two superstars

After Golden State and Cleveland finish cleaning up in their respective conference finals (the Warriors lead Houston 3-0; the Cavs, same thing over Atlanta), we'll have the pleasure of watching (arguably) the NBA's two best players in The Finals.

Golden State's Stephen Curry, playoff per game numbers so far (13 games): 29.9 points, 6.6 assists, 5.0 rebounds, 1.8 steals, 0.2 blocks, 47.5 FG%, 44.8 3PT%, 82.4 FT%.

Cleveland's LeBron James, playoff per game numbers so far (13 games): 27.9 points, 8.4 assists, 10.5 rebounds, 1.8 steals, 1.3 blocks, 42.4 FG%, 16.1 3PT%, 78.1 FT%.

LeBron's shooting hasn't been good. But the team he's about to lead into The Finals is hit hard by injuries, missing both forward Kevin Love and guard Kyrie Irving. Take that same team and replace LeBron with any other player in the game and you won't still be playing come June. Also, he's averaging close to a triple-double (points, assists, rebounds) for the playoffs. Impressive effort.

Steph has been spectacular shooting the ball. The talented son of former NBA star Dell Curry has a chance to add a Finals MVP award to the one he just picked up for the 2014-15 regular season. He's become the most popular basketball player in the country, it seems. And, possibly, the most dangerous.

The Warriors appear to have the better team, and the best shooter in the game. The Cavs... Well, the oft-repeated theme these days is that the Cavs have the best player in the world, which is probably true. My guess: Golden State in six. Enjoy!

no vote

This week's DistroWatch Weekly includes their "first weekly opinion poll," where readers can vote on their "Favourite Desktop." The choices:

- Cinnamon
- Enlightenment
- GNOME Shell
- KDE
- LXDE
- MATE
- Unity
- Xfce
- Other

This list didn't include any "window managers" -- if you prefer only Openbox or Fluxbox or AwesomeWM or Window Maker, etc., your vote gets lumped under "Other."

I'm writing this from Fluxbox in openSUSE, but Fluxbox is only one of several environments I regularly use. I have each of the following DEs/WMs installed somewhere on at least one of my systems: Cinnamon, Fluxbox, GNOME Shell, KDE, Openbox, LXDE, Unity, and Xfce. The laptop that I call my "primary" computer was running Xfce in Debian Wheezy until recently; now it's running KDE in Debian Jessie, with Openbox added.

I don't have a favorite; there are things that I like about each environment, and I'm quite comfortable using any of them. So, I'll pass on casting a vote in this week's poll.

cinnamon added

In my Debian Jessie GNOME installation, I added the Cinnamon desktop by going to Synaptic and installing the cinnamon package (version 2.2.16-5). This brought in the following additional packages:

cinnamon-common (2.2.16-5)
cinnamon-control-center (2.2.11-4)
cinnamon-control-center-data (2.2.11-4)
cinnamon-desktop-data (2.2.3-3)
cinnamon-l10n (2.2.4-1)
cinnamon-screensaver (2.2.4-6)
cinnamon-session (2.2.2-5)
cinnamon-session-common (2.2.2-5)
cinnamon-settings-daemon (2.2.4.repack-7)
cjs (2.2.2-2)
gir1.2-cinnamondesktop-3.0 (2.2.3-3)
gir1.2-cmenu-3.0 (2.2.0-3)
gir1.2-gconf-2.0 (3.2.6-3)
gir1.2-meta-muffin-0.0 (2.2.6-4)
gnome-power-manager (3.14.1-1)
libcinnamon-control-center1 (2.2.11-4)
libcinnamon-desktop4 (2.2.3-3)
libcinnamon-menu-3-0 (2.2.0-3)
libcjs0 (2.2.2-2)
libmozjs185-1.0 (1.8.5-1.0.0+dfsg-4.3)
libmuffin0 (2.2.6-4)
libnemo-extension1 (2.2.4-2)
muffin-common (2.2.6-4)
nemo (2.2.4-2)
nemo-data (2.2.4-2)
nemo-fileroller (1.8.0-1)
python-pam (0.4.2-13.1)
python-pyinotify (0.9.4-1)


I set up Cinnamon with the panel at the top instead of the more traditional (and default) bottom placement. I added, removed, and/or moved some panel items, so the shots below show a somewhat personalized desktop:

Cinnamon's Expo provides a nice workspace overview:

Cinnamon's default file manager is Nemo, which I prefer over Nautilus. I'm very comfortable using GNOME Shell, but many people are not. Cinnamon seems to be very nicely done in Debian Jessie, giving users yet another excellent desktop option. Note: Jessie Cinnamon ISOs (there's a live one, too) are available at debian.org, so you don't have to add Cinnamon to an existing installation like I did.

debian live

The Debian Live project used to be a kinda separate project, and the images would come out some time after the Stable release. Now, for the first time, the live images are made available at debian dot org "as a new alternative to the standard images."  A nice step forward for Debian, in my opinion.

I used the GNOME live image to install Jessie over my Wheezy GNOME installation (that was the last remaining Wheezy installation here). I like to use Unetbootin to get the .iso onto a flash drive, but sometimes that doesn't work out -- I've had problems trying to use it with Jessie images. Better to use dd; in this case, I ran:

#  dd if=/home/steve/Downloads/debian-live-8.0.0-i386-gnome-desktop.iso of=/dev/sdb

The live session looks good, but I couldn't find an "Install" icon or menu entry; looks like you have to reboot and then choose one of the installation options from the boot menu. Then it's just a straight Debian installation.

There's a curious entry in the menu (in the GNOME Shell Activities overview): "Install Debian sid." Interesting.

Also, the live session doesn't ship with GParted. However, it does ship with Synaptic, so GParted could be easily added for the live session, if there's an internet connection. They ship  the GNOME Disk Utility, which shows up in the menu as "Disks":

Looks fine for obtaining the same type of info I'd get from GParted, but I don't know if I'd actually use it for partitioning.

Overall, it's a pretty good live session. Very snappy if run from a flash drive, of course. I'd add an "Install" button and GParted, that's about it. Recently, I've spent some time with the latest MX release's live session and with live sessions from Linux Mint Debian. MX is kinda nice because it can give you root and/or home persistence, but for the most part any one of those distros' live sessions is about as good as the other, so I'd just as soon use the one that comes straight from Debian.

The installed Jessie GNOME (it's GNOME 3.14) looks great; I haven't found a need to add any GNOME Shell extensions. Remember to edit the sources.list file and comment out the line for the CD if you don't need it.