2015 — 16 February: Monday
After an evening spent1 slaving over my Linux laptop PC, I've decided — for the sake of my back, if for no other reason — that the sooner I get BlackBeast back up and running with any OS, the better... Desktop PCs should, after all, be worked on at desks.
I've been snaffling and slurping data files off the SSDs like there's no tomorrow (though I find there often is) and tucking them away on the laptop PC "just in case" it2 all goes horribly pear-shaped.
To those...
... who suspected a variety of events leading to my unaccustomed silence for most of yesterday, the prize for guessing correctly the actual reason goes to Big Bro.
And to prove that...
... it wasn't just a fluke, I'm now about to fire up filezilla once again and sling this file over the parapet to Texas. I expect the saga is far from over, but I shan't be resuming battle with recalcitrant bits until I've scooped up some of the sleep that beautifies. G'nite.
I mentioned...
... the "Windows" way of doing things. It's just taken my sleep-befuddled brain over 30 seconds to realise that the only web page file editing I can do from within Filezilla — until I learn the magic spell — is to open the file in the web browser. But opening a file explorer on the same directory offers "Open with..." and gets me into gEdit.
Of course, if it turns out gEdit is incapable of performing column sorts on text files, I will have a problem with my (excuse the grandiose term) "databases" a little further down this road. First things first: this afternoon's job is to get Mint up and running on BlackBeast. Before that comes some further supplies shopping.
Very long pause...
... while I bribed Len with lunch and then sat him down with free-flowing tea in front of a potentially excellent Linux desktop system with a 40" 4K screen lacking only the, erm, requisite bits in the right quantity and sequence. The fact that you can read this is my 'proof' that it (eventually) was coaxed into life, upgraded to Mint 17.1, and hacked3 within an inch of its life to teach it to play nice with the full resolution available to it.
After he'd gone, I set about adding the FileZilla package to be able to lob these words over to Texas from the desktop, just as I already can from the back-aching Laptop PC. Then it will be well past time for an evening meal.
Mercy me! No more Windows patching. Rather fewer lumps of smelly malware. Loads of free software. And the only reason I didn't do this years ago is... sheer laziness. (Though it's fair to say Linux has improved, of late.)
I would comment on the "Rob Lamb" who's dealing from his imposing height as a VP with impending job losses at IBM, but it may not be the same chap I recall as a spotty graduate at Hursley for a summer job in the mid-1980s.
Len adds:
...suffice to say that I discovered (more by luck than judgement) that I could still boot into Mint from the recovery option in grub, and that gave us 4k/60 resolution. I created a hacked grub to use recovery by default (you needed to hit enter twice but boot is not slow) and then examined the grub config more closely. Turns out there is a kernel option called "nomodeset" which is used by recovery but not by the normal startup. Adding this to the normal path restored full function. Since returning home I have discovered that this disables Kernel Mode Switching (by which the kernel can set the video card resolution) which is required by the AMD (and nVidia) binary drivers as they do not use the built-in kernel mechanism for KMS. This is fixable but requires recompilation of the kernel so is left as an exercise for the reader.
Perhaps one day!
Funny that it's precisely eight years since Christa said "No" to my tentative suggestion that I might acquire a 30" Apple display.
If I didn't...
... know any better, I'd start to suspect it's the season of kit failure. The cheap and cheerful satellite receiver I keep tuned to NPR has turned up its castors.
I wonder why...
... neither Epson nor Canon provide drivers under Linux for the models of their scanners that I own? For that matter, I wonder why Simple-Scan and the XSane stuff signally fails to detect my hardware, too. Is it all a ghastly plot? Or are flat-bed colour USB scanners just too old-fashioned? This could well put a crimp in my formerly overly-graphic approach to life :-)
It's all very well the GIMP having a TWAIN-compliant control for image acquisition. That's no use to me if the hardware is digitally invisible, is it? Grrr.
The HP LaserJet works, but not via my USB hub. And the toner's running low, dagnabbit.
On that note, I'm calling it a day. It's been an oddly long one, starting down in Eastleigh this morning. Pretty cold, too. There's a walk (possibly) and a lunch date (certainly) tomorrow — plus a walk on Wednesday, plus a lunch on Thursday. It's all go, you know! I like what I've seen of Linux Mint so far, though (naturally) there are some gripes, omissions, and idiosyncracies. Bit like Life, I suppose.
G'nite.