Tag: Computers

Sabayon – Gentoo Linux for the masses

As the Sabayon slogan goes “Simplicity is sophistication”

SabayonGnomeDesktop#linux #gentoo #sabayon #Pixel2 #Pixel3
A different kind of Gentoo distribution

Gentoo Linux differs from many other Linux distributions in that packages are not pre-configured. Rather, the source code of those packages is downloaded and compiled locally. This is time-consuming and a real hassle for people like me who are just not that tech-savvy.

Along Comes Sabayon Linux

Sabayon is a Gentoo based Linux distribution that is user-friendly. There is a GUI installer to ease the whole process.

Go to the Sabayon website to get it. I downloaded the gnome version. Here are my notes of installation inside a virtualbox running on a Fedora host.

Process of Installation

After the liveCD boots up you will be inside a Gnome DE. (“Gnome,” in the Linux world, is pronounced “Ga-Nome” not “Nome.”) Finding the actual installation program takes some searching. Once you find it you can begin the installation process. I’ll leave the process of finding it to you. The installation is fairly friendly, but has some hitches if you’re like me.

The first thing you encounter when you start the installer is a welcome to Sabayon 18.04 message with a choice of languages to choose from. Naturally, I chose English (United States) and pressed continue.

Next I was confronted with a somewhat confusing screen of installation summary. There are four items on the screen. Keyboard, installation destination, time and date, and finally “network and hostname.” The “installation destination” selection indicates there is an error and that I should probably click that. I didn’t have to mess with any of the others.

I was then confronted with another confusing screen called “installation destination.” Immediately under that there is a button called done which can be selected. Below that you have to select how and where you want to install Sabayon Linux. Since my ATA vbox hard disk is pre-selected I just click done. This will automatically configure partitioning of my virtualbox hard disk.

After clicking done I have to wait about 20 seconds before it returned to the installation summary screen which caused me some concern that it might not be working. Furthermore, after returning to that screen the “begin installation” button was greyed out indicating that something was still amiss.

However after another wait of several seconds the “begin installation” button finally became clickable and I clicked it.

After that I came to the configuration screen for which I have been provided two options, set the root password and create a user. I did both, as should you. As an aside make sure when creating a user for yourself that you select make this user administrator. Then click “done.”

Meanwhile, as you do all this, installation is progressing in the background. You just have to sit back and wait until it’s done.

Meanwhile if you want to play around with gnome inside the live CD, you just have to press Ctrl alt down arrow. To go back press Ctrl alt up Arrow to watch the installation progress.

After installation is complete there will be a tiny notification at the bottom of your screen which says “Complete!” It’s really hard to notice. On the right side of the screen it says “Sabayon is now successfully installed and ready for you to use. Go ahead and reboot to start using it.”

So although I was worried about my installation media still being in place I went ahead and clicked quit. I did expect the system to reboot at that point, but apparently it just ends the installation program. To restart the system and boot into the new operating system you have to go to the upper right hand corner of the screen and click once you return to the desktop.

Booting into your new Linux installation

The boot screen features three small question marks that are highlighted one after another indicating that something’s happening in the background of an otherwise black screen. However after a not too long wait you’ll come to the welcome to Sabayon greeter screen on the main desktop. Installation and booting into the new system seemed fairly easy and quick. Booting the system once installed seem to go very fast.

Don’t close this welcome screen! It’s more than a standard welcome screen apparently. It has options to establish a password for a keyring, and installation of new software which you will probably want to have.

What you wind up with

One of the things I noticed right away was that Sabayon Linux is very compatible with virtualbox mode running full screen. That’s a great plus for people wanting to check it out without actually installing it directly to your hard drive.

Another thing I noticed was that it will play YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon videos, right out of the box. That is, as long as you use Google Chrome as your preferred browser which comes pre-installed. That’s another plus. No hassle there.

In my past experience with this operating system I know that you can get in trouble with dependencies when installing various software since software is compiled locally from the source code. However, if you’re the kind of person that likes to fiddle with your computer but not a real techy, who wants to be off the beaten path, and be different than a lot of people, then this Linux installation is easy to use, practical, and fun.

NOTE: This entire article was dictated using the WordPress App on a Google Pixel 2XL phone.

Upgrading to Fedora 28 from Fedora 27

Upgrading is slow but definitely worth it.

I am presently upgrading from Fedora 27 to Fedora 28, which as of writing just came out.

At the stage I am at now I have already undertaken all of the command line instructions and have rebooted the computer. The system has started the upgrade process in the reboot. It’s taking a while but I think it will be worth it.

In the meantime, I am without my computer. So I’m using my new Pixel 2XL phone to dictate this article. It makes a few mistakes but that’s ok.
I was once a big fan of rolling Linux distributions but sometimes found them unstable. Sometimes certain programs would just stop working, or the whole OS, which is part of the deal with rolling distributions. I always thought I wanted the bleeding edge of Linux software, something you can get with rolling distributions.

What what I found, however, was that I really didn’t have the stomach or patience to wait for those programs that stopped working to start working again or go through tedious and confusing steps to get the program that stopped working to work again, or get the whole OS up and going again.
I am no newbie to Linux. I’ve been using Linux since 1998. So in these 20 years I have used most of the major distributions, if not all. Pretty much you name it, I’ve run it.

What I’m using now is Fedora Linux. The reason I decided to go with Fedora is that Linus Torvalds uses it and he is the creator of Linux.

Furthermore, I discovered, unlike some other non-rolling distributions, Fedora Linux can be upgraded to the next version without reinstalling the whole software. Meanwhile, you get regular updates so your programs stay fairly bleeding edge.

Upgrading Fedora from one version to the next can be done easily either from the command line or from inside the desktop environment, (which in my case is KDE).

That’s what I’m doing now. I’ve upgraded, or rather am still upgrading, Fedora 27 to 28, all from the command line. It’s easy to find instructions how to do this by a simple Google search, or if you prefer, DuckDuckGo.

At a certain point in the installation procedure the computer automatically restarts to begin the actual update process. That takes time. Be prepared not to be able to use your computer for about 45 minutes or so, which explains why I’m dictating this article on my phone rather than typing it on my computer.

So if you’re thinking of upgrading, by all means do so. Just search Google for “upgrade Fedora 27 to Fedora 28.” Be prepared that this will take some time but it will be worth it in the end.

The process is now complete. My computer is back to normal. Everything is as it was but under the hood is the new Fedora 28 version of Linux.

The History of the Internet

I plagiarized everything below this paragraph from somewhere, I just don’t know where I got it from. I found it saved on my Google Drive from a long time ago. It’s interesting, so I post it here for your perusal.
The history of the Internet begins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. Initial concepts of packet networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, Great Britain, and France. The US Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s for packet network systems, including the development of the ARPANET (which would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol.) The first message was sent over the ARPANET from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock’s laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
Packet switching networks such as ARPANET, Mark I at NPL in the UK, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of communications protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks.
Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was introduced as the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET. In the early 1980s the NSF funded the establishment for national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, which also created network access to the supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Private connections to the Internet by commercial entities became widespread quickly, and the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.
Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF’s very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet’s takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.[1] Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking.

Off the Beaten Track

Sometimes I wander in thoughts and in actions.
Hiking the Adirondacks as a kid, I remember there were are all kinds of marked trails. They’ve got little signs tacked to trees marking colors. In some places, where there were no trees, they painted colors on the rock. These are the marked, well beaten trails. Sometimes they had helpful wooden signs posted here and there showing you the trail map. There was no GPS back then, but we always carried a topographical trail map in our pockets.
And then there was bushwhacking. We’d purposely wander off the beaten track. That’s where we’d get lost if we didn’t know what we were doing. My father always seemed to know what he was doing. We rarely got lost. Maybe we had awkward shortcuts, but never would we be lost. The moss always grew on the north side of the tree trunks.
It was not without adventure including bushwhacking itself and the occasional rattlesnake hiding under a rock or rotting tree branch.
Bushwhacking meant making your way through the thicket – broken branches and bushes, trudging over leaves and pine needles, encountering gnats, flies, and annoying threads left behind by spiderwebs. Sometimes there’d be some cool rocks to climb on. We had a collapsible metal cup we’d whip out when you came to a spring or stream, and we always had canteens too.
The Boyd solution to the snakes was simple enough. They were more scared of you than you were of them, my Dad used to say, so make a lot of noise. Get a big stick and whack at the tall grass on the hill you are climbing. Never got bit. Saw a lot of rattlesnakes and copperheads, though. My older brothers used to kill them by beating them with big sticks. Saw black bears, deer and pretty vistas.
Every aspect of that childhood still affects the way I am in front of my computer as an adult.
I prefer lesser known trails. Sometimes I prefer to bushwhack. Sometimes I get lost.
My computer hobby is this: the operating system that makes the thing work and the various desktop environments that sit on top of it. I’m always fiddling, never satisfied. My wife chuckles at me for this. “Are you installing Linux again?” “Well I screwed up something. It won’t boot, so I’m just reinserting the DVD. Don’t worry, I’ve been through this a million times.”
In 1983, Brooklyn, New York, I had a black screen with green words on it. That was what a computer looked like. It was a Tandy Radio Shack running the TRSDOS operating system. On that machine I used my first word-processor, wrote my first book, and learned BASIC programming.
Oh, why do I bore you? Windows came along. OS2 came along. Linux came along. FreeBSD and it’s latest incarnation TrueOS using Lumina -tried that too. Dabbled with Solaris. The worldwide web came along, domain names, another book, Turbo Pascal, perl and PHP. Added a wonderful wife, a job, pets, smart phones, tablets, laptops, and self-built computers, and here I sit, on my days off, fiddling.
Gotta stop now. See what’s going on in one of my other workspaces downloading Debian with their weird jigdo file download thingamabob. I’ll just press crl-alt right arrow and this whole screen flips over to the next one to see whuz up. I’ve got seven different screens called workspaces, all running different programs, or sometimes just there, all with different window background pictures, many that I took myself.