Hi, Everyone. I’m still here. I seem to have a few regular readers, and I appreciate your continued interest. I’ve mentioned before that my goal at a minimum here is to post once a week. I’ve tried doing more than that because I crave attention and the statistics that say people are visiting. But I’m aware that’s not a great way to look for validation.
And there are priorities to consider. I kidded recently about how my daughter interferes with my ambitions, but it really was a joke. She and my wife are way first on my list, and then comes my day job which sustains us.
I was feeling some stress earlier this week, trying to find time for all the things I want to do, and I decided to not worry about writing here during the week. I felt great about that. It’s not that I’ve lost interest in the blog, just that I recognized that my real life comes first. I planned to have something for last night or earlier today, but as it turns out, that beautiful little daughter of mine got sick enough that she had to go to the hospital yesterday, where she remains today. I don’t think I’ll get in to the details–that’s not what this site is about. But I think she’s going to be ok. They’re just being careful.
So while my wife is at the hospital, I’m at home this evening to take care of the four-legged children. And I’ve had a few minutes to play with a new toy…
Santa drops in early this year
I ended up buying one of those system76 computers, and it arrived yesterday. I didn’t power it up because of circumstances, but I had a few minutes to take it out of the packing box. I noticed something was loose inside. I opened it up to find the memory card floating around unfettered. I put it back in the slot but didn’t turn the machine on.
After returning home earlier tonight and walking the dog, I got set for the big first boot. It’s possible that the ensuing confusion is because of the way I have the thing on my desk. I’m looking at the broad side of it so that the back is as visible as the front. That is, I wasn’t looking squarely at the front. I noticed it has an on/off switch in back, which I thought was odd. I flipped it on, and… nothing. No sign of life. After the memory card misstep, I was prepared to believe it could be DOA. Past experience also told me I could be missing something obvious.
Shamefully, I had to dig out the instructions, and was rewarded with a diagram of the front of the machine showing me the power switch. They had cleverly hidden it as part of a decorative translucent blue bar that runs down the front of the tower. Maybe I would have seen it had I been facing the front with better light on the situation.
I pushed the button. It started humming and beeping. I got a dialog box prompting me for a few options, and then an orange background. That’s it. I clicked. Nothing. Pushed a key or two. Nothing. Hmm. Why is this all so challenging, I wondered. There was a black bar down the side so I pushed a button on the monitor. After auto adjusting, the orange was filling up the whole screen, but still no sign of a graphical interface. I finally moved the mouse to the top of the screen and the whole thing scrolled to reveal the top taskbar or whatever you call it in GNOME.
I played with monitor settings for a couple of minutes, but couldn’t seem to get things to shrink in to a single viewable area. Setting that aside, I opened up Firefox and brought up movingtofreedom.org. The perspective was stretched vertically, making graphics look funny. Having only minor lingering apprehension from past screen resolution misadventures, I found in System –> Preferences the very aptly named “screen resolutions” utility. The max resolutions on my Dell 19″ flat panel is supposed to be 1280×1024, but it was set with some oddball resolution. 1580xSomething, or something like that. Maybe it was 1680. Changing it to 1280×1024 fixed the strange perspective, and finally made the whole display visible at once, with both a top and bottom “taskbar.” (I”m sure I’ll learn soon enough the real name, although I expect I’ll be using Windows terminology for a long time to come, just as there is a guy on my team at work who calls emails “wires.”)
(One more resolution item. I saw an option for rotating the display, but it was greyed out. Do you suppose I need proprietary drivers installed for that? I’ve become fond of a vertical monitor at 1024×1280.)
Anyway, I dipped my toes in the water. I’m happy to have a GNU/Linux system with decent hardware. The beefiest machine up to now has been Wintermute, a sizzling P2 400 with 384MB of RAM. It feels good to buy a new machine without Windows, as a small statement that I don’t want to support the Microsoft monopoly any more than I have to.
What next?
I’m not sure what the next couple of weeks will bring. Aside from the uncertainty around my baby girl, I have some vacation time around the holidays. But I may not be writing a lot. Or I might. It depends. :-) All of the writing I’ve been doing has given me less time to work on learning GNU/Linux and getting things migrated over. Maybe I’ll spend more time working on the move.
I also have another blog in the works, this one for my sister. It will be “our” blog, with me doing the technical work, and both of us designing it and writing for it. Because of my aforementioned time challenges, I think it will be much more hers in the beginning, content-wise, but it will also give me the chance to write on other subjects and have more fun. (Not that “Moving to Freedom” isn’t more fun than a barrel full of monkeys, right?) I’ll be sure to mention it when it goes live, in case anyone is interested.
I’ve enjoyed writing this blog so far, and I plan to continue enjoying it. Part of that enjoyment comes from my belief in the free software movement and my desire to promote it, and part from the ego gratification of being read and some of the nice compliments I’ve received so far. I don’t think I can sustain this, however, if it becomes a source of stress in trying to keep producing “content” when I have competing demands several other possible uses of my time. So, I may just have to post whenever I feel like it, about whatever I feel like, and hope that keeps a few of you as satisfied customers.
(I’ve hinted at several follow-up posts over the past few weeks. These are still floating around and I imagine I’ll get to them sooner or later. Some of them may go away or mutate altogether since my reading has suggested other ideas.)
Related: Spirit of system76
