MadModder

 Christmas will soon be upon us and Santa will be coming down the chimney so make sure to put the cat in the back room Xmas eve because no one wants to sit around the tree smelling ash & pussy.

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Have a great Xmas everyone!

To enable brightess control (Fn + right and left arrow on Acer) an entry in a grub file (assuming grub is used) needs to be edited. But files like that can't be modified without admin or root privileges.

Interestingly, I've never had that issue; and whilst I've pretty much stuck with Linux Mint ever since Ubuntu went all weird looking, I've run it on maybe 4 different laptops now (two Thinkpads, one of unknown manufacture that's actually my official work-supplied device, and one I can't recall now) and the brightness (and volume) buttons all worked out of the box.  Obviously I can't speak for other distros. One of the two Thinkpads ended up with Linux Lite on it (because it was a feeble Celeron monstrosity), honestly can't recall if the brightness buttons ever worked with that - it was my "IMDB" box that I used when watching TV & wanted to look up an actor or somesuch.

WRT software - yeah, that is something which seems less polished than Windows. For the most part, installing stuff on windows (prior to v10 anyway) was pretty well painless. OK, getting it to actually function AFTER installation was sometimes "entertaining"; with Linux it seems the opposite is true: Sometimes it's a bear to get something installed; but once installed it usually functions just fine. Being a software dev who started in the era when windows was a DOS program, I'm comfortable just using apt on the command line. And when it comes to finding apps, I usually end up searching the Web for something to do what I want, and once I find it that's usually got the apt instructions (or alternatives. AppImage is pretty good, although I have found a couple of those which don't work properly).

Foolproof way of doing the testing is to use VM like Virtualbox - it's free and available for Windows, Mac and Linux. If one breaks the system inside VM (I've done that many times), it stays there, without affecting the host system.

Fun anecdote: about 10 years ago now, that's how I ran Windows in my day job: Linux PC running VMWare (VirtualBox didn't support USB back then) with the guest OS running Windows. I also used to have a couple of Linux VMs also running at the same time, because the client software we used was supplied as a Linux-based CD image. So... I'd basically "burn" one of the VMs with the CD Image & boot it up, which meant I didn't need to use any dedicated hardware.  Except... one day, I somehow managed to burn the install to my main PC! Weirdly, Windows kept running OK for a while, but then things started to get a bit iffy, with random crashes and other glitching. So I rebooted everything and BANG! Byebye PC. Had to re-install everything from scratch. NOT ideal.  Had I done the same thing to a Windows PC, of course, it would have spat the dummy instantly, instead of lulling me into a false sense of security by continuing to run for a while!

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Some more thoughts:

A new user, when testing otherwise well running distros like Pop Os, Ubuntu or Linux Mint, might find their software centers to be rather sluggish.  Because of that, they are quite frustrating to use. They may give an impression that Linux as a whole is just that slow with about anything.

An example: when I started with Linux back in spring of this year, I used Pop Os's Pop Shop to see what apps there are available to possibly replace ones I've used in Windows. It was good thing to use at the very beginning to install/remove apps, but for some time now, I've avoided using it.

What are the alternatives for such software centers?

One is Synaptic, which has rather basic interface, but still a GUI. It doesn't necessarily come installed by default on mentioned distros. It can be installed using said software center, or using command 'sudo apt install synaptic' in terminal.

One thing, when using command line to install an app, it's fast, but the user must know the exact name of the package he wants to install.

That's where software center can be used to find app names (by category or so), and further, if needed, to look on the net for more info about that app.

Small and capital letters matter; if one tries to install Synaptic instead of synaptic in terminal, there's an error 'Unable to locate package Synaptic'.

Change of gears: when trying Linux on my laptop, screen is always too bright. To tame it a bit, I've used command 'xgamma -gamma 0.5' to adjust contrast. That can be added as a startup application on control center or similar.

Unfortunately, even if the distro has brightness control in display options, it may not work at all.  To enable brightess control (Fn + right and left arrow on Acer) an entry in a grub file (assuming grub is used) needs to be edited. But files like that can't be modified without admin or root privileges.

One way to do that is to use nano, a terminal text editor with command 'sudo nano /etc/default/grub', and add 'acpi_osi=' entry, so that it looks similar to this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi_osi="
 
After doing that, grub needs to be updated with command 'sudo update-grub' and reboot to apply changes.

Nano's basic commands are: ctrl+o (and enter) to save the file, and ctrl+x (and enter) to exit to get back to terminal.

So no doubt, there are still things that may require the use of terminal. That's one of the things that has kept me from using Linux before, as some of the tasks can't be done using GUI, like on Windows. More savvy users might claim that the users can modify Linux to look and work just as they prefer. It's true, but only if that user knows what to do.

Bit of a rant - there are a lot of sites on the net offering solutions to this or that issue, that newbies face. Some of them are plain hostile, having flame wars about everything. Just don't engage; let them be the way they are, and move on. That's an unfortunate part, as many know, of searching information in these days.

But enough of that. Learning basic terminal commands can help to get a better picture of what's involved in editing settings in Linux. There's no need to go crazy about it. Not everyone wants or needs to be a hacker. At least I don't.

Foolproof way of doing the testing is to use VM like Virtualbox - it's free and available for Windows, Mac and Linux. If one breaks the system inside VM (I've done that many times), it stays there, without affecting the host system.

In the end, I have Pop and Win7 installed on my pc, but without dual boot option. That's because I disconnected Win7 disk before installing Pop on a separate disk. Of course, that might not be handy or convenient, but when I want to boot to Win7, I just restart the pc and press F11 key and select the disk containing Win7. No dualboot issues whatsoever.     

What a beautiful steam engine plant this is. I just love the liquid spirits boiler and being able to see that naked flame dancing inside.
Its running like a dream and looking forward to putting many hours on the engine over the Christmas and New Years break.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLezTIiAPdE