still playing beautiful music

A little over 10 years ago, in my "Sony Minidisc" post, I wrote: "However, I still find myself going back to my old Sony MZ-S1 Minidisc players."

The Sony MiniDisc already seemed "obsolete" by 2009. I think Sony finally shipped the last MiniDisc Walkman a couple of years later. But here in 2019, I'm still, every now and then, playing music from these MiniDisc players!

I don't have Windows around anymore, so I can't make any changes on the discs, and I can't add music to them. And I don't really use headphones/earbuds much anymore; I hook up one of the MiniDisc players to a pair of computer speakers, and to a power outlet, set the player to "Shuffle-Repeat", then kick back and enjoy for a few hours.

The music still sounds great; the devices still work flawlessly. I'm just gonna keep on using these MiniDisc players until they finally wear out. Unless they outlast me!

Now playing: "The Offbeat of Avenues" by The Manhattan Transfer, off the 1991 album of the same name. Beautiful!

sakura

There are many excellent terminal emulators out there for Linux users. One that doesn't seem to get mentioned often (or, I should say that I don't recall seeing the name before today): Sakura, which I'm testing out now.

Lightweight, distro agnostic, doesn't have a lot of dependencies; seems to fit in nicely with some things I like to do here. There's a GUI menu that pops up with a right-click on the window, but there's also a nice configuration file (~/.config/sakura/sakura.conf).

I first tried Sakura in Kubuntu 18.04, in an Openbox session. A couple of shots:

The sakura -? command shows Help options, and there's a manpage that can be brought up with the man sakura command. Also, I found some nice tips at this web page: http://troubleshooters.com/linux/sakura.htm

I see Sakura available from the repos for Debian Stable and Ubuntu 18.04 ("Bionic"), as well as from Arch's Community repo. It's quick and easy to install, and well worth taking for a test spin.

buster lxqt w/ openbox

I've been running the Jessie-based BunsenLabs "Deuterium" on my "test" computer, patiently waiting for the Buster-based BL "Lithium" release. On a whim, I decided to take a look at Debian Buster LXQt to see how it might do on that computer.

I started out by downloading  debian-live-10.0.0-amd64-lxqt.iso and getting that onto a flash drive. The live session booted up on two of my machines, but I couldn't get into the live session using my "test" computer; booting with the Graphical Debian Installer option worked fine with that hardware, however.

Buster LXQt ships with a standard desktop setup and a nice collection of apps, including Firefox ESR, Thunderbird, PCManFM-qt, the LibreOffice suite, Audacious music player, qpdfview, LXImage, and QTerminal, among many others.

I found xfce4-screenshooter in the menu along with another screenshot tool, ScreenGrab, which seems to be a nice app. ScreenGrab gets the job done, and also it stays open between screenshots, unlike xfce4-screenshooter.

Here's a shot of PCManFM-qt, which offers a nice, commander-style split view. I found some items in the Trash. How they got there is a mystery; I didn't intentionally put them there!

I added Openbox, installed a handful of other packages, and did a heck of a lot of tinkering and tweaking -- so much, in fact, that I didn't do a good job of taking notes on everything that I did, which is something that I'm normally very meticulous about. Debian Stable doesn't really give the user a great out-of-the-box experience, but it's excellent for the "do-it-yourself" user who wants to put together a nice, customized system.

A couple more shots of my Openbox desktop, showing QTerminal, ScreenGrab, my tint2 setup, and my Openbox menu:

I like a vertical panel along the left side. For Openbox, tint2 gives me just what I need. For the LXQt sessions, I was able to get a decent left-side vertical panel -- not perfect (I wasn't satisfied with the config options available for the LXQt panel), but it'll do.

As a former CrunchBang user and fanboy, my original plan was to stick with BunsenLabs (perhaps the best Debian-based Openbox distro out there right now) for this computer, and to do a quick-and-easy installation of "Lithium" once it came out. As things have turned out, I'm happy with this Buster LXQt (with Openbox) setup, even though it took a lot of work to get things the way I like them. The thing is that while BunsenLabs is better than "straight" Debian for installing and getting to work right away, I'm never quite satisfied with the default BL setup (same goes for any distro, really!), so either way I was gonna spend a lot of time tinkering and tweaking.

Seems to me that LXQt still needs more polish, especially when it comes to GUI configuration options, but it isn't so bad, overall. It's a decent solution for those who need a light-weight desktop environment for low-performance hardware.

excellent ob/fb info

For some very helpful info on setting up Openbox and Fluxbox, see Addy's Blog -- three articles to check out are "My Fluxbox Configurations", "My Openbox Configurations", and "Automatically Generate Openbox Applications Menu".

buster-updates

In the two Debian Buster installations I did while Buster was still in Testing, the /etc/apt/sources.list file does not contain the buster-updates (previously "volatile") lines. I don't think that suite comes into play until the Stable release.

The Debian Wiki's "SourcesList" page (https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList) shows example sources.list files for Buster, and they include the buster-updates suite. So I went ahead and added them here.

Here's my edited sources.list file in Buster Xfce, which I installed from Testing way back in April:

buster gnome

Debian 10 "Buster" review at DistroWatch: https://www.distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20190715#debian

My experiences with Buster GNOME, which I installed a few days ago, have been somewhat similar to what Jesse Smith saw, although I went with a few different installations options. I prefer a network install, so I downloaded debian-10.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso and used that instead of one of the CD/DVD iso images. Smith wrote:

I ended up downloading the DVD install media, which is 3.6GB in size. I also downloaded the official live GNOME edition which is 2.3GB. My observations in this review come from installing and running Debian based on the install DVD media, unless otherwise specified.

I stayed with gdm3 instead of switching to lightdm, but Smith said that he went with LightDM when the installer gave him the option of using that or GDM as the session manager.

I haven't looked at a GNOME Classic session because I prefer GNOME Shell over the "classic" look. Smith said:

For the most part, I used GNOME Classic during my trial, but I did occasionally use the GNOME Shell session too.

He also mentions that he included MATE during the installation, but he doesn't say anything in the review about actually using MATE in Buster.

I haven't tried a live session yet. Smith wrote:

...when booting from the live desktop disc, the distribution could not launch a graphical interface when loading in UEFI mode. I could boot to a text console, but the operating system could not display a desktop or launch an X.Org session. When booting from legacy BIOS mode, Debian's live disc booted into the GNOME desktop and ran smoothly.

And, regarding wireless:

The most common complaint I keep seeing about Debian 10 in user-supplied reviews and on forums is that wireless connections do not work. This is because people are downloading the official ISO files which do not include non-free firmware, meaning most wireless cards will not work. While Debian offers unofficial media with the non-free firmware, which would enable wi-fi to work, the unofficial media is hard to find and it's not clear from the download page that it even exists or why people would need to use it. This separation of free and non-free firmware media is not even mentioned in the release announcement. Which means a lot of people are giving up on using Debian from a combination of the free firmware only policy and unclear documentation.

I am not using wireless. However, one of the first thing I do with Debian, post-install, is to set up the repos; I like to do this by editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file with nano, and I add the contrib and non-free components on the relevant lines in that file.

As noted in the Debian GNU/Linux Installation Guide (see https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual), section "6.3.2.1. Set the Root Password":

In case you do not specify a password for the “root” user here, this account will be disabled but the sudo package will be installed later to enable administrative tasks to be carried out on the new system. By default, the first user created on the system will be allowed to use the sudo command to become root.

I didn't specify a root password there; I've been using sudo.

Anyway, I thought Smith did a good job with this review.

I've added a handful of my favorite apps to Buster GNOME and tweaked things according to my own tastes. Excellent release, from what I'm seeing.

Here's a link to the "Getting Debian" page: https://www.debian.org/distrib/

dedoimedo looks at geany

Here's another look at Geany, which has been my text editor of choice for several years now: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/geany-text-editor.html