In 2021 the Standard Ebooks server served about 1.4 million ebook downloads over 15.5 million page views. SE runs its entire operations using one single-core VPS with 2GB of RAM.

I’ve done a lot of operating system switching over the past many months and not a whole lot of blogging. My question: Does this thing still work?

I love a quiet laptop with no hard drives or fans spinning. It’s easy to get there with an SSD and Linux.

A 2011 iMac runs horribly with out-of-date MacOS but great with Debian Stable.

I have so many notes. I started running CentOS Stream 8 five months ago, and I wanted to document every win, loss, setback and solution as I tried to make what isn’t really a desktop distribution — Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its clones) — into my laptop operating system. I’m not going to look at my notes. This non-review won’t write itself, and the notes aren’t going to do it for me.

CentOS Stream 8 — a controversial yet boring Linux — would be my new operating system After holding up due to indecision, I went ahead with the Linux laptop rebuild. I decided to give CentOS Stream 8 a try. It’s a “hot” Linux distro. But for all the wrong reasons. I can say now that it’s technically excellent, with the extremely notable exception of an error in the Boot ISO (yes, I filed a bug) that makes it impossible to proceed before figuring out and manually entering a URL for a working mirror and then a regression in Mutter that killed Files/Nautilus for a day or so until I figured out a workaround.

I was all ready to crack open the HP Envy 15 laptop this afternoon, pull the 250 GB NVMe M.2 SSD and replace it with a 1 TB model. While in there, I planned to replace the battery, which has a dead cell. But I decided to press “pause.” I started running Linux on this particular laptop in 2019 (??) with Debian Stable (then Buster), replacing it with Testing (Bullseye) maybe a couple of months ago.

The next step in putting a new hard drive into my laptop is to make a full backup of the /home files. I haven’t done a full-image Clonezilla-style backup in a long, long time, and I do recommend it it you have a spare drive and a lot of spare time. Instead I just back up my user files. I have two working Linux computers right now, and if I need to rebuild one, I can do a reinstall and get my preferred applications set up fairly quickly.

I’m about to put a new hard drive and battery in my main laptop, a 2017 HP Envy 15. Whenever I make a change like this, I like to be ready with backups, Linux install images on USB drives and whatever tools and parts I might need. I’m not as worried about running into problems because I now have a very decent second computer — the 2011 27-inch iMac running Debian Buster — if the laptop isn’t ready right away, I’ll still be able to work.

The debate over whether to include nonfree firmware in the Debian installer has emerged from the depths of the debian-devel mailing list under the title “Making Debian available.” The gist of this extremely long e-mail thread (and Debian is a mailing list culture, despite attempts to pull it into the 21st century is that the Debian Project is hostile to new users because its standard install images do not include nonfree firmware, and installations on most laptops will go poorly because the Linux kernel and free firmware might not support their WiFi or display systems.

As a Ruby user and programmer, I thought that Linux distributions and BSD projects offered packaged versions of Ruby gems to add sanity and stability to a computer. The problem is that every distribution and project packages a different subset of all the Ruby gems available. I’ve always tried to use as many “packaged” gems as possible in the systems I run — chiefly Debian and Fedora Linux, along with OpenBSD.

There were clones of — or more accurately downstream projects based on — Red Hat Enterprise Linux before Red Hat bought CentOS in 2014. CentOS started in 2006, and there have been other distributions based on RHEL. (My favorite is still Nux’s Stella from the CentOS 6 days.) There are many (many!) other Linux distributions and BSD projects that can supply a server or desktop operating system. Most of them are not owned by corporations that can limit their distribution on a whim.

Red Hat unleashed the kraken with its recent announcement that its CentOS 8 clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux would be shut down in 2021 instead of 2029, to be replaced by the newish CentOS Stream 8.

Update: On Jan. 1, 2021, an updated Chromium package moved into the Debian Stable repository. Hopefully it will also become part of the Testing repo and appear in the next Debian release. The original post follows: I guess I knew that the Chromium web browser — the code from the open-source project that is still coded by Google people but isn’t fully Googled — was very out of date in the Debian Stable repository.

I can’t believe I didn’t learn this earlier because now I do it all the time: If you close a file, as I often do with :bd, to open the last file you closed, type e# in command mode: :e# The last closed file opens in your current window. This is great for me because in my editing workflow, I have a story budget from one directory in one window, and I work on stories from a different directory in another.

My 2012 HP Pavilion g6 laptop’s keyboard and touchpad are working intermittently. I’ve already replaced the keyboard twice. They are crazy cheap to buy (and also cheap in quality), but I’m tired of doing it. Not sure what is wrong with the touchpad, but it’s about time to cut my losses. The laptop has run Fedora for a LONG time. It is now on F30. It has gone through many upgrades between about 2013 and 2019.

I’ve been intermittently struggling and totally forgetting about the best way to create cross-platform GUI applications. I’ve veered between Tk for Ruby or Python, JavaFX and Qt. I recently stumbled on GTK3 in Ruby, and I’ve been going through a couple of tutorials in an attempt to figure it out. Since I’m back on Debian Stable for 90 percent of my computing, I figured I’d give GTK3 a try. I knew that you could run GTK apps in Windows (and presumably also on MacOS), but maybe I’d have to resort to exotic packaging to make it happen.

I haven’t had the occasion to print anything in Debian 10 Buster in the couple of weeks that I have been running it, but today is the day. I knew from the release notes that Debian 10 included “driverless” printing, but I couldn’t find any printers in GNOME Setings, even though I have a wireless printer on my local network. The reason? I didn’t have CUPS. I had forgotten to check the “print server” box during my installation.

I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it. And this is with GNOME 3. The stock or lightly/heavily-favored desktop environment in Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu looks great, runs with no hesitation (in constrast to Windows 10) and doesn’t have me thinking that I need anything else for speed-related reasons.

If you wanted to record a podcast, or just a VoIP call with someone else (and yes, PulseCaster warns you not to record without the other party’s permission), it couldn’t be easier than this.

I spent quite a bit of time running Google Chrome/Chromium on both Windows and Linux, but between feeling uncomfortable giving away so much data to Google (when logged in on Chrome) and how well Firefox performs on Linux (which is very well from what I can see), I now use Firefox about 99 percent of the time in Fedora 20.

Rudy Godoy shows how you can use s3tools in Linux to tap into s3-like services both at Amazon and elsewhere.

When I go into the menu in either Chromium or Google Chrome (yes, I have both) and try to edit the bookmarks, the browser crashes. So I can’t re-arrange my bookmarks in these two browsers.