Awesome, thanks for mentioning it. 
I was starting to hate (the default Gnome menu system of) Pop_OS. Much better. The “Super” key still gets me to the place that clicking “Activities” used to get me to.
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I hope you get better soon. I’ve had some kind of stomach flu myself, that’s just clearing up now…
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It seems to be clearing up… gain. It’s been one of those colds that alost gets better, then jumps back… perhaps because I think it’s gone too soon.
Stomach flus can be nasty, I had it last year and don’t wish to repeat THAT experience. Get well real soon.
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- Installed a NAS through the RP4 for a little storage on the home network
– Got a pretty good deal by price matching an Amazon deal on a 6TB solution (storage is so cheap these days) - Messed around with gnome a bit on Pop!_OS, changing themes and whatnot
- Installed Arc menu to rid the Applications overview
- Switched to zsh. Fun shell!
–Installed the powerlevel10k theme. - Learned a little bit about the default configured system accounts and a bit of history of package managers in the Linux class I’m taking
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- In the Linux Admin class I’ve been taking for a a little over a month, got to explore topics including:
– Storage management, partitioning, and mounting filesystems
– Archiving and backup solutions
– Ownership and permissions
– Hard Links and Soft Links (learned a fair share of the inode)
– Working with the Linux Kernel, drivers, hotplug vs. coldplug devices - Tried to install nextcloud next to the pihole on my RP4, didn’t go well. I think I’m going to get a seperate RP4 for a nextcloud server.
– As a result of trying to get nextcloud on the RP4:
— the admin console for pihole was inaccessible
— webmin was also inaccessible
– Removed the nextcloud installation and associated libraries and apache2 which remedied the broken aftermaths
- Began an Arch Linux install on a VM and got pretty far… until I ran out of space on the VDI for the VM. However, what I did get done was very doable and not as daunting as I perceived
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Looks like my Debian 10 is doing a pretty big upgrade as I type, though the Debian website isn’t reporting a point upgrade yet…
Edit:
Debian website reported 10.2 had been released, about a minute ago - good news 
I’ve added few custom colors for tags in task warrior and that’s pretty much it, as I don’t have much time and time I do have I’m gonna spend playing new Pokemon.
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My crusty old yadifa DNS servers (on Debian 9, which I don’t want to do a dist-upgrade on) needed an update. I hand-installed the latest version from tarball. This was to make (false-positive) error messages that looked like this go away (for the recipient), when I sent email:
PS: Even though I’m continuing to use yadifa on Debian 9 (because I finally got it working right after much effort), I don’t recommend it to anyone new to serving DNS. You should probably just go with BIND9, as ugly as it is.
Whatever yadifa promises you in ease of configuration, you will likely get heavily taxed later on in the high cost of administration efforts. Why? You will highly likely get sucked into hand-installing the newest version, like I just did.
The Debian package in Debian 9 (which is very stale), is effectively worse than useless: a buggy decoy to lure you into a quagmire of hacked-together administration, after such hand installation, to get it to work just right (especially with respect to email, like in avoiding the error message above). It would only be worth it for Debian to even have a yadifa package whatsoever, if they can always keep it up to date, like they do for, say, Firefox (as it’s a crucial package to keep very fresh).
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My linux almost two-weeks have been pretty eventful as far as experimenting with VMs goes, about which I post in more detail elsewhere.
This week though, one of my aged laptop’s monitor’s failing, so I’ve had to fall back on an even more aged laptop for now at least. I’m finding on this that Falkon as mentioned on the DL podcast is doing a sterling job of keeping me online for basic browsing when the security and privacy of the heavier-weight Firefox isn’t required.
So basically, my Linux week has been trying out KaOS. Which for those that dont know is solely focused on QT and 64 bit apps and builds only. It has been an interesting experience so far. I can basically do all the stuff I need barring gaming (damn you steam, and gog games seem not to work either)
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I bought a new SSD (1 TB) , cloned my main system (Mint Mate) and installed Debian 10 GNOME on the old SSD.
Currently in my virtual box : Kubuntu 19.10, AntiX, Arch Linux, Fedora 31
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I was asked by a Friend to upgrade her daughters laptop to Windows 10 from W7 and install an SSD at the same time, AND Dual boot it with Linux Mint 19.2 Mate.
Considering it’s a few years since Microsoft supposedly stopped the free upgrade path from W7/8 I was still able to do it. After getting W10 upgraded I swapped out the 500Gb Spinner for a 250Gb SSD, did a clean install of W10 and then did the Linux install. As you may figure the Linux side was flawless but the Windows 10 update broke Windows, luckily I was able to do a system restore to before the update and it’s working again. Found out that the November update this week has been very problematic so If you do need to run a Windows system steer clear of the update manager for a week or so until Microsoft have admitted there is a problem and fixed it.
When I was handing back the laptop I was speaking to Paula, and she doesn’t want to use the new subscription service for MS Office so was planning to keep a Win7 install, she doesn’t do anything complex with macro’s in office or excel but does need to send completed documents to other people and was worried about formatting going wrong. We had a discussion about converting documents to PDF format with LibreOffice and emailing these so she would be sure that they arrive exactly as she created them. She home teaches and has to send the children’s work to external validators, so this also saves in having to print them off, so she can scan them to PDF before emailing. So another case for open source software for the win.
I do like it when you can give people solutions to problems that were so simple to fix.
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My Linux as been mostly good but my onepluss one running ubuntu touch phone is still not very well but have a second one as back up.
Otherwise everything as worked well with nothing breaking on my laptop running KDE.
Highlight for me was ordering my pinephone.
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I hope you kept the “the 500Gb Spinner” and mabe put it in a USB 3 caddy as an external USB drive. Handy for a while to get the Windows 7 files back and after that useful for those regular backups we all make… don’t we?
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My week has been one of catching up several machines with updates, I got behind as I’ve been sticking to one machine mainly for a while.
I was going, as of the last BDLL, try and do whatever Ubuntu flavour was their challenge, but didn’t get around to it. Now I can’t be bothered. To be truthful I have no interest in the Ubuntus, I’m glad they are there, they do good work, serve a lot of people well, but they don’t appeal to the grumpy old curmudgeon that is me.
As I said, I’ve been spending most of my time with 1 machine, it has 4 distros on it’ 2 SSDs, but I’ve almost exclusively just used 1 of those 4 - MX Linux for the win!
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Hi @TerryL yes I gave them back the 500Gb spinner and advised them to get an external usb3 caddy, it also has the original Win10 upgrade on it so if things went south with a windows update you could stick it back into the PC and have a running system again.
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@TerryL I loved MX19 when I tested it last month for Distrohoppers Digest. I’m on Ubuntu 19.10 Gnome 3 this month and it took me ages to configure it to my liking, not for me long term though. I f I was to go back to Ubuntu after all these years as my main distro it would have to be either Mate, xfce or Plasma. More likely one if the first 2, but I hear good things about KDE these days so it’s on the list as a DE to test along with a distro for the podcast.
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Of the Ubuntus I think Xubuntu would be the one I’d go for, I REALLY like Xfce. I actually like Mint’s MATE implentation better than Ubuntus (or did last time I tried), sorry Wimpy, too much customisation need to get it how I like my desktop, despite all the options.
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Last week I installed ArcoLinuxD and installed AwesomeWM. I really like tinkering and learning the basics.
This week I’ve installed Arch on a VirtualBox, cloned it, and then installed AwesomeWM, and then I cloned that. Now I’m trying and learning to get a basic install of Awesome the way I like it with all the themes, shortcuts, and all the extras I like without using an Arch derivative.
I can tell it’s gonna be a long experiment.
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Well right now my Linux week has mostly been testing out new microphones for a company that sent me a few to test out for review. So that has been an interesting experience thus far. Those videos will be out in the next week or so.
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