2016 — 17 February: Wednesday
It turned out to be trivially easy to fit the two 8GB sticks of DDR4 memory, and only slightly trickier to fit the 512GB SSD. Intel's NUC is a masterclass in cramming stuff into a small volume. Though there's a neat gap just waiting to have a slower (SATA III interface) 1TB SSD fitted should that ever turn out to be needed. Heck, even clipping the UK plug on to the power block was easy, once I'd retrieved the folded instructions from the bin and re-perused them a bit more carefully.
So, now for the really difficult bit.1
I need to haul the 34" Dell screen forward, swivel it round, and try to work out where the, erm, Dell, the mini-DisplayPort socket is. I also need to sort out both a second keyboard and a second mouse temporarily, until I've worked out how to use the USB switchbox that Brian has very kindly donated to the cause for my long term use. I hate having to keep a pair of keyboards and a pair of mice knocking around. Their leads invariably tangle. And you always end up typing something on the wrong keyboard, or clicking the wrong mouse.
Since I can't...
... put my fingers on the USB stick with my Linux ISO files on it (for some unaccountable reason) I suspect it would probably be safer if I got me a bit of that sleep stuff first. "Tomorrow", as Christa always used to remind me, "is another day." You're quite right, my love! Besides, my upper and lower eyelids have developed a powerful magnetic attraction for one another.
I also note that...
... the feather warcast for later today now looks most unpromising for any prospect of a walk other than a very wet and very cold one. A "Yellow Early Warning of Snow"? Who needs that? Good job I have this new toy to play with. G'nite.
The 7 o'clock news...
... does little to increase the total of human happiness. And my subconscious tells me I will do better to dig out my second screen — the 27" Asus — and set it up temporarily within easy reach of my network switch roughly where the massively-underused laptop spends its days hibernating, and (I assume) dreaming of electric sheep. I still need to move accumulated "stuff" first, but then I need to do that in any case. If only to get at the nest of glass-topped tables on which to put the screen, the NUC, the keyboard and that Bluetooth mouse I bought recently.
Sweet!
I was a little distracted from the warning message — about far too much sugar in drinks I never buy, in places I rarely or never visit — by the warning message at the top of this charity's website:
And no, I have no idea where that surplus pixel or two came from either!
Remember those...
... "word association" questions in psychometric tests? "Cat" is to "fish" as "raven" is to "writing desk", or whatever? (Relatively harmless, surely, when you compare them against sh1t like the so-called "Porteus Maze" originally developed to "prove" the superiority of white Australians over their aboriginal counterparts.) Well, I've come up with a new one. I was researching alternatives2 to Linux Mint for quite a while yesterday.
Hence my new association: "Debian" is to "Mint" as "Arch" is to "Manjaro".
I was already well aware of Arch, but had been a bit put off by what was widely regarded as its "geeks only" heritage. Even despite the often excellent documentation to be found on its Wiki. (To register a new Wiki account with them you first have to submit to their "captcha" test from an up-to-date Arch system, for example!) Now, after reading a dozen reviews (courtesy of Distrowatch) I've downloaded the current ISO of the Xfce variant of Manjaro. But I will refrain from any experiments until I've first bedded the more familiar Mint down on the NUC.
I blame...
... last Saturday's "Record review" for my current background listening:
As for the "drama" I caught after all the "drama" on Woman's Hour while I was slicing and dicing my next set of root veg for my crockpot... I need another cuppa. I've led such a quiet life, it seems.
Today's helpful suggestion: take Manjaro out for a spin in a VirtualBox first. Now why didn't I think of that? Idiot! Much more fun than clearing physical space in the living room, too.
Sobering to realise...
... that this series finished transmission...
... just a couple of months before Christa came to the UK for her job at Royal Holloway College. The rest, as they say, is history. Speaking of which, it's already a decade since I first saw young Mr Fry's two-part exploration of his long-undiagnosed "bipolarity", so the ten-years-on follow-up is currently downloading in glorious 1280x720p as I type. Those Gothic Voices (in my head?) are just winding down, too. It's a 71-minute CD. Glorious music. But not, perhaps, quite to everyone's taste.
Blimey!
That took all of two minutes or so. I installed Virtualbox, remembered I then had to type "virtualbox" in a terminal to kick it off, defined an Arch Linux system called "Manjaro", pointed VB to the Manjaro ISO I still had on my SSD, and off we went. Didn't take long — reading the ISO from SSD is much faster than from an optical drive, which is how I last ran VB quite a while ago, when first trying out a Mint system under Windows 7 in the early days of BlackBeast Mk II. Sadly, my little test drive soon convinced me that Manjaro doesn't really bring anything new to the table. It's just another Linux, after all.
Need food! Now! But the pre-requisite space clearing is done. If not dusted. Next stop: NUC.
Painless
I invited Len over to ride shotgun while watching me put Mint 17.3 on the NUC. It's now up and running, driving the 27" Asus screen perfectly at full resolution via HDMI. Its Intel Visual BIOS3 had not disabled the m2.SSD but shows no signs (so far) of recognising the local wi-fi. Perhaps I must disconnect the wired LAN first. This stupidly tiny NUC is delectably fast, essentially silent, runs cool, and burns far fewer watts than BlackBeast. There's some look'n'feel tailoring still to do, but it's nice to have a decent capacity spare PC up and running as a hot stand-by. It took less than five minutes to put Mint on, which reflects well on the incredibly fast SSD and RAM.
I fear, therefore, I shall not now be forking out three or four times as much for the Israeli PC I had half an eye on.
Spot the PC!
The Linux Kernel I loaded today (with the completely fresh installation of Mint 17.3 on the NUC) is more recent than the one that was on board when I upgraded BlackBeast Mk III from 17.2 (as I did). So now BB is actually "running behind" its tiny companion.