After the XPocalypse: My Journey Back Up the Linux Learning Curve

Okay, so I'm free from Windows XP at last and my former XP box is now running Ubuntu Studio. Thing is, I've been away from Linux long enough that I have to retrace my steps and climb my way back up the learning curve. Because at this point in time I'm faced with urgent things like a fast approaching NaNoWriMo and getting Spanner Book 1 edited for publication, I'll be doing things more slowly this time and focusing on basic commands and the desktop first.

The basic commands: stuff like cp, mv, rm, and wc. For those more familiar with Windows and MS-DOS, cp corresponds to copy, rm to del, and mv to both move and ren or rename. wc counts the number of words in text files. Actually, you can use all these commands in Windows itself if you install the GNU CoreUtils package; this may have an earlier version of the CoreUtils than the one that comes standard with Linux, but the commands work just the same. GnuWin32 has a lot of Windows versions of Linux packages that you can install and use; they may not be updated anymore, but they can still be useful. I installed most of these packages in XP and used them a lot, though the last couple of years not as much as I once did.

Also, there's the package managers standard in Linux distributions. Ubuntu is based on Debian (and Linux Mint, which I installed on a partition on my new computer, is based in turn on Ubuntu), so it uses Debian's package manager, APT. The advantage of package managers is that they make it easier to keep your software updated. I missed that. I also missed the command line tools like apt-get. When the XPocalypse finally gave me the chance, I plunged back in.

The desktop: naturally, it's got differences from Windows. For one thing, there's several you can choose from. I was a huge fan of KDE back when I had Kubuntu on my old and now defunct Gateway. Ubuntu Studio comes with XFCE; the version of Linux Mint I chose for the cute little 64-bit dual-core unit in my home theatre system uses the Cinnamon desktop that is just about as processor-intensive as the Unity desktop that comes with standard Ubuntu, or for that matter the heavy-duty desktops in Windows since Vista. In both my Linux distributions I had to assemble a few desktop components, especially some control panels that were missing. But learning the ins and outs of my chosen Linux desktops is the easy part.

The hard part is, as you'd expect, the deeper aspects of the command line, and the heavy-duty text editors I prefer but haven't been using lately, Vim and Emacs. For this, I'll have to explore deep into the jungles of documentation that surround them. NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, though, so I'll have to take my time with that.

One new thing I'll have to learn is how to use the advanced audio system called JACK (recursive acronym: JACK Audio Connection Kit). I know nothing about it. I need to find documentation and tutorials for it. I want to at least get competent in using it before FAWM, which is only 3½ months away.

Anyway, I'm happy I've reunited with Linux again. I even have Wine to run Windows programs again, and I've even installed a few games (Minesweeper, that pinball game, and Hover from the Windows 95 CD). I'm not starting from scratch, actually. Still, there's a lot of stuff I have to learn before Linux becomes as intuitive to me as Windows.

Surviving the XPocalypse: The Sequel

Since my last post, I've hardly blogged, tweeted, or otherwise been very publicly active on the Net at all. Mostly I've been editing my book and trying to wrestle it into readable form even as it mutated into two different shapes. But I've still been busy, for the last few months in fact, replacing the late lamented Windows XP with Ubuntu Studio Linux on my old P4 box and gradually setting up Windows 7 and Linux Mint on the cute little Core Duo unit in the living room. This is the sequel and update.

Part of the struggle involved a much delayed game of musical hard drives. The new computer came with only an 80GB hard drive, which didn't give me much room considering how much stuff I had on two hard drives on the old box, so I had it upgraded to the current industry standard of 1TB and transferred all my music, videos, and games to it. Then I cloned my 40GB C drive on the P4 box to the 250GB drive, expanded the partition on that to the full drive (except for %GB of Linux swap), transferred much of my old data back to it, replaced the 40GB drive with the 80GB one from the new computer, and installed Ubuntu Studio on that. To do this, I realized I had to buy a USB hard drive enclosure to do the clones and transfers I couldn't do over the network. After that, there was the task of reinstalling programs that is still ongoing.

The important thing is that I no longer have to deal with the dying XP's increasing lack of security. Win7 is much more secure (and still regularly updated), and Linux is more secure still (though I there still is the learning curve). Now if only the rumors of a Windows 10 upgrade being free to Win7 users were true — though I'm not holding my breath...

The bad part: it made me miss 50/90...

I Have Survived the XPocalypse!

If you haven't forgotten me already (that happens), you may have noticed I haven't been online much since the middle of last month. You see, my old computer runs Windows XP. I got a new one running Windows 7 for the living-room home theatre system. It's a cute little thing with a dual-core 64-bit processor that runs XBMC Media Center like a dream, making it my set-top box of choice (I'll still play Blu-Ray discs on the Blu-Ray player, of course). It took me a few weeks to acquire the computer, install all the software I require, and get all the settings just right. That, of course, cut my NaPoWriMo short.

There was a big, big reason for all this: the XPocalypse!

You see, Microsoft ended all support for XP last month. Today was the first Patch Tuesday on which XP didn't get patched. Already the black-hat hackers are starting to exploit the vulnerabilities that will never again get patched. Today is XP's true death day. By getting my new Win7 machine, I have avoided getting caught up in the XPocalypse. Besides, I wanted Win7 anyway; it's just that a Pentium 4 cam't run it right.

And so I've disconnected my old P4 box from the Internet entirely while it still has XP installed. My next priority: to get a network drive I can move my music and videos to. Next step after that: install Ubuntu Studio to what is currently the D drive; I have to move my music, videos, and games because I'll need to reformat that drive to install Linux, which uses a completely different filesystem (EXT4 instead of Windows' NTFS). Since there's Windows programs I want to run under Linux, I'll want to install the Wine compatibility layer, then install whatever compatible Windows updates no longer available for XP. And then I'll be free of Windows XP's corpse forever!

Meanwhile, the former office terminal in my entertainment center is now my Win7 + XBMC "set-top box". In fact, I'm writing this entry on that machine as I speak...

I Return From Isolation, In Time for Social Media Anniversaries

I've been procrastinating editing a lot lately, which kept me offline for about a week or two. Finally I said, "Aw, screw it," and got back on Google+ and Twitter just in time to find out that G+ is two years old today and in two days I'll have been on it for two years, and that I've been on Twitter four years as of yesterday. Significantly, G+ no longer slows down my computer to a crawl and TweetDeck's working for the first time in a month. Synchronicity or just serendipity?

Meanwhile Twitter recently killed off Posterous, exactly as I feared (and cynically predicted) when Posterous sold out, so over the coming month I'll be reposting entries from my now dead Posterous blog here and on the project blog. And I'll start blogging about books and music again, and I'll post photographs and drawings.

The important thing is, I'm back. And I'm relieved.

Relevant Random Facts: The Goddess of Easter Isn't the One You Think

It was a close call. Too bad it didn't fall on April Fool's Day, or I'd have much more fun with it. One of these days I'll get my wish. But first, the relevant random trivia.

I've been hearing that "Easter" is supposed to be a variant of "Ishtar" (the goddess), whose holy day is the spring equinox. But then other facts intrude from the depths of my brain, and I realize I can't agree. For one thing, the holiday's name in German is "Oster", related to the word for east. But there's another goddess, an ancient Indo-European one, whose day also falls on the spring equinox, namely the dawn goddess: Aurora in Latin, Eos in Greek — and Easter in English (Ostara in medieval German).

Argue my point all you want, this is what I learned.

Believe It Or Not, Summer's Actually Come To Seattle

A year or two ago, we were stuck with cold weather in Seattle. We called it "Juneuary". Well, it's the official first day of summer, and guess what? It's hot here. Even the rainy days will get up to the upper 60s for the rest of the month. That's a big improvement over "Juneuary". Even so, at least we on the West Coast don't have to deal with the 100°+ heat wave that's hitting the East Coast...

Culling Blogs I Follow

After some heavy editing of my novel (the second draft of my novel is now up to chapter 4 of the ebook), I decided on a whim to cull some blogs I follow from the Google Friend Connect list I access from my Blogger dashboard. Now, I started this blog, along with my project blog, back in March '08. In the three years since then, a lot of blogs have been orphaned and/or discontinued. I myself have a music blog I haven't updated in two years.

And so I went to my Blogger dashboard and checked the blogs I follow to see which ones are no longer updated. I found several, of course, some of which haven't been updated in more than a year. I even discovered a site among them that no longer exists. So I removed them from my follow list.

I actually learned a valuable lesson from this. If you want more people to follow your blogs, update them more often. Needless to say, it's a good idea to offer valuable content, even if it's just the personal stuff you think can interest other people. Be interesting, update often, and people won't lose interest in you.

The challenge, of course, is always figuring out what to write about...

The World Will Not End Next on October 21

Now that May 21 is now past us with the world once again not ending, that Christian radio magnate Harold Camping refuses to give up and now says he got the date wrong: not May 21, saith he, but October 21. Just ten days before Halloween. One can easily guess what the wags will be wearing when they go trick-or-treating this year.

Like I said last post, these Christian end-of-the-world predictors keep insisting on ignoring those Bible verses which have Jesus plainly stating that not even he knows when he's returning, but only God. And yet they persist. I assume that those of them who are Pentecostal or Charismatic get a "word of knowledge" direct from God that tells them that the world is going to end on such-and-such a date. Mr. Camping felt he didn't need even that, apparently; he relied on numerology. No doubt this attracted cries of heresy from many other Evangelicals.

A personal disclosure is in order here. As a kid, I used to love reading those Jehovah's Witnesses books which spelled out exactly how the world is going to end. I found them lying around the house. Later I would find out that, according to the Jehovah's Witnesses, the world was supposed to end in 1914 and then 1976. But I didn't read those books to know the future. They were the tract versions of Bible-movie special-effects extravaganzas such as The Ten Commandments, only about the end of the world according to the Jehovah's Witnesses. You know that scene where Charlton Heston as Moses parts the Red Sea? Yeah. Like that.

It was these kinds of books, and not just from the Jehovah's Witnesses, that eventually soured me on the whole end-of-the-world thing. The world was supposed to end just like it says in the books, but it never, ever does. The dates always turn out to be wrong, and the predicted events never happen. So I leave that kind of thing to the movies.

Movies like 2012. Speaking of which, the world will not end on December 21, 2012, either. You bet I'll be posting about that non-apocalypse, too.

Thoughts While Reading: Idea for a Thriller Movie Script

Reading: The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock by Charles Derry

So I was reading chapter 5 ("The Thriller of Murderous Passions"), and, sure enough, my muse went into action. Intersecting love triangles? How about a full-blown Love Dodecahedron? Did Claude Chabrol make slick thrillers about repressed French bourgeois exploding into murder and then trying to repress all over again what exploded out? Well, I'm American, not French, so my upper-class intersecting love-hate triangles involve the far more predatory corporate-raider class, with much more pyrotechnical results. Of course, a thriller of murderous passions must include the tropes Love Makes You Crazy, Love Makes You Evil, Murder The Hypotenuse, and other jealousy tropes.

So here's the story concept for the script I have in mind, with the working title "Triple Cross". The players:

• George Sasser, tycoon in the defense industry.
• Evelyne Lee Sasser, his highborn Southern-belle wife.
• Gary Pace, hitman.
• Starla Pace, his sexy and amoral gold-digger wife.
• Hugo Wells, Sasser's chief engineer.
• Roy Larkin, Wells' predecessor turned Sasser's bitterest competitor.
• Lina Strange, exotic dancer and the story's Only Sane Person.

The plot goes roughly like this: Evelyne is sleeping with Hugo, and they decide to hire Gary to kill George. Well, turns out George is sleeping with Starla, and they're plotting to kill Gary. Chaos and nasty plot twists ensue. Roy decides to secretly encourage the others to kill each other and manipulate the stock market so he can scoop up Sasser Engineering at a discount. Lina gets caught in the chaos by being the one all the guys and Starla sleep with and ends up being the one who survives to tell the tale.

Right now this is just a concept and needs to be worked out into a full script. The specifics aren't written in stone, so some things could change as the plot (or my muse's whim) requires. But I do think this sounds interesting enough. Maybe I could even find a way to turn it into a movie myself...

Good Riddance Juneuary: Summer Finally Comes to Seattle

As I noted last entry, the Northwest has been groaning under gray weather this month. We got so sick of it, we called it "Juneuary". Well, one day after the official start of summer, summer has finally arrived in my corner of the country. Juneuary is over, and good riddance.

I've gotten so used to the dreary weather this month that I'm actually not ready for summer yet. It'll take me perhaps a couple weeks of sweating bullets in 75° weather before I adjust to it. Some of my neighbors are glad they can finally go outside in bikinis. I'm just relieved I no longer have to wear a jacket. I'll have to start seriously thinking about increasing my workouts so I won't be embarrassed by my physique...

Now to get out into the good weather. I might even take pictures and post them...

Juneuary!

The sun's out over Seattle right now, kinda. But for most of this month, the Northwest weather has been dark, dreary, cold, and sometimes rainy. Hell, Alaska's had three 75° days, and Seattle's had none! The local news media and the social networks have coined a new term for our unseasonable late-winter weather: Juneuary.

I, for one, never figured I'd be going outside with a jacket on. I thought I'd be sweating bullets like I normally do this time of year. Where'd my early-summer weather go? This is the first day of summer, but it still feels like early spring.

All the weather forecasters are predicting that summer will finally come to the Northwest tomorrow. That's why I wanted to get this post out of the way now. I'm crossing my fingers. Summer had better come soon, or I'll get seriously annoyed. I'm tired of Juneuary.