There is Nothing like a Good Penguin!

 This year has brought a lot of changes to the world.  Many have lost their life or their jobs, and others have seen their pay reduced.

 While I am of course affected by the current situations, I count myself among the lucky ones.  I still have my job (although it has changed radically from the way I used to do it last year).

 I fully work online now.  I never thought this was going to happen, but here I am, working online every day and using software I never thought I would ever use.

 Then, I hear my colleagues.  Computer crashes, software misbehaving, malware, and the list goes on...

  A couple of days ago, I heard two Windows users complaining that MS Teams did not work properly on their computers.  Then, another told me she had nothing to work with a PDF file...

  Today I worked with a PDF file and my problem was deciding what to use.  At the end, I used LibreOffice.

  There is nothing like a good penguin to help with one's job!

Covid-19, Work and Free Software

Year 2020 started with an unexpected rage.  The spread of Covid-19 has caused lots of deaths, fear, job losses, and an enormous uncertainty.

Anytime I turn on the news, my heart hurts.  Seeing so many people struggling, governments totally lost, and medical services collapsing sometimes makes me lose hope.

Here in my country we haven't had such a bad time as bigger nations, to which I send my best thoughts.  Still, the chaos is evident everywhere.  The authorities have instructed us not to leave our homes unless it is strictly necessary and thus, I (as many other people in the world) ended up working from home although I was totally unprepared for that.

My university literally sent us home with the command "work from there" and nothing else but an institutional platform that cannot hold such a heavy traffic.

Anyway, I am lucky if I compare myself to many of my colleagues.  They were much less prepared for the drastic change and some were heavily against online classes.  The same is true about most students here; they are not used to self learning and are very dependent on teachers telling them what to do. (*sigh*)

Fortunately, I can always count on Free Software.  Thanks to the army of tools available as Free Software, I can plan and make my online classes, even if I am totally inexperienced.

I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Coronavirus has really changed the way we live... many people are gone or will pass away due to this virus. I am deeply thankful to the great heroes who work long hours trying to assist the sick. Those of us who are not medics, nurses or workers in hospitals can help by staying home and following the safety measures.  I'll do that while I work from my house.  Please, let's all help by staying home!

When My New Laptop Lost its Home...

I bought a new laptop from a Linux vendor some time ago.  The machine is a beast and it comes with a SSD for the root system and a HD for the home system. One day, I noticed that I could not enter my session. 

After some checking, I realized that the machine was not reading the HD.  The BIOS did not show the entry for that drive.  Weird.

Now, what do you do with a computer like that?  Can you use it for working?

Of course!  I could log into a session from the root system and work from there.  Also, I could use my the clone of my system that I carry on a live USB pendrive.  Thus, the problem, although weird, did not stop me from working.

Later on Mechatotoro took my laptop to a repair shop and, as I thought, it all was caused by a hardware issue: the HD had somehow gone loose. Once it was put back into place, everything was normal again.

What did I learn from that experience?  That Linux is simply great!  While another OS would tell you that you cannot use the computer, with Linux I could keep working although the home system was unreachable.   

Busy Times and Maximized Productivity

I've been away from the blogsphere for some time.

As the end of this semester approaches, my workload as a teacher increases exponentially and my free time shrinks at the same rate, if not faster.

Some may say that my job is keeping me away from the world of Linux...no time to recompile my kernel, no time to enter into Linux forums asking for help desperately, no time to read obtuse manuals nor to tinker with my crashed Linux system trying to get it to work again...In other words, since I need to meet the demands of my job, I must be refraining from using Linux for the sake of real productivity. After all, one cannot afford silly playing when important work needs to get done...

Actually, my experience is totally the opposite: I've never been as immerse in the world of Linux as I am nowadays. Linux has made me work faster than my colleagues at my office. While some of them wait for their computer to load the OS, I am working already. When they are checking if their USB drives are infected, I am opening the documents on mine. While they patiently wait for their A/V scan to finish, I am finishing some of my work and starting with a new task. Oh, did I mention that I am doing all this on my netbook Toshiba NB-100 which, by the way, is not the fastest nor the most comfortable to use?

I've realized that my productivity has not dropped since I migrated to Linux. Actually, I am able to get more things done and have almost forgotten about the daily rituals that kept me busy in the past: downloading A/V updates, looking for and installing stronger anti-malware tools...running scans. Now I employ that time doing something!

How many crashes have I experienced? Zero. What about the fearful kernel panics anti-linux generals always mention? Zero. Computer freezes? Zero. Restarts? Zero. Is this for real? All that on my modest netbook? Well, as a teacher, I also have to work home and my desktop box has the same figures. The computer at the office, conversely, has crashed three times and has frozen another four. No, it does not run Linux.

When I finish my job at the office, I read, talk with my colleagues, and often clean the viruses that their A/V technologies swear they don't have on their USB pendrives.

And what do I do now at home when I get my job done? Recompile my kernel as all Linux geeks do? I've no idea how to do that. Lately, I play with the kitten my wife brought home, which by the way loves keyboards. Maybe the little furry critter will teach me some kernel-compiling tricks in the future...