Different Flavours and Different Desktops

I am a fan of different Desktops in Linux.
My favorite currently is the Genome.
I was an addict of KDE desktop based on SuSe and PCLinux.
I am a well organized person but not rigid in any way.
KDE was an elegant and organized desktop.
Come Plasma I begin to hate it but the looks and feel of Gnome has now become a part of my life and daily routine.
In that sense I love the Debian early series of 15 kernel.
This distribution had many Desktops from Mate to Cinnamon to Gnome to Plasma to Xfce.
At sign in time one can choose the desktop one likes.
The late Debian series has only streamlined and elegant Plasma but I cannot change from Gnome.
In that sense I like sparky Linux which has minimal to game Linux and is Debian based.

For some unknown reason I do not like Mint and Ubuntu but I have collection of all the live and installable Ubuntu, Mint, Suse.

But lately I have become addicted to Emmabantus for two three reasons.
It has AbiWord.
It had MultiSusyem Utility.
It has enormous collection of packages and had the multi-language capability.
It has Xfce and Lxqt Desktops but it's functionality beats every distribution that is evaluable.
Coming from South African base it an amazing distribution for anybody who loves Linux.
My preferences are
1. Emmabantus xfce.
2. Debian Gnome 
3. Mint Cinnamon desktop
4. Mate from Sparky Linux
5. Of course Ubuntu desktop.
6. PCLinux KDE
7. SuSe
8. Fedora

Why one should use Torrent?

One should never use direct downloads due to many reasons.
One should use Torrent especially in Ceylon  due to power cuts.
I wanted to download 4M Linux for testing and twice it broke down on direct download.
Finally I managed to find the torrent file,
I am currently promoting alternatives to Steam for gaming.
Sparky Linux gaming my first choice.
Through YouTube I found batocera as a good choice.
I am downloading both.
Unfortunately download speed is appalling.
By the way, one çannot access YouTube when there is power cuts.
One can only do one thing during power çuts,
SLEEP.
That is what my son does.
No TV.
No computers.
Laptop is reserved for emergency, but even then no Internet.
It is good time and money for telecom service providers.
Once prepaid fa data is over no more blog pieces.

Writings Obituary for Redhat and SuSe

This Title should have been written long time ago.

Since Ubuntu has taken the same commercial pathway (timing is inopportune with global food and financial crisis), reminding of the importance of the community output  is relevent.

Linpus (or Gonpus in Sinhala), Redflag and DeepIn are Chinese bates and do not swallow them.

Xaomi is another.

I do not know what happened to Calculate Linux of Russia and Stuck Linux of Israel.

Linux strength is it's community.

Any commercial enterprise which highjack the community is bound to fail in 20 years the most.

In fact, 30 years have gone by and these corporations are in crisis and rechenments are on the card.

Do not join them at this point of time.

Their future is bleak.

But Debian will survive and I am currently supporting Sparky Linux the Star that shines.

I am not sure what happened to Aptosid and Aptosid should wipe the dust and come forward.

Pop Os, I don't think would emerge as an alternative with chip crisis on the horizon.

I must write a note on demise of China.

China had being mining Ceylonese sand for ages and their so called Research vessel is blasting rocks in the Hambantita and with global warming and water level rising even Galle is under severe stress due to these as shoddy deals.

Next port of call is going to be Gampaha, and I said this in 1984, long before our regime of curse came into existence.

Their stupid leader from Hambantita is pilfering (under sea operation with the help of China) all the ill gotten treasures and gold and silver.

This remind me of Ranmutu Duwa, Joe Abeywickrama and Arther C Clerk mining gold and silver (from ships sunk long ago) not sand then.

Without golden sand chip industry is in crisis and China will fall from grace to disgrace soon due to their shoddy deals with stupid leaders of the emerging economies in the East and Africa.

They are worse than Muslim Mongolian invaders.

Despise them by all means.

The Coronavirus is only the early warning and the harbinger.

They are a curse to human evolution.

Like Zelensky they are our eternal curse.

Sparky Linux

Debian based Sparky Linux stand up to all the challenges from minimal to games.

I  downloaded and tested Mate which is less than 2GB but mounted on a 4GB USB.

It is sleek and boots briskly unlike Ubuntu or Mint.

Mate desktop avoids clutter similar to original Debian.

It is strange it has only a few entries on YouTube.

Guys in sparky are like stars that shine and do not boast or bloat.

I have no hesitation of recommending it

I make boot CDs using Debian and it does a clean job using about 4MB UFI partition for booting which is the smallest UFI, I have come across.

Rest of the free space is reserved and Gparted cannot claim the free space.

The system is in a different file system and the free space, I think is a FAT partition.

By the way, I installed Mint on butter file system (btrs) and it did a good job formatting the 120 GB left in my terrabyte old rotating disk.

Took a long time and GRUB detected all the other distributions, including Mageia.

The beauty was I had a lantern like speaker with a sprouting water chamber and multi coloured diode lights, which  I could not get to light up (even Ubuntu was not helpful) at booting time and get the audio sounds perfectly (did not use it for 4 full years) playing for my satisfaction.

Mint recharged it perfectly.

Voice recording was perfect.

My black old computer is like a Wesak Lantern for me to see it in the night (with lot of cooling fans).

Mint  got the colour arrangement of diodes also into fine tuning and a nice rhythm.

Thank you Mint.

Regarding the Sparky Linux I am going to download both games and media distribution for testing.
If one does not like Debian Sparky Linux is very good alternative.

I am sorry to realize Aptosid which was a Sidusx derivative has been discontinued from 2013 almost over a decade.

It has all the features of Memphis another Debian derivative I really liked my early days when dual booting with Windows 98:and I was struggling with 4MB RAM fortunately not with 42 Floppy Disks of Windows 95.
I had only 6 or 7 Debian 6 version.
1.;Install Windows.
2.install Partition Magic.
3.  Use partition magic to prepare Ex4 and brtrs file systems.
4. Boot Debian 6.
5. Use open office instead of Microsoft Words.
6. Migrated to open office in Debian.
7. Started using Debian derivative Mephis.
8. I was playing with SuSe Linux,  Redhat and Caldera Linux.
I have lot of books on Redhat and one book
on SuSe (Bible Book series).
Sadly no books on Debian but a man page which I hated. 
9.:I started writing books on Linux especially how to partition a 80GB hard disk and boot multiple Linux distributions.
10. Coming to Mephis which is early KDE desktop which was neat and clean.
It's ash coloured graphical instalation menu was well organized
Welcome screen when clicked.
Then I think an internal duction.
Then GRUB menu.
Then User and root registration.
Internet configuration which I use to skip (no ethernet in Ceylon then).
Using partition already prepared by Partition Magic for root, boot and home (no vat or user or tmp partitions then in my vocabulary.
Installation and run Linux instead of Windows at boot time.
Aptosid had all what I described above but I only ran Aptosid live.

My OLD selection of 20 Linux Distributions

I was deleting old emails from my  Yahoo mail and found an OLD update on Linux.

The top of the pops are Puppy and Knoppix.

I have renamed Knoppix as Toppix.
The 20 without any order or preferences are;

1. Reborn Linux

2. Rescue Linux

3. Simply Memphis

4. MX Linux

5. Debian

6. OSgeo

7. Steam

8. Sparky Linux

9. Endless OS

10. ELive

11. Puppy Linux

12. Knoppix

13. Emmabantus

14. PCLinux

15. AVLinux

16. Rescatux

17. DSL

18. Finnix

19. Mint

20. Parted Magic now a commercial product.

21. DSL

22. M4 Linux

23. Deft

24. Linpus and Redflag

25. PCLinux

26. SuSe

27. Mandrake

28. Pendrive   Linux means some Linux supporting sfs (single long file system) on a 1 or 2GB USB.
In fact, I booted Puppy Linux on a 512MB USB.

That is how I started and I loved Finnix, DSL and 4M Linux (? Media, Maintain, Multiple ???).

I hated bloated Linux.
Now KDE, Gnome and Cinnamon are resource hungry whereas xfce, fm, likeworm and many more I forget the names).
I am going to settle down on MATE.


Ubuntu, Peppermint, Zorin, Pop Os, Gpart, (there should be a new Linux named "GonPart" in memory of failing memory of Sleepy Joe and his war machine), portable DSL and (new one should be named Sleepy Joe)  Dream Linux, Xandros were not in my original list.

Linux Success Story and Windows Global Failure

I have no intention of helping Windows at all.

Windows failure can be summarized by a single sentence.

It's corporate mentality and the belief that they know what is best for the Putative User, lead to it's total failure.

It is surviving on Samba, Bind and  Python all Unix/Linux Utilities.

It's only success is front end desktop which is glorified beyond it's original use.

To entice and lure a to play games.

Steam Deck and Dock put an end to that domination.

Linux can play windows games but not vice versa.

Windows cannot play Linux games.

It is trying to muddy the cloud in vain.

It's current attempt to use Linux Python for reentry will end up in total disaster.

I pity for the guy or girl who would embrace windows as a workaround and positioning in the IOT.

The Linux failure was not of its own making.

It is totally due to discrimination by OEM guys at the behest of Microsoft corporate plan.

That plan has misfired and Linux is the main operating system for NASA for many reasons.

I want to write a book on Linux Fundamentals from Ceylon, the country in peril with debt crisis.

We are a country which is good in killing it's own citizens in the name of many dogmata.

This country had a president who did not have a email when tsunami hit us.

Then we had a stupid president who came from paddy land and ruined Telecom by appointing his brother as a director.

He was good eating hoppers in Singapore when another ex- president was planning a clandestine attack on Churches with money coming from Middle East.

The current president is well known for his sexual orientation in favour of one sex or UniSex.

He wanted to give laptop for every kid in school but did not understand there is something called Linux.

We would have saved lot of money which went to US through Microsoft Windows, if we adopted Linux in Public sector.

But we did not.

By the way, the computer literacy is appalling and general understanding is if one knows the 25 letters of English and 10 numbers and a few equations, on a work sheet or  log sheet in the monitor, that is wizardry.

For me writing a book for local guy or girl is a total waste.

It is for the global community.

Coming to Linux I started with Puppy Linux, graduated to Knoppix and ended up in Debian.

We had a clever guy by the name of Anuradha who is a wizard in Linux.

He could give the cordinates for a particular location in Ceylon very precisely, without the aid of a computer  which President Putin would be jealous of, if he wants to send a missile to Ceylon for testing.

I do not know where he is now.

Somewhere on Top of Linux the Code.

I was going through all the Linux distribution written on CDs and DVDs to trace from where I started, apart from Puppy Linux and Knoppix.

I think Mepis Linux  would have been my crunch or crux point.

Before that it was Redhat Linux from 7 to 9.

Then Mandtake Linux up to 9 and SuSe Linux.

I have tested from DSL to Nimble Linux to MX and 200 or more.
I still have copies my archive.

I did not count the number of CD/DVD probably 2000 half the book store of 4000 books.

I got the urge to burn them starting from Buddhist books eaten by white ants.

One of my friends stopped it and I found a cure for white ants.

I did not get stuck on one distribution.

I moved on.

There was Berry Linux and Turbo Linux from Japan.

Linpus from Singapore.

Calculate Linux from Russia.

Garuda Linux from ? Spain.

MultiSystem  Linux from France.

CIA tried LPS and failed.

STUX from Israel to attack nuclear plant in Iran.

Linux magazine from Germany.

Hantana Linux and Ceylon Linux from Ceylon.

SuperOS from India.

Nothing from Malaysia.

Now DeepIn from China.

ChromeOS and Chrome Book have a special place.

Xandros true to emulate windows and failed.

The failure of Linux was due to these guys trying to go independent without a community.

Instead of tagging with Ubuntu or Debian these guys tried to reinvent the wheel and they failed.

Simply because they did not have a backup community unlike Redhat and SuSe.

I have not mentioned but tested Simply Memphis, Mint, Manjaro, PCLinux, Emmabantus, Elive, Elementary OS, EndlessOS and many more.

The strength of Linux is it's global community.

It will go from strength to strength.

I am going to burn all 32 bit CD and DVDs and Keep 64 distributions.

I will keep all Puppy Linux (of  about 100) and Knoppix about 10 starting from 3.4 and currently at 9.1 in English.

I have stopped subscribing to the Linux Magazine to save money.

It comes from Germany and is the best.

Linux Torvalds is toying with kernel ? 15.1.12 and I would try it on new Intel's NUC.

NUC is pretty good.

Do not waste your time on Raspberry pi.

ANSI C and Brian, Denis, Debra and Ian

I have avoided the surnames and one should go to the library and pick a  book on C, the code base  (C++ came later).

It is hard to learn Linux in the Internet.

I my time Ceylon Internet was hopelessly slow and Maru Sira destroyed the SLT and I moved to Dialog.

Hutch is hopeless in customer service.

Lanka Bell does not have the outreach to reach my neighbourhood.

I have gone to all these places but when I used Linux there were only 32 Linux Users in the entire world.

What a turnaround for Linux?

With,  reverence to the first two guys, I learned the basic code.

Only by reading their books.

Second two are the creators of Debian which I am based now not Ubuntu or Mint.

I have over 2000 CD and DVDs which I collected to make a local archive and I am going to put them to fire except the 64 bit versions.

I started with Knoppix 3.4.

Graduated to Puppy Linux and later to Mandrake, Suse, Redhat, Mepis, PCLinux.

I think Mepis made me to change to Debian and it had the best bootloader then, for MultiBooting.

This piece is about books.
I have books on,

DOS
Q Basic

C
C stuck with me.

Then I went to Linux Unwired and pulled out the Ethernet Wire since I was using my wife's data in 3 days and paid extra for every MB.

Mind you, I paid the bill.

I was working and I had money to spare.

Amazing think was, I was a doctor,  teacher and a private hospital administrator, all at the same time and did not sleep well.

I was multitasking.

People use to call me RIGID but I was very well organized for multitasking, like a computer.

I did not have time for gossip or flame wars.

I sleep well now 8 hours exact and get up at 5AM and do my browsing, emails and blogging until 7AM and sit and watch birds and squirrels.

There was a plant blooming for the first time after 38 years.

The stupid gardener who cheats my wife, who comes with a sharp knife chops everything.

I have stopped him when he raised his fee to Rs.3000/= with food and amnesties from our house bill.

He was a cheat.

I scarred him but he bought some orchids but none of them bloom except Kandyan dancers I myself found and another one which bloomed after 18 years.

I do not put any artificial manure except rotten leaves and pure tea leaves which kills fungal parasites of plants.

With all this busy work in Linux, I was truly a gardner.

It takes 2 to 3 hours for watering and rain has come in, but in bit and pieces and I deserve some well earned rest.

UEFI and Music Problem of the Game Box sorted out

Well my son was there to help me. He had a spare USB Media (Audio) jack but the speaker needed power.
Both front USB ports were utilized.
Copied a few of my music files to the music folder and with a mouse click Game Box powered the music.
Those audio jacks are rare to find.
My son had three and I borrowed, one.
He is not into music now but play TV games with his remote which I cannot.

Regarding the UEFI booting with Debian if one forces UEFI boot with new BIOS one can make EFI partition in FAT 32 and dual boot Linux on a SSD.
One has to partition with Ex4 files.

Moving from Legacy BIOS to UEFI

When Microsoft introduced UEFI hegemony, I hated it and immediately change the boot mode to legacy BIOS and continued it till yesterday.

The old PC has so many ports and I did not miss anything.

Yesterday, I bought a mini game box and it's visual BIOS was like a mini program.

I stuck a SSD with Knoppix 9.1 installed it booted in few minutes and after 5 minutes, I switched off an had a day time nap.

Woke up removed the SSD and stuck a blank SSD and installed Emmabantus, using a USB.

I did few mistakes.

1. I did not prepare a  USB and copy the latest books and files I was working with.

2. Game Box did not have an audio port.

In a way, I consider it as a blessing since there is nothing to divert my total concentration.

3. I did not configure my Huawei Mobile WiFi with a MobiTel SIM.

Could not fire the FireFox.
Emmabantus thought I was using a laptop.
I figured out I need to configure Huawei and enter it's password.
With few click of items I found the configuration utility entered the Huawei and signed up with my email.

I have become lazy and Debian does all this at boot time automatically and each action is displaced in a plymath file running one after another.

If Internet configuration fails, it waits for another instance of the configuration of it fails, it reports and move to the next file and boots to my user account.

Debian has saved me tons of hours and I use Emmabantus to have AbiWord available for me but use Libre Office for my work.

4. Did a complete overall including my old Olympia  typewriter to make space.

5. Placed the PC on the bedside rack at bed level so that I can see whether, the ants build their cosy anthill inside to incubate  eggs.
If they do, it short circuits the processor.
I avoid killing black ants.
We have to learn a lot from their sociology that goes beyond the coronavirus pandemics, that come in 100 year cycles.

On the top rack I have the laptop rarely used and my purse, keys and accessories, pens, pencils and marker pens.

I have a very tiny notice board mounted  on the  wall and it never had a notice on it.

6. My notice board is my brain.

7. I started forgetting things when I was an alcohol addict and three years after complete abstinence and my book on alcohol my memory is back but not pristine and I forget spelling for simple words.

The reason for that is the cellphone's wonderful typeface utility.

8. Mind you Moderna Vaccine almost killed me and one if my classmates.
But my classmates son died and he has still not recovered.

My alcoholic friend still goes out for an occasional drink.

9. He tells me a guy junior and known to me anyway, his sister was killed by a thief who had come to steal gold and jewellery.

I got rid of my gold, a decade ago and bought three cellphones and if anybody steals them they are traced by  Google automatically.

I have 15 SIMs for various jobs.

Only two for voice  and the third voice SIM was stolen by a Muslim Guy.

I gave this Muslim Guy  two years to record his sordid things and I am going to Police and Hutch to report it, before I kick the bucket.

I have no hurry to catch a thief.

She tried to alert by screaming and the thief had cut her neck for her to to bleed to death.

It is the standard method in Ceylon which I have seen from the days of Internship.

10. In Ceylon even screaming is curtailed.

This happens when country had been under war footing for over 40 years.

11. Unfortunately this is happening in Ukraine now.

Booting Linux on a Game Box

I have some good news, I bought a USB stick with WiFi utility with a Microsoft supported CD long time ago but could not mount it on my old BIOS Linux PC.

I stuck that USB on my new game box and it connects automatically with the Huawei Mobile Unit.

Another long black code is removed from my clutter free table. 

Additionally, my cellphone with no voice data is switched off.

I was expecting a call from a young guy whom I tried to convert to Linux.

He interestingly only trusts bogus astrologer Manio!

He is ruined for life.

But this Visual BIOS does not mount external SATA mounted on a case, not even to retrieve DATA.

I decided to ditch the functional PC to a tiny game box to save power and noise.

PC is very slow with the plasma desktop.

It is running only on BIOS and UEFI gone defunct for good.
I did not change the BIOS but UEFI was inactivated.

The game box's characteristic are;

1. It is little bigger than a large cellphone.

2. Unlike the cellphone it has 8GB RAM.

3. Boots fast with UEFI.

4. Two New (HDMI) VIDEO outputs for two monitors. I had to buy a converter for VGA monitor.

5. No audio outputs.

6. No fan.

7. 3 USB 3 ports.

8.1 USB 3 with power and data.

9. Silent in operation.

10. Boots all my Linux distributions on USBs.

11. Won't boot from the external SATA disks but reads data and films.

12. Mobile or portable and cleared the clutter on my table.
That is the very reason for changing. Portability is not a issue with cellphones doing that job.

13. Stuck a SSD inside and in five minutes I was running Knoppix and Linux compatible.

14. Removed Knoppix only ,120 GB. Removing SSD safely secured in was difficult. I had to remove 4 nuts and took a long time due to cramped up space and very small nuts

15. Installed Emmanantus in a 320 GB SSD and saved 180 GB for NTFS partition for data.

16. Jack one terabyte external disk with steam games and saved films.

17. It has side ports for standard  SD card to load photos from the cellphone. In other words compatible with cellphone data.

18. No heating after 3 hours run.

19. Bit expensive but overall a good buy. But it is a fraction of what one pays for Apple and not  bulky.

20. So look for audio ports and  for fan if you go for a bigger and expensive Game Box.

22. WiFi instant with a dialog dongle for Internet connectivity.

Connect to internet fast with WiFi.

It has a Ethernet port for wired connection.

21. I   am going to use it for office jobs and not for games, so audio is not a problem.
I have a USB digital speaker with my favorite songs in  MicroSD card.

Mint Cinnamon Desktop Experience

First of all let me thanks those Linux guys who have embraced Linux and posting some short and some, detailed instructions in YouTube.

I just tested keyboard (all forgotten) ctl and h and got dot files appearing in the home folder.

I used to edit fstab boot configuration file in the early days.

Mind you, I rarely use keyboard shortcuts since one hasty touch of a shortcut would spoil a day's work.

The cinnamon is sleek similar to Ubuntu but  with extras.

Like Steam, Skype, Telegram and few more,  I have never used.

I have no hesitation to recommend it to new users.

Idea was to test the bootloader and it worked well but it took a long time to recognize various distributions already installed.

I have used the old rotating disk with master boot record and I do not know how it fares on  SSD.

My belief is it will not dual boot another distribution on SSD.

I begin to love the cinnamon desktop and old days of Linux with up to 8 work places.

In summary, Ubuntu is my personal recommendation but it has limited but essential utilities.

Mint has lot but installation is painfully slow and customization is impossible since installation is OEM.

It took ages to find already installed distributions.
But it was worth the waiting since , I wanted the old kernel 14.5.
In other words if you want cutting edge and kernel 15 add on do not try Mint.

One thing good was it only used English and there was no time wasting deleting unwanted languages at the end of the installation.

Testing Time and Stolen SIM Card

Well there is no problem with my  Huawei Mobile WiFi and when I use  my MobiTel SIM.
It works.

I put the SIM in my cellphone and Hutch says it has no money having uploaded Rs.1500/=.

Hutch is a pain. 

This blog piece is the proof of the pudding.

This is all about SIM Cards and Telecom Service providers, particularly Hutch.

I had several Hutch SIM Cards with enough data and  money left.

I have not used them, for some time.

I have a mobile WiFi with a Hutch SIM on it.

Uploaded Rs 1500/= and it is not activated, after two weeks of waiting.

I had a another problem.

I gave one of my  old cellphones to a guy free with Hutch SIM with voice mail and asked him to remove it once the data is over.

He did not know how to use an email.

I told him use free WiFi and learn a bit about Internet.

I met him after several months.
"How is it going"?
"How about the cellphone"?

He said he showed it to a casual Muslim guy and he removed my Hutch SIM and put another SIM in it's place.

I hit the roof.

I immediately went with him to Hutch and reported this and asked them to inactivate (voice card) SIM.

Simultaneously, I stopped using the data card.

Then from a 3rd party salesman, I got a another Hutch SIM for this phone.

It has over Rs1900/= money and data.

For three days I tried to activate it.
I could not.

Ultimately, I removed all Hutch SIMs (except one on the mobile WiFi) and replaced them with MobiTel and Dialog.

Here I am, making a blog piece with MobiTel.

NEVER use Hutch SIM for important work.

I am going to visit Hutch with my Mobile WiFi once my anger is toned down to Zero.

I may even make a police complaint to see how this government works with Identity Theft.

Thankfully I am not registered with Ceylon Medical Council for over 20 years.

This Muslim Guy may already have a dispensary in my name.

God's particularly Muslim God should help anybody who seeks treatment from this bogus guy.

My personal data can be obtained from the stollen SIM.

The residence recorded in the SIM is not my present residence.

If you have an unused SIM Cards put them to a burning Fire.

Otherwise somebody else will use it for FireFox browser.

Coming back to the innocent guy who was hoodwinked by the Muslim guy.

He never used the cellphone that I  him with nice Internet features.

I asked him to bring back the cellphone and removed (probably stolen from another guy) the Hutch SIM the Muslim guy had artificially introduced.

It also had another Dialog SIM that was not working belonging to him and told him to go back to Dialog and get a another SIM for Rs100/=.

I did meet him after that but he has not gone to Dialog.

Now with the above incident I decided to ask for a new National ID card.

When one does that one has to surrender the old one.

My liability of any, ends there.

The new ID was of international standard and cannot be duplicated.
I give credit to former President Gotabaya.
He had done a good job with Department of Registration, unlike his brother.
This is true with issuing Passports.

The corrupt officers in these institutes wanted him out.

One must give credit to his attempt at formalizing good offices, in spite many faults in his personality trait.

I think with the new guy doing the end term in office, these offices will fall back to corruption again with some MPs having several ID cards and passports.

This is the sorry state of Ceylon.
Do not come back to settle down here like me.

Pure Linux Text File

This site was created due to pure frustration with Microsoft Windows.
I hated Visual Basic.

Way back in my Linux history, I wanted to train (I am a medical teacher and keeping medical records safe and secure was my original intention, then) 100 Ceylonese guys (no girls at all) or introduce Linux and Free Software to 100 guys.

It was a TOTAL failure.

My attempt in a open public meeting was scuttled by Microsoft by bribing the guy who organized the bonanza for Microsoft.

Me the vagabond, went into overdrive, here I am still promoting Linux.

That little incident Microsoft should regret.

I became Linux addict and Linux advocate.

A lawful act of benevolence.

(please note that I have used the words that follow to test the digital dictionary. I hate the cellphone keyboard and tried using many but none satisfy my needs.
I love the touch of keys of a standard keyboard and cut and paste of Microsoft, I despise.

I always use simple instructional English.
I call it academic English.

The computer language bores me to death and one finger typing on a digital keyboard is painful to my index finger digit).

I have stated the above comments about Microsoft for over thousand times, I do not HATE  Window Users but I only PITY, them.

Satire is in my genes and that genomic piece in my genetic code has kept my head above water for so long.

Lot of American and British guys, lately Ukrainians do not have backbone to resist subtle and deliberate insinuation by USA/CIA.

Freedom, I value and Linux gave me that freedom.

I am glad after many years in the doldrums Linux has woken up to take Windows head on and Windows guys have found Linux Python utility as an escape route.

This piece is to make the statement that YouTube is useful for advertisement and it increases the coffers to Google.

Text book and text file is the sure way of learning Linux.

All Linux is a grand text file and python 3 plus integrates it.

By the way, some of these utilities are coming from Free BSD.

The best server utility, if you care to learn is BSD.

Decade ago I promoted BSD one always  need an Internet connection to use BSD.
No text books.

In retirement, to save money,  I only use a Dongle to access Internet.

Dialog is my favorite even though it costs me one Rupee per MB.

I have about 8 SIMs to do various jobs.

I uploaded Rs1500/= to HUTCH and that money is not credited to my account. That SIM is in my mobile wifi I carry it with me "on the go".

When I visit them eventually, I will blast the Ceylonese receptionist, all the same.
That works in Ceylon.
This is why I hate Chinese.
They (Chinese) provide service but the customer service is hopeless.

Do not use Hutch.

Chinese are hopeless in English.

But if I lose the receipt that job is undone.

So always ask for a receipt.
That makes it legal.

Now if you want to learn Linux file hierarchy, please use Debian.

The directories (folders in windows) in Linux are

/root
/boot
/home
/etc
/var
/tmp

Then apart from su one should learn to use # dollar sign £ pound sign
. a dot precedes every file and it is not visible by default.

ls
User
Dir
Bin
Bin has all the utilities
Password and thousand more code words.

Learning 10 to 20 is not enough to be a instant Guru.

10 commands are not enough and all are in simple letters, never capitals.

ViM has better functionality than python.

There are many more text editors from simple to advance.

One should start with a simple text editor and graduate upward.

That is how I did it without a proper Guru but all are forgotten now with a cellphone in hand.

Latex has gone into oblivion.

Vade Mecum is my bone fides.

Demise of our dog put me off from the Internet for two years.

I am back again but has forgotten all commands due to lack of use.

Buy the Linux book for details.....

Read it's chapters on Shell (they vary according to the distribution) and Administrative Tools.

That is the entry point to Linux.

In this site I only promote
Knoppix
Debian
Emmabantus
Ubuntu
Magia
PCLinux
The rest including Arch and Mint I never used.

But over the years I have made an entry of over 100 distributions here.

They are outdated but one is free to browse them.

There are 20 to 30 visitors daily.

To keep them amused I have liberal pieces of local satire and global academic stuff.

But I am going back to writing books and then I am totally absorbed on what I am writing and unavailable.

This Blog site is to let my Steam Out and with hopeless coordination in old age, no Steam Games except Digital Bridge.

Games and Game Boxes

I have done two nasty political pieces but are real events in our current century.

The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) was exposed to a small degree but they are the ones calling the shots.

Before I go into game boxes, let me expose the psychology behind  most games.

Most of the games simulate violence in young kids.

The parents one generation behind
have no knowledge or understanding of the violence in these games.

These are good to train violent soldiers in action not disciplined soldiers.

I think in Ceylon military training in the past,  it is the first and the foremost and I do not know how it is enforced now.

We had over 3 decades of war, generation after our generation only knew violence.

A peaceful Buddhist country turned upside down and Myanmar is the classic current example.

Violence begets violence.
Parents buy toys to
(I have replaced the words win or lose in a Dhammapada verse)
to divert their attention and to buy the latest to riva, the neighbour's kid's gadget).

When they grow up they start liking guns and try them like game kits.

That is the truth about America.

Due to our violent terrorist in the South (the British let us own guns to begin with) the government confiscated all the guns.

That did not prevent emergence of LTTE, the Underworld and political goons possessing guns.

Perhaps only in Russia (we only speak bad things about Russia) carrying weapons is a criminal offence.

There is another Dhammapada verse that states one sees the tiny speck of dust in another's eye but do not see a fly in one's eye or nose.

This applies to America and Ukraine.  

Weaponized Ukrainians are more violent than average Russian soldier who is doing a job and there is a violent brigade in Ukraine some holding political posts.

These things are getting exposed due to the war.

Then there is exposure to illegal drugs to get the 'game kick" one gets when playing a game.

Fourthly they fail in academic activities.

Fifthly one should play with your own kids, right game at the right time.
This is what I learned as a paediatric guy.

Buying a game box to buy time for your own work is not way around.

Instead of collecting these toys one should give them to a kid who does not have one.

With that long preamble let me dish out my observation.

1. Number one is the price, is it affordable?
With parents finding difficult to feed their kids this question does not arise in Ceylon.
Even a photocopy is expensive and exercise books have gone up in price.

2. Number two is the RAM and none of the basic models except Apple has above 8 GB RAM.
One need at least 16 GB RAM to play modern games.

3. Number three is Graphic processor which costs at least 100 dollars.

4. Then the accessory ports in the front or on the back, ideally with a Ethernet port.

Our wireless connection is hopelessly slow.

Current president wanted to donate  a laptop to each kid in ? A level and one of the ministers was given the monopoly to import.

Thankfully we got rid of that government before executing any of these grand projects.

I was telling at that time it is far better to buy a cellphone with Android 10 or 11.
I have not seen an Android with version 12.
I bought three cheap cellphones before they went up in price to 3 times (to avoid buying new batteries for old ones).

There are no cellphones or batteries to buy in the open market, now.

One has to fly to Singapore but the  plane ticket is 5 times, now.

5. Then there are  other accessories like Monitor, keyboard, mouse and joysticks.

6  All these add up to 300 or more dollars and buying a Valve Steam Deck and Dock is more realistic, than ever.

7. The problem is there are not enough chips in the market with China banning export of good quality sand that they dig from our (Ceylon) coast for many years, pretending to build a port city.

Our politician banning a ship is eye washing mouth watering politricks. 

8. We could have built a chip factory instead here to earn money from the DEBTS to unnecessary ports and air ports built but never completed.

That is the bottom line of our idiocy.

Chinese are shrewd monsters in this globe.

Bacterial Logic and Forensic Toxicology

This is a convoluted piece only a forensic guy will understand.

Neither Ranil the current Raja nor the  Ex Raja would understand the logics, literally or metaphorically.

This has nothing to do with current starvation strategy of the government to save money to pay the salary of 225 MPs and their dependants.

Arguments goes like this why we have one bowel motion a day.

Of course some have three purges a day called 'Ka Hatiye Bada Yama" and I have not understood the scientific bacterial logic of 3 motions a day.

Somebody else should do a PhD on that topic.

It is our own Lamabadusuriya who did a PhD on ion channels and the need for glucose not sucrose in rehydration fluid apart from Sodium and Potassium (me adding vitamins in 1973 as an intern some of my Sinhala colleagues thought, I had gone mad).

Sodium, Potassium and rehydration fluid which WHO borrowed from US was out of the Formulary Committee headed by Professor Senaka Bible.

I have a single copy of Formulary Notes and the list of other names in 1968, I will post it here, on a later date, with some of their  volatile statements, that I can remember.

By the way, 1968 is the year we entered the university 54 years ago.

Out 55th anniversary is next year by that time, I hope Anthony Fausi CDC chairman is ousted after a formal inquiry of mishandling of China and his outreaches of money swindlers in pharmaceutical companies world wide, including in UK.

Coming back to my original preposition why one motion (not one nation) a day and the corollary one meal a day.

It goes like this.

1. 60 % of our faeces is bacteria.

2. They are vital for us including providing B vitamins and  K vitamin.

3. If you flush them fully we succumb to loss of 60% of the cell load of the body.

An amazing biological factory.

Mind you they are so tiny the mass contribution in weight is so tiny like Tiny Linux (4 to 8 MBs in memory here) but in numerical numbers they outnumber the current human population.

So if you count the number of bowel bacteria in Chinese population, ordinary binary computer will crack in a few seconds.

We need a quantum computer to count the number of Chinese bacteria (I stop counting their viruses).

4. They are called friendly bacteria.
I have a book on that topic.

5. Giving antibiotics to kill about 40 types of pathological bacteria is not logical.

6. Invariably leads to drug resistant pathological bacteria.

7. That is the survival strategy irrespective of that the bacteria are commensal or pathogenic.

8. These bacteria divide once in 24 hour cycles is my belief.

So one has to empty one bacterial load once in 24 hours.

They divide in 20 minute cycles.

9. More importantly in their sugar  metabolism they produce water and carbon dioxide.

10. Carbon dioxide make a big noise like politicians and is called political farts.

11. The water that is essential is reabsorbed even during periods of starvation.

It is called the water of metabolism.

Lower colon is the only place where water is absorbed in the body, solely by ion channels.

What a vital organ and we die in 3 days without water.

12. So using this biological hole for homosexuality is forbidden by 60% of the bacterial occupants whose downright biological residence.

13. That is why I hate homosexuals, like the Russians and Putin Do.

14. Current democrats are all homos and that is why the economic meltdown.

15. Please save bacteria and our Ar,. Ses.

Evil Designs of the Multipolar World

Let me be global in this entry of current Geopolitics.

Dish out the Evils inside US first.

Both Rajapaksa and Ranil alliance have sold our sovereign state to the devils.

They are Devils Incarnation.

The rest of the devils are as follows.

I have excluded small city Vatican and it's influence.

1. Devil number one is China.
I will deal with this in detail later.

2. Devil number two is USA.

3. Devil number three is our neighbour India who created LTTE with the aid of Norwegians and (USA ably facilitating).

4. Devil number four are so called Norwegians who pretend to be innocent bystanders.
They are not.
They are the long arm of EU and USA conglomerate.

5. Number Five is EU autocrats or cryptocrats.

Here Germany, France and now Spain are becoming hegemonic.
Italy with Mafia background comes fourth but is fading.

Strangely Turkey and Greeks are making inroads to upset the imbalanced EU.

Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Rumania and Latvia, the  former USSR breakaway countries are caught in the middle.

Serbia is in a mess already.

6. In this scenario Russia is the only country we could have aligned with but we never did.

Russia is not a communist country.

It is a powerful country who stood up to Hitler.

It was Russia who defeated Germany but USA and UK took the major honours.

It is now standing up to the proxy American Ukraine.

The outcome is collapse of the world order and Chinese hegemony creeping in.

China's problem is it's inferiority complex but care less to eat up any African or Asian country under duress.

It is the mentality of the Muslim vendor in Ceylon.
In the north they align with LTTE in the South they align with evil Ranil and Raja.

They never integrate with the country of their domestication.

They are the only ones who do not participate in the cultural peagent in Kandy.

The Tamil do participate but Muslims never did.

The Chinese follow Muslim strategy.

Step in when the going is bad for the host country.

Of course they have the Mongol experience to copy.

Their space exploration should be viewed with this background.

They use the satellites to scrutinize the whole globe and whenever they find a loose joint enter there and monopolize.

The are the enemy in secret we have to worry about.

With the silk belt initiative failing, they decided to dominate the sea and air.

Creating artificial islands in Ceylon, South China and African continent, show their global nature in strategy.

That is sand mining for the chip industry.

Their ulterior motive is for global domination.

Country with a largest population in the world tries this strategy one has to be be suspicious of their apparent neutrality.

They are becoming globalists.

With this background one should view the Russian President's invasion of Ukrainian.

It was inevitable.

Zelensky is a puppet on  American strings.

Whatever he touches it burns and his curse will follow.

It is pretty obvious.

We do not have top class diplomats and good counsel.

He is a global curse and it is already too late to realize his curse with global economic meltdown and famines.

Japan is the latest casualty following, Italy and UK.

Global diplomacy is failing and I have left out Middle East and Iran.

Their oil economy will fail with the emergence of Russian influence.

With prudence and patience Russia has revisiting it's former glory.

One should be empathetic not jealous.

American democratic ploy failed again and Trump coming back is inevitable.

He is in my opinion, the better of the two  Devils in America.

Multi-Booting Linux on New Hardware

New Hardware is always a pain (including the money invested) a for hardcore Linux user like me.

So keeping one's old hardware in trim condition, come good in retirement.

1. I always say that Linux always protects hardware that include RAM, Graphic Cards and SSDs.

2. One exception of course is SSDs. I come to that later.

3. Linux use minimum of resources for full functionality and 100 GB is is enough with only  25 (Debian) to 30 GB, in installing (Emmabantus), them.

I am not sure how much for Ubuntu 21.10, probably less GBs.

Ubuntu has not become frugal but it is becoming pragmatic with Debian having an enormous package store to add up.

4. I will not talk about games which is taken care by Valve and Steam hardware.

5. This is about using a Functional Desktop.

6. With cloud functionality in full gear Linux sever can be accommodated by 4M Linux or Tiny Core Linux of about 4 to 8 MBs (note this is in MBs) in a Pendrive or USB stick.

Both of these tiny guys are within  the top 100 in distrowatch's ranking.

7. What I mean is to run, server utilities one need not have a fully fledged distribution.

There are number of server dedicated Linux distribution, I forget their names.
? System Linux is probably one of them.

8. Coming to SSD with 120 GB drive one can run two distributions but only one can be booted.
GRUB does not work on SSDs, no master boot record to configure booting options (only one distribution, alone can be run in a SSD).

There is a way about it
The second one I installed, I boot it from the GRUB written in a USB stick.

Or else, partition the extra GB with a NTFS partition for storing data.

9. So spending huge sum on a SSD is counter productive and waste of money.

10. Buy 1 terabyte external rotating disk and install the other distributions in it.

11. I have old one terabyte internal drive which I have installed four other distributions using GRUB to access them.

12. I think I will incorporate those tricks in a book I am going to write and I will dedicate the book  to both GRUB and Ubuntu.

13. It is tempting to learn about Linux on YouTube but it can be frustrating without a Guru.

14. My Gurus has always being books.

15. Terms like srv, etc, tmp, bin, libs, home, /root, file history and many more jobs like cron jobs can be learnt only in text mode.

16. One has to learn file hierarchy, the desktop is only the window dressing and the real work of Linux is  behind the screen in a text file written in python.

17. There was a fully fledged text editor called LaTex gone into wilderness.

18. I have Endless OS in my Laptop and missing things like AbiWord, Telegram, Tex are there for me to fiddle with.

Endless OS is like an Android on a PC.

19. The Android like Linux distribution failed in it's early days.

20. Cloud Linux also failed but it looks like another one has come into fray of Linux influence.

21. There is no limit to Linux and enjoy it when one is young.

When one is old one settles down to the minimum that gets the work done.

Laziness becomes a habit.

I am in that mode, taking life in a relaxed way.

But Linux keeps me young at heart.

Don't be grumpy, if a Linux utility fails.

Improve it by becoming a critic and later a developer.

Anaconda and Fedora

If you are new to Linux never ever try Fedora.

It is a real anaconda.

By the way, anaconda is the nickname we gave to Python.

I did post this before trying Fedora on 120 GB drive.
I erased Ubuntu and installed Fedora on it.
Every bit of it I had to do it manually.

When I booted it it did not recognize my old Navidea graphic card.

It did not give an option to select a suitable driver graphic card.
It took a long time to install.

All other distribution does the installation automatically.

No reporting of errors or problems.

Do not try Fedora on a old graphic card.

Below is what I said about Fedora before installing.
It is a pain.

It will destroy your PC and you may have to buy a new one.
 
I am glad I left Redhat and Fedora many moons ago.

Luckily, I switched on my Radio and listening to old classic songs, in preparation of installing, Fedora JAM edition, and I did not throw a heart attack.

These Linux experts did not talk about PCLinux only Fedora.

I love Plasma Desktop, if you love Plasma experience, please try PCLinux.

I used PCLinux for a long time but gave up since like Endless OS, it does not dual boot with other Linux distributions.

I tried to download PCLinux and with a very few peers, it is stuck at 40% download.

No wonder.

You will begin to hate Fedora, like I hate Windows, even if you have 16 GB RAM.

1. Live sessions takes up (I have 4 GB RAM) all the resources.

2. It took few minutes to open my 1 terabyte external disk.

3. Idea was to install it on the external disk which had 600 GB free space with Ubuntu running and with a few downloaded films.

One can install Debian, Ubuntu and Emmabantus with only 100 GB with 60 GB to spare for Home partition.

Thankfully, I did not start my new book on Linux installation.
An account of Fedora will be there as a side note.

Instead, I would do a book on GRUB and Kernel 5.10.1...

4. idea was to see how it's GRUB works.

5. I tried to run Benji film in the background, it could not mount, it and could not even get the audio file.

6. If you install Fedora to watch films, it is a non starter.

7. Installing with Anaconda was a pain.

8. It has no ....next protocol of the Debian and Ubuntu.

8. There is no welcome screen and it wants you to follow Fedora's business like protocol and say done, to each entry you make.

It is a pain.

9. It probably takes over the full hard disk.

No cohabiting with another Linux distribution, in my case Ubuntu in the external disk.

10. If I give 80% satisfaction with Ubuntu, I give Zero or better Minus points to Fedora.

11. The clutter in the live desktop even a guy like me who is well organized, get disorientated.

This is what happens when something is crowd or community funded.

Ubuntu is an exception.

Everybody wants his or her package included in the distribution.

12. Too many windows and too many redundant utilities.

13. Plasma does not have Gparted and Anaconda is a pain.

Do not ever try this distribution, there are over 300 more distributions in www.distrowatch.com.

14. I think I am going to burn all the books on Redhat and Fedora and keep only the Linux Bible.

15. If you use Fedora or Redhat you are trapped in their corporate plan and you become a slave.

16. Libre or Free software basic Vision is to become FREE.

Not a slave of the Corporate World or Neocons.

How to Solve SSD Problems

To begin with SSDs are expensive.

Second one pays a lot for Low Capacity.

I also got caught to this Media Hype and bought 120 GB SSD for Rs.25,000/= and mounted it as the primary or boot disk.

That was the biggest mistake, I made.

SSDs can mount only one operating system.

It cannot boot multiple Linux distributions.

I mounted only Debian on the SSD which took about 60 GB and I upgraded it from 10 to 11 over the past 7 years.

All my working files were in it.

To overcome the low capacity I bought several 1 terabyte external SATA disks.

They were used to store Linux images.

They were later used to mount several Linux distributions without disturbing the 600 GB NTFS Data Partition.

I also had one terabyte rotating disk with many distributions (with data, 500 GB free space to test distributions from Peppermint to Ubuntu to Mageia) installed.

I could not write the GRUB boot record to the SSD but it had to be booted by pressing Del or F2, everytime I use it.

I lived with this minor inconvenience and did not lose a single file.

After near fatal hardware breakdown, I decided to have a little rest and work out a viable solution.

First solution was to change the hardware jumpers master to slave and I decided not to fiddle with the hardware.

There were no hardware problems except the low RAM of 4 GB.

So I decided to find a software solution.

Boot everything from the slave drive instead from the master drive.

I erased everything from the master drive of 120 GB.

Installed Debian on first drive and booted it from there.

It was OK and detected the boot record of the slave drive and copied it.

There was 60 GB left in the primary and booted Emmabantus on the balance portion.

When it came to writing the GRUB I decided not to try booting Emmabantus from 120 GB volume but decided to write it on the second drive.

Presto both can be accessed now  by one GRUB file.

I could have done this before but I was more concerned about over 2000 to 3000 files in the primary drive but having copied everything to an external disk, I decided after 7 years of regular USE a clean slate was due.

Importantly only two boot records  to access the two drives.

One on primary and a second detailed one on the slave drive.

All this hassle to get AbiWord to work for me in Emmabantus.

Debian does not support AbiWord.

By the way, I am keeping, the old Debian 11 with 6 desktops ruining  as my regular distribution.

Debian 11 new version  has only Plasma desktop.

I did not want to give up XFS, LXDE, Mate, Plasma and other desktops,  for one heavy duty Plasma.

I have a copy of heavy duty Plasma, too.

I did all this after Using MutlSystem to boot Multisystem, gParted, Emmabantus and Peppermint on a 16 GB USB and Knoppix on another 120 GB external disk.

By the way, Knoppix 9.1 is my favorite.

It has everything in one go.

Both Debian and Ubuntu do not support the squashfs file of Puppy Linux.

Debian and it's rightful follower Ubuntu have file structure of parent and daughter hierarchy which squash file cannot emulate.

The distributions that cannot be on MultiSystem were mounted on individual USBs.

I also mounted Partition Magic (which was a CD of 350 MB long time ago) image on a USB stick.

A commercial institute bought Partition Magic and killed it's independent development.

The Partition tool of Partition Magic matured into GParted and that is the tool I use for partitioning.

After years of using USB sticks,    I have only one USB of 2 GB gone corrupt without a Partition table which I used to mount  Pendrive Linux.

It all started with Linux running on  USBs, beginning with Puppy Linux, I have still not lost the interest in Linux.

Having done all this I have six more Free USBs to spare.

Panic Mode and Initramfs and Alcoholism

I really hit the Panic Mode in Linux that only happened once or twice during 32 bit mode.

Emmabantus was running Initramfs and it was taking time and since this was in the external disk booted, I had the courage to press the off button of the computer.

With a firm press I switched it off but won't switch it on again.

?RAM gone!
?Graphic Card gone!
? Computer ready for Junk Yard!

In 32 bit mode one has to wait 24 hours for the RAM to flush electromagnetically.

In 64 bit this is the first time.
I had no idea.
Had a cup of tea and slept, day time sleeping is my routine.

Another coffee and switched, it on after 5 hours.
It did boot up to the master or primary disk of only 120 GB SDD.

Debian 11 running.
Logout the administrative mode and login in with user mode, switched off and got a book to read.

Last chapter Singalo-Vada Sutta in old English.

I was looking for Singalo Vada Sutta in English for ages but could not find.

I was convinced Buddha did not go into our life beyond 8 precepts (not even 10).

I stand to correction.

A comprehensive guide of 14 acts.

List them without any order.

1. Partiality hit me first.
Do not follow judgement on your fellow beings specially your spouse.

2. Control your anger, I was a guy with short burst on daily basis.

3. Do not lie.

4. Do not steal.

5. Do not be a fool.

6. Do not try to be a professional, it invariably applies to me.

Last two I forgot.
Re-referred the text

7. Fear

8. Impurity of what?

Note there is no reference to alcohol at all.

That was revealing.

Having a tot on the sly is allowed?

The last SIX (6) was the most important.

Do not associate with bad friends.

1 Number one is, DO NOT associate with an alcoholic friend in the bar.

Unfortunately I did not read this before finishing my book on Charms of Alcohol.

Poverty
Strife or conflict
Disease
Loss of character
Shame
Impaired senses or faculties

Public display of one's personality good in my vase and bad in All Ceylonese including Wira Wansa with Racial rhetoric.
Of course Pu....ke, Vasudeva included.

What Buddha says is associating with these guys leads to financial meltdown.

I immediately gave a call to one of my class mates who had bad friends and was really an alcoholic.
Strangely he was in  Temple and I told him to Teach the Young, the Singalo Vada and practice it yourself.

2. Number two dicing or gambling.

3. Idling and sleeping and getting up late and loitering with your friends in the night shadowy beings.

4. Becoming a libertarian including 'woke' culture guys.

5. Going to films, theater, dancing and singing with your buddies.

6. Associating with outlaws cheats, swindlers, rouges, that include some Prime Ministers and Presidents like Zelensky in Ukraine.

So in actual fact Buddha had American Neocolonials in mind 2500 years ago.

Thank YOU Ubuntu 21.10...

By the way, I had 120 GB external disk with  faulty boot partition.

Ubuntu could not configure it BUT I used Knoppox 9 (English version) and mounted Knoppix with a large persistent volume in it.
I will be storing all my books published at Amazon and final copies of all the  articles there, before my memory fails due to old age.

That should be sealed and put in in my coffin, the day I quit this World and Linux with it.

I had enormous problems installing 9 (only five distributions of my choice, one copy in hard drive and another copy, in a one terabyte external rotating disk and one exclusively on a 120 GB external drive) Linux distributios.

I rarely use the primary hard drive for my work but boot the external SATA disk.

There is a guy who is boasting in YouTube, about booting Linux in a breeze.

Please do not believe him.

He is a savvy guy with good intentions but he has never read the Linux Bible (the last copy came out in 2010).

I have it with me for reference.

I have the book "Using Linux" by QUE published in 2002 with 3CDs, Caldera Linux, Debian 2.1, and Redhat 6 version.
I used only Caldera Linux and manually configured the boot file to learn Linux.
I have misplaced those 3 CDs.

I have three other books Linux in a Nutshell and two UNIX books.
This is in addition to Redhat books.

I do not think a library in America have them for browsing.

No use at all now, with 64 bit computers in the market.

I discarded 12 of my 32 bit computers long before 64 bits computers came into operation.

Unlike Linux Star (he should be named Linux Tzar) I moved, on with the new trends.

I could not install Redhat with 2MB RAM in my first PC.

I could never update the RAM of the first computer, I bought for my son.

It is still with me, as a reminder, next to my work desk on a table which I have my utilities including knives, scissors, screwdrivers and hard disk nails and cameras utilities.

The bottom line is one should never try the things, I explain here with 4GB RAM.

One need at least 8GB RAM to run  Debian 11, kernel 11.

I counted it runs nearly 3 million files when preparing the live booting.

Only Ubuntu is stable in a Live session and Debian could not remove 10 files with 4GB RAM for nearly half an hour.

I switched, the computer off and went to sleep.

Most of my problems were of my own making.

IMPATIENCE.

That is to get the GRUB file installed in the external disk.

I have large number of films in another external disk on  NTFS partition of 600 GB which I am going to keep as an archive and as a reserve disk (with three distributions running within).

The point I want to bring in here is I have never lost (of course like finding an old book out of 400 other books, I forget the file's name but I know it is in the 72 GB home drive in the master hard drive) a file for 20 years.

It is vital for a book writer not to lose an old file.

Mistake number one is using 120 SDD disk.

SDD disks cannot make a boot or grub partition.

SDDs runs only one distribution.
Only one installation.

Unfortunately
I have configured it as the boot drive.
I have overcome this by having a rotating slave disk of 1 terabyte.
That is the slave disk from which I can boot the primary boot drive.

I have Debian installed in the first drive which I have migrated from version 10 to 11 version.

The home partition of this drive was never formatted but all my files going into thousands are still there which I retrieve whenever I want a file to start a new book.

I remove old files manually when updated to a new copy.

By the way, I used Peppermint
Linux and AbiWord for my books.
I could not configure the boot file using Peppermint 10 and I have stopped using it.

Now this piece is about Configuring the GRUB boot file.

Only Ubuntu can configure the boot file having looked at all three disks.
Debian cannot.
Emmabantus cannot.
Magiea cannot
PCLinux cannot.
Endless OS cannot.
Even Knoppix cannot.

Only Ubuntu does it, perfectly.

Ubuntu needs a small Grub Boot file of FAT 32.

EFI partition to bypass the Microsoft's UEFI discrimination strategy of Linux.

Other Linux distributions have not figured out this UEFI branding and brandishing.

Coming back to my failures, it is all due to my impatience.

I want to go to sleep and I switched off and rebooted, when the distribution was reading something and RAM was not flushed out and Swaps were not mounted.

Linux use SWAP partition to shift memory pages from RAM to Swap when flushing the memory.

If there are no Swap files it takes ages to flush the memory.

I have 5 Swap partitions.
One in the primary boot drive two each on the others drives.

The SWAP file is Mandatory.

SDD does not do a proper swapping.

That is the other problem with SDDs.

It cannot reconfigure boot file, if another distribution is installed.
That is again bowing down to Microsoft Mafia.

Then there is another big problem.

Suppose you have the original boot file in the primary SDD drive and it gets corrupted.

Then, one cannot boot an alternative drive.

Format and Reinstall of Microsoft is not my way.

That is why I never used Microsoft's Windows for overt 20 years.

I hate Windows for needing updates every 3 months.

In Linux once installed properly, it runs perfectly for 10 years, if one lets, the deamon utility to run at 1PM every night.

That is why I do  all my important work after midnight.

With in one hour deamon utility does it's house keeping JOB in the background.

Computers are meant for running 24/7 schedule.

This is the very reason I get Ubuntu to write the GRUB file on an external disk (in my case in two removable external drives so that (it never happened in my case since, I use the primary drive sparingly and almost never on critical work), it is ready to boot any distribution (already installed).

The cardinal feature of computer is even though you have fancy gadgets everything is done or running on RAM  (on RAM only).

So do not listen to these guys who used Windows for 30 years, then suddenly find Linux and try to teach one's Grandmother Linux.

The guys have never read a Linux book to see how Linux operates.

Thank Linux Torvalds, for editing 3 million files over 20 years and producing kernel 11 with fabulous  Debian.

Even though, I only use Debian for my work, thanks all the same to Ubuntu (all Thanks   go to Ubuntu) for Configuring the GRUB file perfectly.

The cardinal mistake I did was while Ubuntu was mounting the Swaps, I became impatient and rebooted the PC.

After telling myself of my mistakes and having had a good sleep, finally I waited for Ubuntu to do the House Keeping (PC Updating), which it did perfectly.

It took two days due all to my own mistakes but it was all worthwhile in preparation, of my new  book on Debian on kernel 11.

You may be wondering why a big cock and bull story here.

Simply because I cannot put some of the things I say here in a book, which is bordering an academic exercise.

I said about books above.
I am very fast reader on many topics.
Even in the Internet I pick the gems and discard pebbles.

By the way, Internet had metamophasized to a cesspit, and one cannot learn anything worthwhile.

One cannot reproduce class room experience in the Internet.

Coming back to the book story.

I managed to find two (2) CDs on Redhat 8 and a guy in my city was having 6 Redhat out of 7 CD series, probably illegally copied and I ask him can you give me at least five copies out of six.

He never did and much later I found that the set of Redhat CDs (version 7) was for a server and it was for commercial enterprise.
The desktop edition went up to 3 CDs the most and 2CDs were enough to learn Linux.

Because of this guy I decided to learn Linux in depth, and this guy who wanted to set up a Linux network with his brother for commercial purposes went into oblivion.
I told him Linux is free and if you want to make money join the Windows guys. This guy did not have money.
But another guy who came from a rich family had a shop in the town and beat him, by  associating with Microsoft.
All the young guys I tried to teach Linux was employed by him.
I used to go to his shop to do hardware shopping (he was well away from the town) and I did not find anything that I was looking for him.
There was another guy who used to go to Singapore and buy computer stuff and sold at exorbitant prices, I decided shouldn't  I go to Singapore myself and save money.
This guy also got hold of one of my Linux trainers and none learnt Linux after that.

Microsoft's ploy was/is to buy these guys and stunt Linux growth in my city.

Thankfully a guy very young from my college was a wizard in Linux and was a Debian developer from early days.

I hated Redhat after 8 and joined the band wagon of Debian and never looked back.

By the way, my favorite was Mandrake which came from France but it went bust by toying with hardware called "globe trotter".

I went to SuSe for a while and when they went commercial I stopped using it.
I hate both Community driven Fedora and SuSe Linux.
None of them can beat Debian.

But my love was Knoppix coming from Germany.
To get Knoppox latest DVD I used to  subscribed to journal,  Linux for over 10 years and two years after retirement I stopped subscribing to it, coinciding with the demise of our dog.

By the way, I adopted Puppy Linux from its (coming  from Australia) very beginning.

Barry Kauler has gone dormant and he is a better dog lover than me.
I do not blame him.
Linux has got firmly ROOTED.

Lot of eccentric guys support Linux and that is why it's success.

But my most favorite utility is AbiWord the smallest Words program but slowly I am migrating to LibreOffice 7 which is fabulous.

Using Debian, Ubuntu and Gparted

If I am using a brand new disk  Gparted is the distribution I use.
It can be mounted on a CD or USB.
Now I use GParted mounted  on a USB.

I do not like the rackety noise of the DVD driver (anyway Drive is very slow in execution).

One should not fiddle with the partition table, which GParted is capable of doing.
Partitioning is a very slow process of writing 0 and 1, what is called the machine language.

1. Number one one should have a theoretical understanding of partition table and partitions.

2. Number two, there are different file systems and I use (exclusively) journalzed Ex4.

3. If partition table is corrupted neither Ubuntu nor Gparted can remove the corrupt sectors.

A journalized memory is kept for reuse purpose and with the warning and hanging abruptly.

4. I had one terabyte external disk with lot of saved films on a NTFS partition,
The distribution I used had used 32 bit boot partition and it was not booting on 64 bit computer.

I could access all the films plugged in with Debian running, which I faithfully copied to another 320 GB external disk.

Then I tried to change the partition table using Gparted but I could not.
Tried live Ubuntu I could not.

Ubuntu also use GParted as it's default partition utility.

5. Finally I used Debian 11 and erased the hard disk of all the files.

It takes 2 days and 9 hours to erase a one terabyte hard disk.

6. I am not going to wait for 3 days.

7. Once 5 GB was erased (I had figured out the corruption file is within that region) I aborted the erasing of the hard drive.

Since I was working on partitioning, Debian had figured out my requirement and made a 25 GB FAT partition and the rest NTFS briskly.

8. Mounted Ubuntu and installed Ubuntu on the 25 GB and another 300 GB NTFS copy filing, and kept rest 500 GB reserved for future installation.

That's it.

Few more points before winding up.

I took very big RISK.

With power cuts going on, if power went out, when zeros and ones were written, I could have got a permanently damaged external hard disk.
UPS could stand for only 20 minutes.
UPS is mandatory.
If one had two UPS, better it is.

Do not do it with full stomach.

You fall sleepy when computer or the installation is waiting for you to make an entry.

One should have 6 to 8 hours completely free.

If you are married you must wait till she or he goes to see a sick aunt or uncle and is not at home.

Fridge is full of cooked food.

I had a light meal.
A tea.
A coffee.
Another snack, rather some jelly.

Unfortunately no chocolates (what is available in Ceylon is very expensive).

Another tea with biscuits.

And Ubuntu is on my external disk all nicely installed.

Due to zeros and ones this was the longest Ubuntu install in my life.
I used cell phone in between and fished out all the external disks and assortment of USBs with various distributions and MultiSystem installed on them.

If you a impatient young guy, DO not try Partitioning.

There is a guy in the YouTube who pretends installing Linux (multiple distribution s) is damn easy and breezy.

I strongly discourage using mirrors and downloading (on the go) updates while installing.

It slows down the installation and if power fails one has to do it all over again.

All one needs is in a installation image.
One can add on once the basic system is on.
Even then I cannot get AbiWord.
Only Emmabantus has AbiWord.

Ubuntu and Debian do not.

Happily I did NOT have any misadventures, at all.

I am telling you, it is not easy with over 20 years of experience.

I still make mistakes with my memory failing, like forgetting the administrator password.

I have written a few simple books  on Linux some are outdated by now but the basics are the same.

New book will come soon with Kernel 11 issues, if there are any.

Hopefully, not.
Linus Torvalds is doing a grand job.

Before that I needed, an updated Linux running in my computer.

Debian 11, Kernal 5.1

Debian 11, Kernel 5.1, I installed in my computer and on an external Seagate disk.
I had a few problems, booting it from the external Seagate disk which had functional Emmabantus.
I use Emmabantus to use Abiword.
I am getting very well organized with LibreOffice 7 version, which is fabulous on both Emmabantus and Debian 11.
I have few books already finished but going through Typos and final editing.
The next book I am working will be about the problem with SSD versus mechanical rotating disk.
I have many problems with SSD which I have solved using an external disk.
More will be on this book.
Plasma desktop of Debian is sleek.
Finally it has got a live CD with the installation (Calamaras Installation) capability which was just like Mandrake/PCLinux live session.
But I prefer standard graphic installation which is second nature to me.
New Partitioning  on a disk already having a functional distribution is pretty daunting but I figured out, all the feasible solutions.
In a I TB hard disk having one distribution is simply, wasting resources.
What I mean is having  MaC Apple or Windows running usually on two separate computer units is absolutely ridiculous facing a massive economic down turn.
Partition of  Disk
Partitioning is a messy job.
I will write a new blog piece.
Details I will reserve for the book and my first little book on Linux is about partitioning.
That book is outdated since I used partition magic installed in Windows to access the hard disk  secondary to  Microsoft booting requirement.
No dual booting at all.
I do not want Microsoft to tell what I do with my computer.
Over 20 years I have not used a single file (exe extension) of windows for my work.
My workhorse is Debian by default which has over 60,000 utilities and I use only sbout 3000 Debian files 2700 for installation and another 300 for my work.

Partition file  is my bonfide.