Saturday night quietude

[altivo]

And that's good, really. After this week I need it. Gary's gone to some music thing or other, the second one today. He left at one and passed through for about ten minutes at around six, probably won't be back until midnight or so I think.

I got chores done, and though I should be working on weaving this weekend I picked up Kyell Gold's Shadow of the Father instead. It's off to a good start, and I have some notions about where it's going but only vague ones. This volume picks up something like 15 years or so after Pendant of Fortune, and though Volle and Streak both appear in the opening scenes, it's not their story. Instead it's about Yilon, Volle's second son, whom Lord Dewanne promised to designate as his heir in the last book. The story opens with the arrival of the steward of Dewanne, who has come bearing the news of old Lord Dewanne's death and to escort Yilon to his new lands to be confirmed as Lord, after which he will have to return and swear fealty to the king. Yilon is not eager to go, as we soon learn, but has no choice. Kyell is headed into new territory too, as this one promises to be an action adventure tale, where Pendant of Fortune was a mystery-suspense story and Volle was largely a period romance.

I've found the workaround to allow my new camera to talk to Linux. It turns out that the camera is accessible as it should be, using the proper tools, but only to the root user. Obviously this is an issue with file and device permissions, and something isn't going right in HAL or udev. It may take a while to find how to tweak the configuration for those, since the "documentation," if you can call it that, is very, very spotty and deficient. Both have also been in rapid development for the last three years, so what you can actually find is often obsolete. What it seems to come down to, though, is that the device files created when the camera is plugged into USB have "0760" permission bits and need "0766" in order for the camera to be accessible to an ordinary user. That or the group for the files needs to be changed to one to which the target user has access. It's a nuisance, but I can change those permissions after connecting the camera. Then the correct utilities will work with it. All this is resolved and works correctly in the latest Debian, as I found out when I tried it at work. I hate to give up Wolvix, but it may be time. The distribution is lagging behind and doesn't seem to be getting upgrades. Supposedly a new version based on a newer kernel is in the works, but it has already been two years...

Possible rain, maybe even some freezing, is predicted for after midnight tonight. STill too cloudy to see the moon, though the sun did come out for a brief time this afternoon.

Oh, and this morning, as I was getting ready to turn the sheep out, one of the Brit neighbors' dogs ran into the sheep yard with an object in his mouth and proceeded to bury it. I pointed it out to Gary, and he looked to see what it was. It was a chunk of mineral block about 1-1/2 inches across, from the gated sheepfold in the barn. Gary replaced their block with a new one earlier this week, and tossed the fragments of the old one outside. The block is made of salt and molasses, with various minerals added. I suspect the sweet taste combined with the strong smell of sheep (they rub their faces and necks on it sometimes) made it attractive enough to bury for later.

Comments

[moonhare]

Possible rain, maybe even some freezing, is predicted for after midnight tonight.

Nice and clear here, so far. Moon is out in front of the house and calling to me (the skylight is above the bed and the light will be streaming in). Temps here dipped almost into the teens last night. Cold all day.

[altivo]

We're still just overcast enough to inhibit the moon at night. Are were-rabbits inspired to transformation by the moon?

[moonhare]

I know it affects me - I get twitchy and anxious and my moods swing. :o)

[altivo]

Legend and popular belief to the contrary, I've never noticed that moon phases affect my mental or physical state in any consistent way.

However, it does appear that we'll have a clear enough sky tonight to at least see the moon at full.

[moonhare]

We're under siege by rain. I'm at work, finishing emailing the boss that I've vacuumed up the standing water in the stacks and set the dehumidifier and fans to run run run.

My road in was flooded, water surging across where the culverts were unable to handle flow. I may need an alternate route home.

[altivo]

Be careful! I saw in the news that Massachussetts was having flood problems and wondered about the rest of New England. We have the opposite here, as suddenly it's become unseasonably dry. Predicted rains have failed to materialize in the past week or so, and the last real precipitation we had was that late snow.

[moonhare]

Got home okay, thanks, although I was detoured at the point I had expected where the water was rushing over and under the road! Possibly washed out, but maybe just a precaution. 3 if not 4 police cars- that's a lot of coffee and doughnuts for one little intersection ;o)

[altivo]

Maybe they could use doughnuts to fill the sandbags.

We had rain like that last spring here. I remember one night when I thought I'd never get home. Not from work, but from where we went for dinner afterward.

[feathertail]

You could always try Ubuntu Furry Remix! (Although it's basically just a theme, which you may or may not like. Plus it's based on Ubuntu, although the .deb files will probably work just fine on Debian.)

[altivo]

I'd rather avoid Ubuntu. Though they've done a lot to increase acceptance of Linux, they did that by adding in many of the elements that I dislike about Windows. Debian is closer to the degree of control I prefer. I'm reluctant to abandon my Slackware roots, as I've been using it for almost 20 years now, but it's clear that the mainstream of Linux is leaving it behind. Being able to download a pre-packaged application is certainly an advantage over having to compile everything from source, and especially so when you often have to patch the source to get it working.

[altivo]

See tonight's post. I'd forgotten about Xubuntu, which is lighter and more like what I prefer to install. So the Ubuntu family is back in the running here.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

That's my only problem with linux there are so many builds and some lag and are forgotten and some zoom ahead then die quickly.

[altivo]

That has mostly begun to shake itself out. RedHat, Debian, and Gentoo are the three most lively lines now. Slackware is still alive, but mostly out of sheer stubbornness and because it sometimes supports older hardware better. RedHat is the commercial choice, it seems, and remains popular with corporate users who don't think software could be any good unless you pay for it. Debian, and particularly its offspring Ubuntu, is becoming the market share leader. Gentoo lives mainly for hackers and people with 64-bit processors. The rest of the dozens of Linux family trees seem to be pretty much withering on the branch these days. Some of them may survive because they are good for one special niche or another, but in the long run I think Debian and its various "flavors" and RedHat with its various "added-value" resellers are going to form the bulk of Linux installations for the forseeable future.

The key to Debian's ascendance, in my opinion, is a solid mechanism for updating and maintaining the software without the need for a skilled technician to fit the pieces together. Ubuntu added easy scripted installation that configures the software for the user without the need to know hardware details or edit configuration files. Ubuntu also makes a selection of the "recommended" desktop applications for the user, without presenting them with the thousands of options that a pure Debian install can offer. Most people don't want to have to make those decisions and would rather take a single default. Ubuntu makes that viable, and has managed to keep a lot of novice users happy.