Saturday, January 23, 2010

Roads.



Storm in the morning light I feel No more can I say Frozen to myself

Fantastic performance! and one of my favorite Portishead songs from the Dummy release. That entire album was on very heavy rotation during it's release (93? 94?). I can't tell you what it meant for me to have such an album to listen to during that time in my life.

***

I have been having quite a few sleepless nights in past few  months. It's taken it's toll and I don't know the cause of it. Surely my depression is the same as always or perhaps it has begun to worsen. Something to that effect. I had these problems before but that was a long time ago when I was living in Phoenix. Whatever. Who cares.

***




So during one of those nights instead of just laying there for sleep to come, I decided to just get up and do something. So I turned on my computer and I can't remember what led me to it, but I downloaded one of those Linux distribution discs and installed Linux Mint to my computer. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu but for whatever reason I decided not to go with Ubuntu and instead chose Mint cause it just sounded fresh.

Turned out to be a good deal. I installed the system in my seperate hard drive that had been sitting there since I got it with nothing in it. I didn't want to partition my system drive so it was a very easy instal. But you don't even have to do that (install on a HD). You can just work from the CD and play around with it to see if you like it or not. 

Some Linux facts if you don't know anything about it.

It is a freely distributable operating system which will work on any PC or Mac (though Mac does run on a Unix/Linux operating system called "Darwin"). There are many "flavours" meaning you have a choice of many, many different systems. Some are put together with something specific in mind. Ubuntu is the most popluar with Mint being No. 3 most popular.
All software for Linux operating systems are free. There is *just about* every software that your computer might need including the Firefox browser, e-mail application and a number of essential tools. The only thing is that they are not commercial software so they are mostly clones of popular programs but work just as well like GIMP  which is like Photoshop and Open Office which is like MS Office. I'm still having fun tinkering away with it and discovering new things. Give it a try if you're bored one day.

The thing about Mint is that when you install it, a lot of the software comes pre-installed so you don't have to go looking for them downloading  and installing them.






Hmm.. Portishead and Linux in the same post. Surely, I need some rest.

1 comment:

kilgorsky said...

V, I'm a Linux guy. I gave up Windows four years ago (never used Mac) and have tried a few distros since then. Right now I'm running Xubuntu.