2016 — 5 August: Friday
A nice, sunny start.1 The tea is hot. The ginger nut eminently dunkable. Hardly any noise from the motorway. Just a few hints of the presence of those winged rats some people call "pigeons". I predict a little expotition at some point.
Reading...
... an interesting piece on "Jheronimus Bosch" — yes, that's the spelling — has (predictably) tempted me. In this case, the Gary Schwartz book caught my eye.
In 1979 I bought three identical, large-format copies of John Rowlands' book "The Garden of Earthly Delights" from Bibliophile. It simply reproduced the artist's most well-known painting, page by page. I set about carefully dismembering two of the books to re-assemble the complete image (a bit like a jigsaw puzzle) on a very large piece of hardboard. Alas, when Christa realised where that little artwork project was heading I was (probably sensibly) forbidden to display it "in the house", which left only the garage, of course.
Reading...
... a very sensible piece by one of our "great and good" on the Brexit fiasco:
Not that too many people are keen to hear that message. I'm reminded of a scene in "The West Wing" where the President, having been forced to watch daytime TV for a couple of hours, says "please tell me these people can't vote".
Step away...
... from that PC with your hands in the air! Now, would you mind telling me just what in tarnation you've been doing to that poor, defenceless, little i5 NUC?
Nuking it, that's what.
If the speediness of Linux LXLE (a respin of Lubuntu, 16.04.1 LTS) is any guide, after a surprisingly pain-free installation, I might even keep it. [Pause] But not, I fear, having seen its confused state — nearly as confused as dear Mama was in her later years — on waking from hibernation after I'd gulped a late lunch. Nope. I have seen the light. And the light clearly says "Linux Mint 18 before all others." On it goes.
Just like slipping on comfy shoes! Next, I shall see how I get on with Mint 18 on Skylark.
Pah!
It's almost reassuring, says he, as he returns from an emergency mission into Soton... to see that Technology Towers is maintaining its proud tradition of only allowing the hapless proprietor to have a maximum of two working Linux systems at any one time. If I didn't know better (and I clearly don't) I would begin to suspect that support for my spiffy little New Format m2 SSDs is a little iffy. Mint 18 installation was ticking along nicely until it reached that last (but horribly necessary) bit involving writing the boot loader.
Fatal error. (Plus a terse apology.)
Can't be written in the location specified (which, I might add, is whatever location Mint itself had chosen by default). Nor can it be written anywhere else on the damn' thing. It did offer to let me write it on the USB stick I was loading it from, but that didn't strike me as a smart idea.
More tea is clearly required.
Nearly there!
The m2 SSD in Skylark is currently its only hard drive. This is because several months ago I had to cannibalise Skylark's second 240 GB SSD and put it in the NUC to solve exactly the same troublesome boot loader issue that I stubbed my toe on last time. Now, I didn't know how badly I might have messed up Skylark's m2 SSD2. So, assuming the worst, I nipped down into Soton to pick up a SanDisk Ultra II 480GB SATA SSD. That's quite sufficient for holding Skylark's initial Mint 18 system. And with Skylark back up and running I could then sort out the m2 SSD... and possibly even try to re-install Mint 18 on it.
Len had outlined his UEFI-related hypothesis, and pointed me to a fairly abstruse section of the Arch Wiki for further reading. Thus, for my second installation attempt, I popped the Sandisk into Skylark, booted from the installation USB, fired up its GPartEd utility, pointed it to the Sandisk, and partitioned and formatted it. Only then did I click on "Install to your hard drive".
Result? I now have three working Linux systems, with Mint 18 on Skylark and the NUC, and BlackBeast still running Mint 17.
Here is...
... Skylark's new /home alongside the unmounted 512GB Block Device that is the currently unused m2 SSD. I shall be scrutinising that more closely when I'm a bit less tired:
I've just switched over to the recommended nVidia proprietary driver for my GTX950 graphics card. Next, I have to work out how to get Skylark to reboot without having to go into the BIOS each time. (A minor inconvenience since, in general, I boot only once a day.)
I very much enjoyed the Petrushka Prom, by the way.