Thursday, August 31, 2017

dist-upgrade, full-upgrade

From what I can determine, these two commands do the same thing:

# apt-get dist-upgrade

# apt full-upgrade

The following appears to work the same as the above commands as well, although the option is not explicitly defined in man apt:

# apt dist-upgrade

This is because most (if not all) apt-get commands can also be used as apt commands.

From man apt-get:

       upgrade
           upgrade is used to install the newest versions of all packages currently
           installed on the system from the sources enumerated in
           /etc/apt/sources.list. Packages currently installed with new versions
           available are retrieved and upgraded; under no circumstances are currently
           installed packages removed, or packages not already installed retrieved and
           installed. New versions of currently installed packages that cannot be
           upgraded without changing the install status of another package will be left
           at their current version. An update must be performed first so that apt-get
           knows that new versions of packages are available.

       dist-upgrade
           dist-upgrade in addition to performing the function of upgrade, also
           intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions of packages;
           apt-get has a "smart" conflict resolution system, and it will attempt to
           upgrade the most important packages at the expense of less important ones if
           necessary. The dist-upgrade command may therefore remove some packages. The
           /etc/apt/sources.list file contains a list of locations from which to
           retrieve desired package files. See also apt_preferences(5) for a mechanism
           for overriding the general settings for individual packages.


From man apt:

       upgrade (apt-get(8))
           upgrade is used to install available upgrades of all packages currently
           installed on the system from the sources configured via sources.list(5). New
           packages will be installed if required to satisfy dependencies, but existing
           packages will never be removed. If an upgrade for a package requires the
           remove of an installed package the upgrade for this package isn't performed.

       full-upgrade (apt-get(8))
           full-upgrade performs the function of upgrade but will remove currently
           installed packages if this is needed to upgrade the system as a whole.


refcard

Screenshots of the two-page Debian Reference Card:



There are a couple of different ways to get a copy of this handy document. The package debian-refcard (v. 9.0.4) is available from the Stretch (Stable) repos, but it isn't the most up-to-date version of the document. Once installed, it can be found at /usr/share/doc/debian-refcard/refcard-en-a4.pdf.gz/refcard-en-a4.pdf. When I open up this document, I see:
Debian GNU/Linux Reference Card
Version 9.0 - Debian 9 'Stretch' - 2016-07-09
Alternatively, one can click on the "Debian GNU/Linux Reference Card" link at https://www.debian.org/doc/ to download the refcard document, or download the latest refcard.en.pdf document from https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/refcard/. When I open the refcard.en.pdf document I downloaded, I see:
Debian Reference Card
Version 10.0 - Debian 10 'Buster' -- 2017-07-14
That more up-to-date version appears to be the same one currently found in the Testing and sid repos.

brain damaging sports

Column by Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune: I don't think I can watch football anymore
The most debilitating part of the sport appears to be not the rare concussion but the regular, inevitable blows to the head that occur at every level. A study conducted by Stanford researchers on Stanford players found that in a game, the typical offensive lineman endures 62 such hits, each equivalent in force to driving a car into a brick wall at 30 mph.
Ouch. Same thing with boxing, I'm thinking. But I don't know if I'm at the point where I can stop watching football and boxing. Not yet, anyway.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

soul deluxe

The "Soul Deluxe" radio program plays on KUNM here in Albuquerque every Sunday morning from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. Nice segment.

The DJ is Byron Fenix, out of Camelback H.S. in Phoenix. Born to a Navajo father and a half-Hopi, half-Navajo mother.

This show comes to us in Albuquerque via Native Voice One, the Native American Radio Network.

From http://www.souldeluxeradio.com/about/:

Soul Deluxe is a weekly radio program featuring eclectic mix sets by Phoenix-based DJ Byron Fenix.  The show spotlights Soul music and various genres that either gave rise to or were influenced by it, including Electronic, Disco, Funk, Hip-Hop, House, Jazz, and R&B. In addition to the music, the show exposes listeners to a variety of emerging urban-themed artists and musicians.

The program has its genesis in “Unity Vibe,” an earlier mix show launched in late 2008 on community radio station Radio Phoenix, which was hosted by Phoenix-based DJ RMC (Ruben Candelaria). One of RMC’s regular co-hosts was an emerging mix DJ by the name of Byron Fenix. When RMC decided to end “Unity Vibe” in mid 2010 to focus on his family, Byron took over his old time slot and launched the weekly radio program now known as Soul Deluxe. Since “Unity Vibe” focused on spotlighting house music, the early days of “Soul Deluxe” followed in the same direction.

As time went on, Byron decided to focus his mixes on more soulful cuts from a variety of genres including electronic, disco, jazz, and R&B. The show also began to spotlight emerging urban artists and musicians. Past guests on the show have included dance music artists Mochico & Boogie, Native American artist Damien Jim, and Byron’s former co-host DJ RMC.

Soul Deluxe is produced by Radio Phoenix in Phoenix, Arizona, and is distributed nationally by Native Voice One (NV1).

Monday, August 21, 2017

fluxbox info

For those who want to learn to use Fluxbox, it's all about finding and reading the documentation -- the online documentation (a few web searches will turn up tons of info) and the installed documentation.


Documentation that comes with Fluxbox (in most distros):

As I wrote in "diggin' some fluxbox!":

For a little help and info, run:

$ fluxbox -h

$ fluxbox -info

man pages
:
See man fluxbox as well as these other man pages: fluxbox-apps(5) fluxbox-keys(5) fluxbox-style(5) fluxbox-menu(5) fluxbox-remote(1) fbsetroot(1) fbsetbg(1) fbrun(1) startfluxbox(1)



Online documentation:

Fluxbox home page: http://www.fluxbox.org/
Fluxbox FAQ: http://fluxbox-wiki.org/FAQ_en.html
man fluxbox online: http://www.fluxbox.org/help/man-fluxbox.php

Some distro-specific Fluxbox pages:

Debian: https://wiki.debian.org/FluxBox
Ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fluxbox
Arch: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fluxbox

Friday, August 18, 2017

smh

Atlantic article:

What Kind of Monuments Does President Trump Value?

"He’s spoken in support of Confederate statues while threatening to undo as many as 40 conservation parks."

"...the excitement with which the president defends one kind of monument, while undermining another, does raise the question: What kind of history does the president value? What does it look like when history is destroyed? And what kinds of beauty and culture can be truly lost—what treasures of the United States can, once removed, never by human hands be comparably replaced?"

Ugh.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

42.3 review

A nicely done review of openSUSE "Leap" 42.3 at DistroWatch, by Joshua Allen Holm: https://www.distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=current&mode=67#opensuse

the latest gparted live

I wrote about GParted Live a few years back in "for partitioning" (January 25, 2015). That was version 0.20.2, and I used Unetbootin to put it on a flash drive. For the current version, I downloaded gparted-live-0.29.0-1-amd64.iso (released August 8, 2017) and used the following dd command to put it on my flash drive:

$ sudo dd if=/home/steve/Downloads/gparted-live-0.29.0-1-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M; sync

Partitioning hard drives is about the only thing I ever use GParted Live for, and that's its main purpose. The system boots up, and GParted is started automatically:



GParted uses the Fluxbox window manager. Here's a shot of the empty desktop:



GParted Live ships with other tools besides GParted, including:

PCManFM 1.2.5
NetSurf 3.6
LXTerminal 0.3.0
Leafpad 0.8.18.1
GSmartControl 1.0.1
Partition Image 0.6.9

NetSurf didn't work for me out of the box, so I didn't concern myself with it:



I don't know why the Calcoo calculator is included, but it's pretty cool:



The lower-level tool xcalc is also available, for those who want something simpler.

GSmartControl, as described here, "is a graphical user interface for
smartctl (from smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk and solid-state drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's SMART data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it."

Here's a shot:



Tools that don't appear in the Fluxbox menu can be found by examining the /usr/bin and /usr/share/applications directories. Some included command-line utilities:

fsarchiver      - File system archiver and restorer
partclone       - Backup partitions into a compressed image file (e.g., partclone.ext4)
partimage       - Backup partitions into a compressed image file
testdisk        - Data recovery tool that can help recover lost partitions
gpart   - (Older) data recovery tool that can help recover lost msdos partition tables
grub    - GRand Unified Bootloader for restoring GRUB 2 boot loader
mc      - Text based file manager known as Midnight Commander
nano    - Text editor
vim-tiny        - Enhanced vi text editor
parted  - Partition table editor
fdisk   - MSDOS partition table editor
sfdisk  - MSDOS partition table editor also useful to save/restore partition table to/from a file
gdisk   - GPT partition table editor
sgdisk  - GPT partition table editor also useful to save/restore partition table to/from a file
gptsync         - GPT and MSDOS partition tables synchronization tool useful for Mac OS X users
openssh         - Secure shell (ssh) connectivity tool suite
screen  - Screen manager with VT100/ANSI terminal emulation
ping    - Check network connectivity to another host on a network
rsync   - Fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool
telnet  - Communicate with another host using the TELNET protocol
traceroute      - Print the route packets trace to network host
bc      - Arbitrary precision calculator language

So, GParted Live can be used for a lot of things. While partitions on a hard drive or flash drive are not, by default, automatically mounted and accessible from GParted Live, I was able to access my hard drives, as well as another flash drive, by creating a mount point and then mounting the partition. I think I had to use sudo, but it didn't prompt me for a password. To get access to my drive's sda6 partition, for example, I used the following commands (after taking a look at the output from the lsblk command):

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/sda6
$ sudo mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/sda6

I used a similar routine to mount and access a flash drive (at /dev/sdc).

GParted Live's repository files are at /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/drbl-repository.list. As you can see below, GParted Live is based on Debian Sid. The contents of the sources.list file:

deb http://free.nchc.org.tw/debian sid main non-free
deb-src http://free.nchc.org.tw/debian sid main non-free

And, the contents of the drbl-repository.list file:

deb http://free.nchc.org.tw/drbl-core drbl unstable live-unstable
deb-src http://free.nchc.org.tw/drbl-core drbl unstable live-unstable

For download links and (much) more information, visit: http://gparted.org/livecd.php

Also, see the GParted Live page at DistroWatch: https://www.distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gparted