LMDE: Please! Please! I want to encrypt my $HOME!

A little rant:
Why in the hell LMDE doesn't have the option to encrypt -at least- your home during the installation?
And if that it's not possible; what about an encrypted LVM?
I mean, even Lubuntu has that option during the plain vanilla install...
Been playing a bit with the Cinnamon version of LMDE and the thing feels amazingly snappy... It is a shame I can't use it just because encrypting stuff it is a major PITA.

Kernel Crud Delete Mode

Time to delete a couple of old kernels from Stilgar.

Monday 29-07-2013

No MX Player For You!

Upgraded to Jelly Bean 4.3 Friday night.
Things went pretty Ok, except for the MX Player, that simply refuses to launch, belching an error message that the Android version is not supported.
Major PITA, I guess that about 95% of the videos I have on the Nexus 7 aren't playable at the moment.

Thursday 25-07-2013

24K and counting!

Another month went by...
Seems like this is my current pace, a thousand plays a months.

Winter Full Blast Ahead

Will it snow?
Once again?

T430: The Need For Speed

Made a few changes on the T430.
Setting up things to make the little lappie fly, now that the new kernel has finally taken charge of those awful hangs.
Right now the /etc/fstab file is like this:

proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
UUID=e9ee5c6a-b32d-45ef-b947-95e96686cc88       /     ext4    relatime,discard,errors=remount-ro  0    1
tmpfs                                           /tmp  tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777   0    0
/dev/mapper/cryptswap1 none swap sw 0 0

And also, I've moved Chromium's cache to RAM, to really speed stuff, and limit the writes to the SSD HDD.
On the /etc/rc.local file:

mkdir /tmp/chrome_cache
chmod -R 777 /tmp/chrome_cache/

And on the ~/.cache/chromium/Default directory, a link from the directory Cache to new one on /tmp/chrome_cache/.

Also on the /etc/rc.local file:

echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

That's it.

The current Linux Mint desktop

Another one of those mossy fuzzy wallpapers that goes along great with a dark Cinnamon theme.

Kernel bump & VirtualBox

Last Wednesday updated the kernel from the 3.2 branch all the way to 3.9.

I was fed up with the occasional hangs and the problems shutting down my T430 lappie.

So far things are really good... Did a 3 day up test, with many, many Suspends, and had no problem at all.
The only thing -and it was actually something to be expected- that did not work after the kernel upgrade was VirtualBox, it even belched an error message while the actual kernel was being installed.
So, after dabbling a bit with some Google & different tips, in the end decided to simply uninstall Precise Pangolin's stock VirtualBox and then install the Raring one form the VirtualBox website.
It works flawlessly.

Kernel Cleansing Time!

Last night deleted something close to 1 GB of old kernels.
All of those were unstable MOFOs on my T430.

Lubuntu sans LTS... Why?

One thing I really can't comprehend from the Lubuntu project is why they don't have an LTS release.
What's the point of having a very, very cool lightweight distro (conceivably aimed for old machines) that you have to re-install every 6 months?
Installing, not to mention installing updates and copying a lot of files, onto an old box it is a major PITA and time consumer.
That's a huge show stopper for me. I really like Lubuntu 12.04, but the lack of an LTS doesn't cut the thing.

The current Linux Mint MATE desktop

The first MATE on quite a while.

Unity is not my thing

After close to a month of testing on my T60 I have to go back to Linux Mint MATE. Unity was good, rather snappy actually (that was surprise), but the Global Menu implementation drives me completely crazy, I really can't understand how on Earth they did such a thing. 

I love the Global Menu approach, the idea, to me it makes total sense, no matter how big the screen or its resolution; but why, why, why they had to make it only visible on mouse over?

It seems like a really moronic idea.

Other than that, I had a couple of serious glitches, that is lockups, doing stupid and trivial things like dragging a couple of video files onto GNOME Player... The kind of lockpus  that requires an X Window restart.

So, yeah MATE might look ancient and there no Global Menu -at least with an easy setup- on Linux Mint, but it delivers.