an old favorite

Enjoyed the article by M. Hanny Sabbagh, "18 Years Ago, Linux’s Legendary Package Manager Synaptic was Released", which begins with these lines:

"What is the first thing you do after you install Ubuntu or Debian? For me, and literally for almost everybody I met in the Linux world, the first thing is to install Synaptic."

That's exactly what I'd been doing for years with any Debian-based distro I installed, unless the distro shipped with Synaptic by default! I've never really warmed up to any other GUI package manager; always felt that nothing I saw was any better than what I got with Synaptic.

In recent years, I've been doing all of my package management from the command line, so making sure that I've got Synaptic installed isn't the first thing I do anymore. I do like to have it on-hand, even if I don't really use it now; I've learned to get along fine without it. Still, Synaptic remains my favorite GUI package manager.

looks like the real deal

20 year-old Luka Doncic of the Dallas Mavericks, in his 2nd NBA season, through 16 games:

30.6 points per game
9.8 assists per game
10.1 rebounds per game
49.5% FG percentage
34.7% 3PT percentage
81.7% FT percentage

separation of powers

“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.”

-- U.S. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson

piano

Here's one that I have on CD, playing it right now:  Ahmad Jamal, Chicago Revisited - Live at Joe Segal's Jazz Showcase.

Recorded in 1992. I was kinda surprised to see it at YouTube -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v783UhX8Zho&list=OLAK5uy_nKuonnPkVPKB6jGfV__GZuXsFqbU3Szis

I was introduced to The Ahmad Jamal Trio way back in the early 70s by my mom, who played (and still plays!) piano.

let's leave that stuff out

Blog post by "Robin", who I consider to be a friend of mine: "Political Linux"

I like the antiX distro, which I usually keep on a flash drive here, for live sessions. Great distro. But I agree 100%, keep the politics out of it!

celtic great

From ESPN, as reported by the Associated Press:

Bill Russell finally accepted his Basketball Hall of Fame ring.

The 11-time NBA champion, five-time MVP, Olympic gold medalist and two-time NCAA champ said on Twitter on Friday that he was presented with his Hall of Fame ring in a private ceremony.

The 85-year-old Boston Celtics great didn't attend the induction ceremony in 1975. He said he didn't deserve to be the first black player inducted, tweeting: "I felt others before me should have that honor."

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/28088224/bill-russell-accepts-hall-fame-ring-44-years-induction

https://twitter.com/RealBillRussell/status/1195370531962281984/photo/1

Without a doubt, one of the greatest and classiest NBA players of all time.

oops

Oops, wrong distro.

warming up to lxqt

I finally got LXQt configured into a setup I really like. I put a shortened, vertical panel at the upper left of the desktop, and I have a little horizontal panel, set to auto-hide, at the upper right.

There's an icon for the LXQt menu at the bottom of the vertical panel, while the Openbox menu is accessible by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop.

The Configuration Center is simple but nice enough. It was kinda annoying that LXDE (from which sprang LXQt) didn't have something like it.

I put a "Leave" button on the horizontal panel; this shot shows the dialog box that button brings up:

Not a perfect desktop environment (is there such a thing?), but LXQt is light, simple, and a pleasure to use. Development on the project has come along slowly; it'll be interesting to see how the LXQt desktop looks in, say, five years.

an easier way

I recently did an installation using the Anarchy Linux Arch Installer (see: https://www.anarchylinux.org/). I downloaded anarchy-1.0.8-x86_64.iso, wrote it to a flash drive, and booted into the text-based installer. I chose the "Anarchy-xfce4" desktop installation. The installer gave me the option to install other packages, but I chose only Audacious, Firefox, and Geany to start out with.

The installation steps weren't difficult to navigate, and there weren't many steps; just had to wait for stuff to get downloaded and installed. I couldn't find much documentation for Anarchy, but the idea is to refer to the Arch Linux documentation, so I did that.

Anarchy gave me a nice Xfce setup, usable right out of the box for getting to work.

I removed some of the stuff that Anarchy installed, running sudo pacman -Rns vlc libreoffice-fresh chromium gnome-packagekit. I added a few more packages, made some other changes under the hood, and totally re-did the desktop. I added libreoffice-still to replace libreoffice-fresh.

I actually needed a few tries to get the hang of the Anarchy installer, but the end result is a very nice Arch Linux installation. It looks like a nice way for a user to get a first taste of Arch, but folks who are already familiar with the Arch installation process might appreciate Anarchy as well. I think that experienced Arch users would be better able to take advantage of it than those who've never been through a "real" Arch installation.