alphaville kick this week ... and just love this remake of a song I probably last heard in the '80s. "Summer in Berlin" is one of their more obscure songs but its now my favourite!
"Open your eyes and let the Sun break in for a while ..."
Interesting enough that I just installed Chimera on my test Thinkpad with a setup that uses LUKS encryption with LVM on top. I'm curious to learn more!
"If everyone is happy with this book, I’d like to try another- more on the manufacturing end, how to bring a product to market at Shenzhen Speed, but only if there’s interest."
"Ingenuity may forever change the way NASA, other space agencies, and eventually private companies explore and settle the Solar System. The program did so by using commercial, off-the-shelf parts... Ingenuity uses a 2015-era smartphone computer chip, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor. It has a mass of half an ounce ... [and is] 100 times more powerful than everything JPL has sent into deep space, combined" ...
Using pyenv makes it easy to install and switch between multiple versions of Python on a Linux system. It also enables a clean separation between the Python installed by the system (required for its maintenance and to satisfy package dependencies), and other Python versions and libraries installed by the user:
"Japan is about to attempt one of the hardest tricks in space exploration: a soft landing on the moon ... and if all goes well, a robot designed by the company that invented Transformers will rove the lunar surface."
@thindil Yes ... I imagine Firefox would be a beast of a compile on a 10-year old Thinkpad!
I won't be continuing onward to BLFS, though. I'm doing LFS as a straightforward learning exercise in the basic building blocks of a Linux system and compiling software. And for that purpose its proving to be illuminating.
With the release of Debian 12, I decided that - instead of my usual setup of Xorg + Openbox - I would explore Wayland and a different desktop environment.
After making the switch to Sway and using it on both Linux and FreeBSD I find myself liking it very much!
Sway quickly gets you 90% towards a usable desktop. Its that 10% where you're crafting your own desktop just the way you like it that takes some experimenting!
After performing a few installs of FreeBSD, these are my personal notes of steps taken and choices made. A distilled, short and sweet version of Chapter 2 in the FreeBSD Handbook.
Hardware used is a Thinkpad T480s with 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and Intel integrated ethernet/wireless/gpu. Architecture is 'amd64'.
There is always more than one way to do it. This is mine. 🙂
