brilliant decision

Not everyone thinks that it's such a good idea to have organized football, at any level, during this particular time. USA Today's Christine Brennan penned a column that speaks for many of us: "Opinion: Big Ten's decision to play football signals darkest day in conference's sports history":

 An excerpt:

 [...]

Just as the Big Ten was looking smarter by the day as COVID-19 outbreaks popped up at Michigan State, Wisconsin and Maryland while other conferences playing football announced COVID-related postponements and soaring cases, the league’s presidents reversed themselves and decided to steer their schools and their football programs right into the teeth of what are predicted to be some of the worst days of the pandemic in October and November.

And how are they doing it? With a mountain of daily antigen tests, special delivery for Big Ten football teams only. Rapid tests for football players, but apparently not for the elderly in Ann Arbor or Columbus or Evanston, or for school children and teachers in Bloomington or New Brunswick or Minneapolis, or for students paying for their education amid the outbreaks in East Lansing or Madison or College Park.

So how will this work? Smooth as silk, I’m sure. Let’s look at Michigan State. The other day, all MSU students were asked to self-quarantine – and 30 large houses, including 23 fraternities and sororities, were ordered into mandatory quarantine – after the school announced 342 new coronavirus cases.

“This is an urgent situation,” Ingham County Health Officer Linda S. Vail said. “The exponential growth of COVID-19 cases must stop.”

So hey, Michigan State, let’s start football! What could go wrong?

[...]

Indeed.

i might keep this one

I wrote a little about Emmabuntüs back in June (post: "from france"). I ended up doing an installation, which took up a little over 8 GB on the hard drive. I used the 32-bit iso (emmabuntus-de3-i686-10.4-1.02.iso).

Emmabuntüs Debian Edition is basically Debian Stable underneath. I've purged a lot of packages, added a few of my favorites, tweaked some things, and turned off a bunch of things that were on by default. I'm finding my trimmed-down setup to be a pleasure to use. It certainly looks like a good option for older computers.

Emmabuntüs comes with Xfce and LXQt. LXQt can use other window managers besides Openbox; in this case, the window manager is Xfcwm4 (one way to show the current WM is with the wmctrl -m command). This is my first time using LXQt without having Openbox underneath; seems to be working out okay.

A few shots of my LXQt desktop:

 

And, a couple from the Xfce session:

 

Emmabuntüs seems to be an excellent project. I'd like some sort of minimal installation option. Can't find much else to complain about; one of the nicer distros I've seen.

 

looking more attractive

Visitors to the MX Linux website might be pleasantly surprised by some recent developments:

Yep, MX includes Fluxbox on their main isos along with the default Xfce, and now there's also a KDE iso! Kinda makes me a bit nostalgic for the old Mepis days, when I mainly used KDE.

For more info about available MX Linux downloads, see: https://mxlinux.org/download-links/

I took a look at MX's Fluxbox setup a few months back (https://monksblog-malspa.blogspot.com/2020/05/fluxbox-in-mx.html), but it seems that there's been a lot of work done on it since then. Check out the latest announcement about it, here.

I haven't look at the KDE spin yet. It might be a nice option for some users, if choices like KDE Neon, Kubuntu, and Debian w/ KDE Plasma aren't enough.

simply stable plus openbox

From https://head-on-a-stick.github.io/: "SharpBang (♯!) GNU/Linux is a live ISO image that can be used to install a pre-configured Openbox/Tint2 desktop running on Debian stable."

I decided to take a look, and downloaded sharpbang-buster-backports-10.5.0-amd64.hybrid.iso. When I booted into the live system, I found a clean, simple Openbox setup:

 

Some of the apps/packages included: Thunar, Gparted, Synaptic, Galculator, Mousepad, Firefox ESR, mpv Media Player, gmrun, htop, ranger, tint2, UXTerm, rsync, and obmenu. Here's a shot showing the nicely-arranged right-click menu:

 

The SharpBang project appears to provide just about everything I want/need in a live session, without including too much other stuff. I think the idea was for something along the lines of the old CrunchBang project. I took a look at the /etc/apt/sources.list file; no surprises there:

deb https://deb.debian.org/debian buster main contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates main contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports main contrib non-free

Great job here by "Head-on-a-Stick"!! Here's the github page: https://github.com/Head-on-a-Stick/Sharpbang

 

 

worth the wait?

BunsenLabs Lithium was finally released yesterday, over one year after the release of Debian 10 ("Buster"), which Lithium is derived from. The release announcement can be found here at the BunsenLabs forums.

I downloaded the 32-bit iso (651 MB) -- instead of the full, 64-bit iso (2.1 GB) -- wrote the image to a flash drive, and booted up. I wanted to check out the live session from the smaller image even though a note at the installation page at the BunsenLabs website says, "Using the 64-bit ISO is recommended, as the CD-sized ISO has been surgically reduced in size."

Post #3 in the forum thread mentioned above contains package lists for the full image as well as for the smaller image. Some of the apps/packages included as defaults on the CD-sized image: Dillo web browser (no Firefox), Thunar file manager, GParted, Ristretto image viewer, Evince document viewer, Mousepad text editor, URxvt terminal emulator, and mpv media player. BunsenLabs, of course, ships with Openbox as the default window manager instead including one of the standard desktop environments.

I felt that the CD-sized image would be great for doing a Lithium installation, but its live session was not quite what I would have liked it to be. I'm guessing that the live session from the 64-bit image is more polished. The CD image booted fine on 3 out of 4 of my laptops; I'll keep it on my flash drive as it looks like it could certainly be used for emergency purposes, and for just playing around.

The default Welcome window contains some important information to read before proceeding:

The BunsenLabs website: https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

And, the BunsenLabs page at DistroWatch: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=bunsenlabs

favorite bangs

Some of my favorite DuckDuckGo !bang codes:

!m - Google Maps
!w - Wikipedia
!s - StartPage
!lilo - lilo search
!ytm - YouTube Music
!yt - YouTube
!dpkg - Debian package search
!pac - Arch package search

!aur - Arch AUR package search

!up (or !apt) - Ubuntu package search

!wc - Weather Channel

!allmusic - AllMusic reviews and info

For more info on DuckDuckGo's bang shortcuts, see: https://start.duckduckgo.com/bang

from france

Fascinating distro. I downloaded the latest release of Emmabuntüs -- the download was about 3.3 GB -- and I've been running it in live sessions, from a flash drive. The Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 3 1.02 release announcement includes the following bit of information:

This distribution was originally designed to facilitate the reconditioning of computers donated to humanitarian organizations, starting with the Emmaüs communities (which is where the distribution's name obviously comes from), to promote the discovery of GNU/Linux by beginners, as well as to extend the lifespan of computer hardware, thereby reducing the waste induced by the over-consumption of raw materials.

That sounds good to me. For more info, check out https://emmabuntus.org/.

The live session defaulted to an Xfce desktop, with an option to switch to LXQt. Here's a shot of the LXQt desktop, with the Welcome window:

Emmabuntüs ships loaded with applications, as noted in this Distrowatch review. I like that it's based on Debian Stable. I'll certainly be keeping it around for live sessions, although I don't think I'll be doing an installation. I think I'm better off with a system built from a Debian netinstall. Still, I'm impressed and intrigued by this distro, and I may end up changing my mind about installing it on one of my notebooks.

Here's Emmabuntüs DE3-1.02 with Xfce: