BMN New Hard Drive & Now Debian Linux

Brian's Morning Newsletter
Monday, February 13 2012

Partly Cloudy / Wind High

Now Clear

Temperature 31.0 °F Feels Like 23 °F Precip 20%

Wind: From W at 23 mph Humidity: 50% UV Index: 4 Moderate

Sunrise / Set 6:50 AM 5:40 PM

Moon Waxing Gibbous

Good Morning

We've had some pretty whacky weather this weekend. Luckily it contained a little rain and snow so we're real happy. I am also quite happy about the progress I've made with this computer and I've got a half dozen boring techno-photos to prove it.

Above is the way the BMN-PC looked before we went into the weekend. A couple of hard drives to choose from. Ron suggested I use the faster 7200RPM Hitachi. I tried it several times, but couldn't get it to do anything except make unsettling clicking noises. Trying things multiple times seemed to be my modus operandi this weekend.

BMN-PC-After-Cooling-tunnel- Not really, the above image shows the space left after removing the floppy drive. There actually was a purpose to my madness, I mean other than creating another rabbit hole of complications. There is a cage behind this rectangular opening which holds three drives. I believe the two hard drives plus the floppy being packed in so tightly caused the hard drives to run hot. I'll go dig through my boxes of ten year old computer parts  and try and find a cover plate to fill this space. I'll also drill some ventilation holes in the plastic in the hopes of keeping the system cool.

BMN-PC-After-front You don't see too many of these horizontally situated PCs anymore. Back home my desk had a place made specifically to hold this old style PC, so I kept rebuilding this computer over a number of years. It fits pretty well in the custom alcove Jack build for dad.

BMN-PC-After-guts. Of course this used to be a pretty hot computer. Now it falls into the "It's better than most five year old PCS," but that is about it. I try to live by my Facebook motto "Work Less, Need Less," however lately, I'm feeling a bit needy. Many of the new PCs come with four gig of memory. This bad-boy has-been (I mean the PC, smartasses) has a single one gig memory chip.

Just down and behind the multicolored cables is the memory chip. There is room for another chip if I feel the need to beef the PC up, but I think it really comes down to how I feel. The bottom line is that this computer does what I need it to do: Compose and publish my newsletter every day. I'll feel better after I get the cover back in place and don't have to look at all the dust bunnies circulating hither and yon powered by a half dozen micro fans.

BMN-PC-After-before-too . I like it, a picture of the computer before a 20 hour makeover being manipulated on a brand new Linux operating system.

This is debian Linux, kind of the grandfather of modern Linux distros. Believe me and you might better if you saw the red in my eyes, that debian is the third distribution of Linux I installed on my BMN PC this weekend.

I started with Kubuntu on Saturday morning. Actually it wasn't my choice.  It was the first CD I found when I walked over to our house looking for a bootable Linux CD after trying unsuccessfully several times to get the Mint Linux (previously installed on my netbook)to boot off a USB device.

That wasn't terribly frustrating. Booting from a USB device is a fairly new phenomenon, and I did get the PC to boot from the thumb drive, but it never started Mint properly, so I bailed before spending too much effort.

Anyway Kubuntu got the new hard drive formatted and setup to boot. I tried a few things in Kubuntu, but that version is as old as the hard drive I just pulled out, indeed that CD was probably one I had used five years ago when last I dealt with a hard drive crash.

Once I had the system up and could get to my other hard drive where several distros are stored I made a DVD from a beefy Mepis Linux ISO file, something like a one gigabyte file size. I really did not want to download another distro, so I gave Mepis a good run-through.

I decided to try something else when I couldn't locate and install Mozilla Thunderbird and the final straw occured when my camera wouldn't mount properly.

Since the PC was now up and running I went online and read several reviews of Linux distros.

I settled on debian as it seemed most closely matched to Ubuntu 10 I had on the failing hard drive and maybe if I was luckier than usual I could copy over the home folder with all my settings and the transition would less painful, ha ha, too late for that.

It took hours to down load debian. One thing different with this installation is, it didn't create a live CD like most distros do, it just started installing itself. I'm glad I didn't have any data on the drive yet. I suppose it sort made the decision for me.

I found out that debian did not have Mozilla Thunderbird either. That seemed a bit more than a coincidence so I read a little more and learned that the Mozilla and debian which Mepis is flavored after as well had some kind of falling out several years ago. This part is kind of funny. Long story shortened: Mozilla made debian rebrand Firefox and Thunderbird. They came up with "Ice-Weasel & Ice-Dove."

You get it right? Well I didn't, I just thought what a crap OS if it doesn't have Firefox and Thunderbird. I just didn't know what to look for.

Confucius says "The trick to success is reading."

Anywho, I've got the BMN mailing list installed in Ice Dove and it appears to be working fine.
I would still like to do away with this BMN emailing from two places. quite a few of you went to the The Outfit and re-registered, thank you thank you thank you. I am watching what happens on the Outfit site very closely. Every one that subscribes at http://outfitnm.com I pull out of the emailing list here at home. I hope to resolve the double mailing issue very soon.

There are 180 subscribers at the outfit. I finally found a place on my site where I can see who is subscribed. There are around 80 subscribers here in my email program, many overlapping names and addresses.

I suspect that junk filter on your end needs to be checked to make certain that http://outfitnm.com is a trusted source. I say this because I've asking for those who receive two BMNs per day to write me and let me know who you are. The numbers are not matching up.

With your continued cooperation we'll get this sorted.
Then maybe,  no more more redundancies, okay? okay?

Love you all
Brian Rodgers