James LaRue - myliblog

Last week I did a full upgrade and something about the kernel crashed my elementaryOS 8.1 installation. That's a problem; I don't want an unreliable computer. So I had a CD from a recent Linux magazine with Linux Mint. It installed well, found the broadcom wifi, and all was well. Then I got to dinking around  with making it look more Maclike. Installed the White Sur theme with icons. So now I have the rounded corners, the red yellow and blue dots on the left of a window, and a Maclike logo for the program launcher. I installed Plank (a Maclike dock), and fiddled with it. Then for no reason I can discover, Plank just disappeared. I uninstalled and reinstalled it and no dice. It's there, it has preferences, but I couldn't make it show up on the screen. But it's ok. Linux Mint on a Mac is pretty easy to use. Firefox, Emacs, pandoc, Upnote all work fine. Without the dock, I can run everything from a minimal panel in a way that's a little calmer. I don't need thi...

My personal laptop is a Chromebook. I've been using it for 5 years. I throw it in my backpack and rarely turn it off. It has terrific battery life and does most of what I need it to. But it's begun to show its age. First the internal mic went out. OK, I could plug in my phone's headphones. Then the camera went out. OK, I could buy a camera--but this starts to look like a trend.  I realized I might need to have a backup computer, so dug up my 2011 MacBook Pro. It was running elementary OS 5.1, Hera, based on Ubuntu. (See my earlier post on this combo.) elementary is a good match for a Mac. Its use of the Pantheon desktop environment gives it a sleek, light, colorful look.  But Hera has been superseded, meaning it no longer has security updates. I didn't want to mess around on the internet with a vulnerable machine. And unlike some operating systems, upgrading meant more than issuing some commands. I would have to reinstall it. So I downloaded the latest elementary--versi...