Pardus 17 Released Today: The Big Turkish Cat Awakens!

Today I learned that Pardus Debian has just released its version 17.  That's quite a jump in the numbering scheme because the previous release was Pardus Community 3.0.  I guess now they switched into a year-matching number. 

I am quite happy about the release because this distro appeared as "dormant" on Distrowatch.  With that, I had realized a couple of weeks ago that most of my preferred distros are either discontinued or dormant. Others are in an unknown status, although I prefer to call it "slow development process".

Anyway, even if Pardus Community 3.0 seemed unpolished and clunky, I downloaded Pardus 17 right away and made a bootable USB stick.  The menu came in Turkish and the booting process was pretty slow.  In fact, I thought I would get a show-stopper error but Pardus managed to get to the desktop after a while.

As you may see, the DE is XFCE and everything is in Turkish, hehe.  In spite of the language barrier, I noticed Synaptic as the package manager and also located the installer, which is Debian Installer. Fortunately, Debian Installer asks you about the language you want to use for the installation.

It is too late now for me to run the installer, so that'll have to wait.  Maybe I'll do it tomorrow, if I can clear some of my work first.  At least tomorrow I'll test this new Pardus on my ThinkPenguin Adelie, which is quite picky with Linux distros.  Maybe the kernel 4.9.30 of this release will be compatible with my moody laptop.

Ubuntu's Logo Spotted in The Big Bang Theory ... And What I've Been Up to Lately

This is a quick account of my recent activities:

1.  I saw Ubuntu's logo in an episode of the show The Big Bang Theory.

That was on episode 17 of the 10th season.  Actor Kevin Sussman, who gives life to the character Stuart Bloom, is wearing a grey Ubuntu T-Shirt.

2.  I upgraded from Yakkety Yak to Zeisty Zappus.

The only time I attempted to upgrade an Ubuntu version was on my Chromebook, and it did not work.  Thus, I had my concerns when I did it on my ThinkPenguin Adelie laptop, which is the machine I take to work.  My fears proved unfounded, though: everything went perfectly!  Wow!

3.  I experimented with Debian on my Lenovo tablet.

I had tried GNURoot before and it went pretty well, but everything felt more like a proof of concept. Thus, I tried Debian noroot this time.  I still cannot get VLC to work, but Libreoffice does run smoothly, and that was one of my priorities.  I'll keep testing.

GnuRooting Experiment 2: Success!

Long time ago, I had tried GnuRoot on a ZaReason tablet.  I didn't go very far: I got to boot a Linux environment, but without a graphics session.  Thus, I abandoned GnuRoot.

Debian GNU/Linux running on my tablet!

Today, I found this nice tutorial by Braden Farmer and it motivated me to try once again, this time using a Lenovo tablet.

Apparently, everything went as expected.  I could indeed install Debian with LXDE and it works pretty well (although you do need a keyboard and a mouse, which I don't have right now.)


Well, I'm glad this experiment worked.  I feel happy because I learned something new. 

How to Fix the "A Weird Start Job Is Running..." Delay on Pardus 2.0

I decided to upgrade my Pardus 2.0 system.  After a long time downloading and installing the updates, I booted my system into the new Pardus with its 3.16 kernel.

Everything went fine, except for one thing: while booting, I noticed a message I had never seen before.  It was something like:

A start job is running for dev-disk-by (a long string of numbers here,

followed by the time count: x/1min30sec)

Fortunately, it actually lasted the one minute with 30 seconds it announced, but that made my boot time longer than 2 minutes!

Thanks to this Arch Linux forum, I could find the answer.  Basically, I had to edit the etc/fstab file to make it accurately point to my swap partition.  In my case, /dev/sda2.  

That took care of the issue and now my Pardus system boots normally.

Oh, and the upgrade seems to have fixed Steam.  Now I can play Violett again!  :P

My Experience with Pardus 2.1

There isn't much press about Pardus lately.  Well, there hasn't been since Pardus got included in the sad list of dormant distros, some years ago.

Then, Pardus came back...but not without controversy.  Instead of the old, independent distro it used to be, it came back with a Debian base.  Some of its former fans got disappointed and said the revived Turkish leopard was nothing but Debian with Pardus icons and logo.  I, for one, did notice several elements in the new Pardus (like GRUB Customizer), that were not originally in Debian's repos.  

Before Pardus went to Debian, I used to like that Pardus a lot.  In fact, I still have Pardus 2011 installed on my netbook, where it is still working happily, even if it's outdated.

Then, the Anka Team was formed with the goal of keeping the uniqueness of Pardus alive, and their efforts have given birth to Pisi, which soon will see the light of day.  I have a beta version of Pisi installed on my laptop and it is great!

But I feel at ease with Debian, too.  Most of my favorite distros have a Debian base.  Thus, I gave Pardus 2012-13 Debian a try.  It became the host of all my games and of my Steam client.

Then, I decided it was time for a bold experiment and upgraded it to Pardus 2.1 Beta.

Bad idea!  The upgrade rendered my system unusable.  Well, that's what happens when you try to upgrade an old system the rolling-distro way.  I knew it wasn't going to work, but my curiosity was stronger.

Then, I went the traditional way:  I performed a fresh install of 2.1.  I did notice several issues while running the live, maybe the biggest show-stopper was that I could not see my other partitions and I couldn't mount USB drives.

Still, I went ahead with the installation.  Pardus 2.1 is fully updated; it even sports KDE 4.11!  I had to see what it looked like installed.

Well, it was the same as with the live session: I couldn't see or mount my other partitions no matter how much I tried with my limited knowledge.

Then, I noticed a big amount of updates.  I figured that they would correct my problems, so I installed them...and went back to where I was when I upgraded Pardus 2013 to 2.1:  the sound was broken, KDE was unstable, and I got a nasty message that my user was not recognized...

That means Pardus 2.1 needs more polishing, without a doubt.  As a result, I went back to Pardus 2.0, which is not so up to date, but it is pretty recent.

And then, the enormous batch of updates showed in my system tray.  You'd have to be crazy to install them, especially because it was about 1 Gb of downloads.

Well, call me crazy:  I did perform the download and installed the updates.  I got several warnings that my system was broken...what a surprise!

But the real surprise was that after the process, I booted into a Pardus 2.0 with a shiny KDE 4.11.5 and updated packages!  That was great!

And a little later, around 200 new updates popped up.  I knew I was not a good idea to install them (I had been incredibly lucky after my previous downloads), but I had to see for myself what happened...

I proceeded with the updates...and got to a broken Pardus 2.1 that could not see my drives.

I finally settled for 2.0 and updated KDE and the other packages later.  However, I did not download again the 200 or so downloads that break the system. In other words, now I have a Pardus 2.0-2.1 hybrid.  I find this as a better solution than having either Pardus 2.0, which worked fine but was a bit outdated, or Pardus 2.1, that is not yet ready for prime time. 

That's the beauty of Linux!  You have lots of choices and the freedom to experiment.  Also, you lose that horrible fear of breaking your system.  After all, when things went wrong, I could install Pardus 2.0 again in less than 20 minutes!  That's why I kept pushing my limits in my experience with Pardus 2.1.

 


 
 

GNURooting Android on a ZaTab ZT2

Little by little, I am learning how to use my ZaTab ZT2 the way I want.
I think I managed to handle Android, but I want to push my limits and learn to do what most people won't do with their Android device.  Why following everyone's path if one can make one's own path?  True, this path may lead me to my doom, but walking it will be more interesting than staying in the comfort zone without learning anything new.

Thus, I am set to booting Linux (another distro, that is, if you count Android as a penguin) on my ZT2.  I have absolutely no idea how to do it, but I'm determined to figure it out.

Thus, in the meantime, and as a learning exercise, I used GNURoot to expand my Android horizons.

GNURoot is not a rooting tool, to begin with.  But it does give you some interesting ideas on how to proceed if you want to boot several GNU/Linux distros: Aborigin, Debian Wheezy, or Fedora.

Well, although I took a Fedora-based course online, I chose Wheezy because the download was smaller.  I didn't want to wait for a long download just for the sake of experimenting.

What did I get?

Yay!  A Linux console, alright.  That's Wheezy without a GUI.  Cute, isn't it?  The best part is the # telling you something that means the Promised Land, right?  I felt encouraged by that and tried an apt-get update.  Could I access Wheezy's repositories?  YES!  I could!  Apt-get works, as advertised.

What should my next move be?
I thought about installing something light, like Abiword.  But that wasn't light at all.  All dependencies included, my download soared the 200 MB.  Too much for this first test.

 I thus knew what to try.  Quickly, I typed "apt-get install sl."  That's a very small, must-have application, after all.  Surely enough, Apt did its thing and installed sl.

It was time for the last stage of my experiment: testing sl.  If sl worked, it would mean I was indeed using Linux.  I then typed "sl" and...

THERE YOU GO!  THE STEAM LOCOMOTIVE OF SUCCESS IS ALIVE!!!!

For my next experiment, I'll try downloading and running something more complex, maybe a GUI.  But that will have to wait until I recover from this X-mas flu.

My Top 3 most Creative Linux-related April Fool's Jokes

April 1st. is a day in which computer users and developers have fun creating the most awkward stories and articles.  Linux jokes are especially creative, and the funniest part is that there is always someone who actually believes these "articles."  I learned to be on my guard because I used to be one of these poor victims!

Now, what happens when the jokes are taken to the developer level?  Let's see three of the most creative examples:


Number 3:  There has been lots of discussion about the volume sliders on KDE. Fortunately, a solution was finally reached. The KDE Volume Slider Compromise.

Number 2:  What happens when it is the developer of a distro himself the one who fools someone? This happened at the antiX ranks.  Anticapitalista, the developer of antiX Linux told an unsuspecting antiX user that a big company wanted to deploy this little distro to all their systems...with two conditions that could cause antiX substantial disturbance:

Number 1:   A big distro's whole site becomes a joke:  DEBIAN.ORG:

Do I need to say more?

PiSi Goes to SolusOS

Now that Pardus has gone to Debian, PiSi, its package manager, is gone.  That's sad because it was part of the identity of this distro.  I must say that this new Pardus is very stable and its package variety has increased a lot (thanks to Debian), but I still miss PiSi.

I learned recently (and it has been discussed in the MEPIS forums) that the new release of SolusOS will go away from Debian and will become independent...but adopting PiSi.

Hey!  That's good news!  PiSi won't fade away into oblivion!  I always thought that it was a great tool.

I don't know much about SolusOS (except that some MEPIS fellows are very fond of it), but now the bold move by its developer (leaving Debian to search for a new path) really made me interested.

I wish the best to the members of SolusOS community.

By the way...I feel it's time for me to download SolusOS now...

Debian is BIG! :P

Arjaybe, a fellow MEPIS user, posted this on the MEPIS Forum:



I don't know if the image is real or not, but certainly it is interesting!

I guess I'll start looking to the clouds and to the surface of the moon...maybe I can find MEPIS or other distros there! :P

EDIT


At least, I found Puppy Linux on Mars! :P

(source: http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/5-years-of-walking-on-mars/)

Finally...Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" Released!

For many Debian fans, this is big news: Debian 6.o, codename "Squeeze," has been finally released!

Let me rephrase. This is great news not only for Debian fans, but also for those who, either knowingly or unknowingly, use Debian: I'm speaking about those who use Linux distros based on Debian (like myself!)

For the record, Debian is not as what Linus Torvalds said in a recent interview. He said that Ubuntu had made Debian usable. However, I think it is just the opposite: It is Debian who made Ubuntu not just usable, but possible in the first place. Being honest, where would Ubuntu and all the Buntus (as well as all the other Debian derivatives, Mepis included) be without Debian?

Cheers to the Debian swirl. And to all Debian users, keep Debianizing for a long, long time! :)