The Search Continues Part 2
Posted on August 24th, 2007 by Crunchy Chocolate.
Categories: Tech.
So after all this, I still was left without a distro or a working laptop. So, with cd’s ready to burn I headed back over to DistroWatch.com to look for the perfect fit for me.
I checked out Pioneer Linux but it didn’t make me love it. I had tried several others previously, Dreamlinux, Elive, pretty much anything that was .deb based, even if it didn’t have KDE. I tried Mepis again but ran into the same problem of my 2gb SD card not being readable and crashing the system. About this time, a few people suggested I just take the time to try the original, the grandaddy…Debian. I debated it for awhile. I don’t like the fact that there’s no livecd to try out. I had to install it to see what I thought. But what better time when I had to wipe the other installs anyway? And, at least I’d know what it was like. Decision made, I’d give it a whirl.
All the tales of the difficulty of installing Debian haunted me as I went through the process. I found it relatively straightforward. There were a
few glitches, a couple of process that failed and I had to go back and try to reinstall them. Probably because I used the internet based installer and there may have been issues with the downloaded packages. Eventually, it was a success and I was proud that I navigated my first text based Linux install and had weathered the storm of the installation and come out booting up Debian (pure). I have to say, I rather liked it. It felt stable, and clean, if a bit austere. I began the long process of installing additional packages and software. I then began to run into some of the Debian ideals of “free” (as in speech) software. While I love the sentiment and try to use “free” software whenever viable, I also like a system that works. I spent 8-10 hours trying to get things installed and setup. It seemed I was constantly fighting this ghost in my laptop that didn’t want any non free software installed. I need simplicity and ease and this wasn’t it. Not to mention that after loads of work, my wireless still wasn’t working. Probably needed some non-free driver to run my Broadcom wireless card. I finally gave up and decided to look, yet again, for a distro I could live with.
All this talk of using the “original” Debian distro got me thinking. I liked Ubuntu based distros such as Mint and Mepis. Hmmmm, maybe it was worth giving the original a try…
Skating
Posted on August 12th, 2007 by Crunchy Chocolate.
Categories: General.
I’ve always had somewhat of a fascination with skating. I never skated much as a child due to my commitment to dance. It was generally accepted at that time, that “cross training” (or basically any other activity other than swimming) would have negative effects on a dancer. So that was that.
But by the time I reached my late teens, that thought process has begun to change. Needing to add something different to my routine, I got a pair of inline skates. I didn’t have much of a chance to really learn how to use them at that point. We lived in a very hilly area and the driveway was aggregate and far too bumpy to skate on. Within the next couple of years, though, S and I decided to try to learn together – and we did. Skating along a trail in Virginia as we were learning, it didn’t much occur to us that it’s actually more important to learn how to stop than how to get going! As we grabbed a post along the trail to stop ourselves, we noticed the well placed ad for a free skate class teaching newbies like us the basics of inline skating, especially how to stop! We went to the very next class. We both managed decent basic skills, enough to allow us to be crazy enough to skate in downtown Washington DC several times. Minus a few notable scrapes, we lived through the experience.
Several injuries, lots of travel and moving a couple of times (ha!) stopped our skating for several years. Six or seven, to be more precise. However, I’m very excited to say, that recently, I dug our skates out of storage and have started up again. I remember very little of that beginners’ class, unfortunately, but the feel of skating is slowly returning. I debating whether quad skates might not be a better option for us at this point. I’m trying to learn about the differences and similarities and weigh the options. Perhaps, we could trade in our inline for a set of quads? We managed to get great deals on them before and paid very little for a good set of skates (found then “used”, though they were so lightly used, you couldn’t even tell 
). Anyway, I’m having fun and it’s motivated me enough to get moving again after a very, very difficult year and half. Here’s hoping I stay all in one piece!
Scumguard
Posted on August 11th, 2007 by Crunchy Chocolate.
Categories: EcoLife.
I saw a commercial last night that really annoyed me. It’s the antithesis of everything I believe about mindful home management. It’s for a product called “Scumguard”. It’s a large piece of clear plastic (wanna take bets on whether or not it’s the uber harmful PVC otherwise known as vinyl?) that you stick up in your bathtub or shower. Then, instead of simply spraying your shower down and cleaning it, you take down the Scumguard plastic and throw it away. This is a perfect example of irresponsibility in our culture. It takes time to put up and take down this plastic nonsensical scum barrier, it’s expensive ($5.99 for one), it makes your shower/tub look ugly, then it clogs up our landfills when you throw each one away! The company that makes Scumguard has the audacity to make the claim that it’s “non-toxic”, taking no thought of how toxic the manufacturing process is or the long term effects of the plastic breaking down slowly in the landfills leaching who-know-what toxins into the environment. And all of this because our Western culture has become so lazy and lackadaisical that we can’t spray down our showers and wipe them clean. You can use a truly non-toxic cleaner such as Charlie’s Soap All Purpose Cleaner that will take care of any soap scum and hard water build up without any problem. A much more practical solution that is cheaper to use and won’t cause our landfills to grow. It’s safer for the environment as well. So, skip the Scumguard and spend your money on a good non-toxic cleaner that will last many times longer and not cause landfill problems for future generations.
BTW, I emailed Scumguard to see what it’s manufactured out of. It’ll be interesting to see if/what they reply. I’ll post an update if I get a response.
Let there be light!
Posted on August 11th, 2007 by Crunchy Chocolate.
Categories: EcoLife.
In our ongoing commitment to living more “earth-friendly” and inspired afresh by the recent Live Earth Concerts, we committed to change at least 4 regular incandescent light bulbs in our house to low energy compact florescent. This actually took at bit of thought at first because all of the lights we use most (i.e. lamps, etc) were already using these little marvels. However, we stretched our brains and came up with 21, yep, 21 light bulbs that we changed over to florescent.
There are a more and more types of light bulbs that are now available in an equivalent florescent version. These include of course the “normal” style bulbs, the bathroom “vanity” type globes (we changed out 5 of these!!!), outdoor anti-bug type light bulbs, candle style bulbs (like those used for chandelier fixtures), small spotlight and even florescent replacements for those halogen track and kitchen type fixtures!!! Very cool. Many localities offer rebates or discounts on the purchase of compact florescent bulbs and we’ve found great deals at “club” warehouses such as Costco.
So we proudly (much more than) fulfilled that part of our pledge for Live Earth and are saving money and the environment. I encourage you to take a look around your house and try to replace even a few of your most used light bulbs to florescent ones. It’s a simple change and one that *will* save you money. You can’t get much better than that. Together, we can make a difference and take better care of this amazing earth we’ve been given.
The Search Continues Part 1
Posted on July 16th, 2007 by Crunchy Chocolate.
Categories: Tech.
Disillusioned by my less-than-hoped-for experience with Sabayon, I continued my search for a distro that I could call home. Having spent over a week with a partially working computer that I gave every spare minute trying to get working again, I found myself needing to wipe both Sabayon and Linux Mint off my machine and start over. Though it was somewhat frustrating to say the least to have my computer screwed up and unusable, there was a certain freedom in starting with a clean slate and, in the end, I kind of enjoyed it.
I decided to try out some other distros. PCLinuxOS was one. I figured I *had* to. After all, it’s been at the top of the DistroWatch.com list for a
couple of months or more. My brief experience with PCLOS left me feeling quite apathetic about it really. It was one of the worst distros I tried for hardware detection and it just sort of left me cold. I couldn’t find anything that impressed me enough to work through the hardware issues and learning (yet another) package management system, this time for .rpm’s. It just didn’t feel like “home” to me. So I moved on.
Of course, Linux Mint would be in the running and I’ve liked it so well, it was a near shoo in for the prize. I was excited because there was supposed to be a new KDE version coming out soon. However, a quick trip to the forums over at LinuxMint.com found quite a commotion stirring. After hearing repeatedly that a KDE version of Mint would be forthcoming and maintained in the future, Clem had decided to abandon officially developing any KDE versions and turned it over to the community. Needless to say, there were varying opinions on the merits of this decision. I respect Clem’s decision because he wants to streamline his efforts and KDE really isn’t in his vision for the future Mint. However, I wouldn’t be truthful if I didn’t say that I was disappointed. I think that the community KDE Linux Mint will be great but without the official development backing it, I worry that it won’t be maintained and I want a distro wth longevity. So, after much internal debate and with great sadness, I said goodbye to Mint and moved on.
By this point, I had decided to stick with a Debian based distro. I like the package management, I feel at home using it. So this narrowed my choices. With Linux Mint out of the running and KDE being a must for me, I continued my search…
A week with Sabayon Linux
Posted on July 14th, 2007 by Crunchy Chocolate.
Categories: Tech.
I figured I should give an update on my distro-hopping activities of the past several weeks.
I did indeed try Sabayon Linux 3.4 Loop 3. It’s a beta version so a few hiccups here and there are to be expected. First of all, it must be said that the hardware detection in Sabayon is second to none. On both the livecd and the subsequent install, it was nearly flawless in its ability to correctly detect and setup my laptop screen (which at 1400×900 has given many a distro a challenge) and, perhaps even more impressively, setup my (dreaded) Broadcom 43xx wireless card without any help from me whatsoever!!! The developers over at Sabayon should get some sort of gold star for that one. The distro’s artwork is beautiful and the system is very complete - you get a lot of programs installed with it, totaling around 14gb, to be more specific. You won’t need to install much on this distro but when you do, you remember that it’s built on Gentoo, for good or for bad. The SUSE style menu is great and I missed it when I was trying other distros. I love the fact that all the apps, the kernel, basically everything is “bleeding edge”. If you like to have the latest and greatest, the folks over at Sabayon think like you. Things aren’t all rosy in Sabayonland, however. There areseveral things I don’t like. The most glaring, for me, became the Gentoo base. Coming from Debian package management, I just didn’t care for Portage and compiling from source. I know Portage/Emerge is a great system with numerous benefits including avoiding “dependancy hell” but it wasn’t for me. Second thing I had issues with was how Sabayon kinda took over my system (once I had installed it, that is). Suddenly, my home page had changed to SabayonLinux.org, and very strange things happened to my other Linux install, Linux Mint, that I never was able track down. The result was that I wasn’t ever able to get Mint to boot up again and I had to completely reformat that partition and start over. Also, Sabayon didn’t find Linux Mint during installation and I ended up having to manually edit my GRUB menu. I suppose none of these are complete dealbreakers on their own but all together, it gave me a feeling that Sabayon wanted to be my *only* Linux distro and it doesn’t play with others. That irked me. The single thing that probably frustrated me the most, however, was the clock. Yes, that’s right. The simple little clock in the bottom corner of my screen. In Sabayon Linux, it was *never* the correct time. And it wasn’t off by a set amount of time. It was random and it changed, often. Sometimes it would be 23 minutes late, other times, 5 hours and 7 minutes late. Then, it would be fast, again by odd amounts that you could never count on. I tried and tried and tried and tried to fix it. I literally spent hours online trying different remedies and tricks, searching (and posting) on forums, scouring wikis, then searching some more. I was on IRC channels getting help from experts. Nothing would work. It would always end up screwed up again. To make matters worse, it somehow took over the system clock so that my other Linux distro (which I subsequently installed after hours of trying to get Mint to boot up again) started having the wrong time as well. To add insult to injury, I finally had to *gasp* boot into Windows (and yes, the clock was now wrong there too) to get the system clock synched with the atomic clock and finally get Windows and my second Linux install sorted out with their clocks. I never did get the clock fixed in Sabayon. All the issues above left me rather disappointed overall and I finally wiped it off my hard drive. I realize that it was a beta version but something as simple as a clock should be working, even on a beta, IMHO. Having said that, Sabayon will remain in my Linux CD collection because it’s excellent hardware detection as a livecd makes it an invaluable resource for rescuing a system in trouble.
*Sigh* That was an experience!
So my search for the “perfect” Linux distro continues…
Linux
Posted on June 16th, 2007 by Crunchy Chocolate.
Categories: Tech.
I just wanted to announce that I have made the leap to Linux and now run it as my primary operating system. I’m very proud of that. 
Along my journey, I’ve come to find out I’m a bit of a “distro hopper”. I love to check out the new latest and greatest offerings in the Linux world. My current fav is Linux Mint KDE. It’s based on Ubuntu but IMHO, is much improved. It’s easier to setup and the little touches that Clem (the lead developer) adds are the best. I also love the fact that the artwork tends to be modern and a bit abstract. It’s worth checking out.
I started with Mepis and actually really liked it. If it weren’t for the fact it couldn’t recognize my 2gb sd card in my media card reader, I’d probably still be using it (strangely, it recognized my 256mb and 1gb cards just fine…go figure). Anyway, S still runs it and seems as satisfied with it as he can be with any OS 
However, I have my eyes on Sabayon Linux. I tried it once and it didn’t recognize my screen res the first time so I kinda skipped over it. But I like a lot of things about it and now that I’m a *little* (stress little) more familiar with Linux, I might give it another look when version 3.4 comes out (hopefully in just a few more weeks ). The best part for me is the fact that it’s entirely bleeding edge. I love that. Maybe if I could get it working, I wouldn’t hop around so much since they seem to have fast release cycles and always include the latest and greatest technology. I’ll just have to get over being scared of its Gentoo base…
If you want to check out these or any other of the myriads of Linux distros, hop on over to Distro Watch and explore to your heart’s content.
The pronunciation of a djembe
Posted on June 16th, 2007 by Crunchy Chocolate.
Categories: General.
I’ve been around a lot of good musicians and all of them pronounce the instrument name Djembe as “jem bay”. In fact, took me forever to figure out the correct spelling!
But lately, I’ve been around a couple of people who persistently call it a “d-jem bay” and that really threw me off. I mean, I thought I knew how to say it right, you know? So off to the web I go and visit our friend, Wikipedia, to settle the question.
You can read it for yourself, but suffice it to say, I came out vindicated
Aggregation
Posted on April 23rd, 2007 by Crunchy Chocolate.
Categories: General.
I decided to try to aggregate (love that word) my few blog posts from Blogger, LJ and Myspace to here. I figured it was worth “owning” my own domain so here we are. I’m using WordPress (which I have before) to manage this blog and it’s just great. It’s only improved since the last time I used it. I’ve faithfully preserved the date and time of the postings which is why some “old posts” have only just shown up. Maybe I can find a sense of balance in this craziness…
That sounded very zen. Oh well, I like zen.
A Changing Atmosphere
Posted on April 22nd, 2007 by Crunchy Chocolate.
Categories: Spirituality.
Well, we’re beginning a series of informal meetings today to seek God’s Presence. It’s a simple act of obedience but we hope to see good things come from it. We can already see and feel changes happening. It’s like the atmosphere is being charged with a peaceful electricity. Very cool. My expectations are beginning to increase.