This is one HOT little post!

Sooo...  What exactly are you expecting???

Dirty minded people...

It's HOT here...  88F with a humidity that would make any jungle animal quite comfortable.

Anyway...  My mind turned to this blog again.  You know, I really SHOULD post more here.  I mean, with my newfound projects and all.

Projects, you ask?  Yes, I have a few new ones...

1. Learn C.  I mean, more than the typical advanced, scrolling, multicolored "Hello World" sort of level.  I mean, really learn it.  I really thought long and hard about whether I wanted to learn X86 Assembly or C.  My brain is still on the fence just a bit, but when I sat down, wrote a "Hello World" program in each, the C version compiled and ran the first time.  My Assembly version required some research to understand some of the assembler switches on NASM.  Sure, I got my assembly program to, er...  assemble but was a pain.
2. I found my favorite college textbook, "An Introduction to Data Structures With Applications" by Tremblay and Sorenson.  There may be better text books out there that cover this subject, but this is the one I have...  And from my days at WIU, it is my favorite.  What am I going to do?  Well, when I used this book, all of our projects were written in USCD Pascal.  What I would like to do is use several languages to write all the projects in the book.  I am thinking of using C, Free Pascal, Modula III and Lua.  Maybe a few others like Assembler, C++, Python, Java or Rust.  Not certain, but it sounds interesting.
3. Maybe...  maybe find an open source project to contribute my time.  
4. Sailing...  boating... sailing...  OMG, I am a sailor!  Yes, my significant other gave me sailing lessons for my birthday.  Finished class about a week ago and bought a little sailboat built in the early 1970s by a company in Missouri called Advance.  She is 16 feet long, and also known as the "Sweet 16".  Great little boat, but is just for me.  Our 18 foot cruiser is currently in the shop for repairs and HOPEFULLY will be home before there is ice on the lake.
5. Project StarStare, my little project to automatically detect meteor streaks in night sky photos is on a temporary hiatus but my be revived this winter.
6. RuralRuins will see some new photos, I promise.

Anyway...  Probably a few things to blog about here.

And...  There is plenty to bitch, moan and complain about...  So...  Be back soon. 

A Linux Mint Live USB With Persistent Storage - The EASY way

Honestly, Linux Mint is my favorite Linux distribution.  Every piece of hardware I have ever thrown at it has worked out-of-the box without additional drivers.  Linux Mint with Xfce is quite lightweight and responsive on the somewhat older and under powered hardware I have a tendency to accumulate and use.

Anyway, to add to my previous post, Linux Mint Saves the Day, I wrote that post immediately after setting up the Live USB and watching a few things from YouTube and Netflix.  Unfortunately it was not after I booted to the flash drive a second time.  You see, the Linux Mint Live USB does NOT have persistent storage.  What I had initially done to setup the machine for watching Netflix was completely gone, thrown into the bit-bucket, fed to the monster of system confusion.  In short, making changes to a Linux Mint Live USB installation will NOT be saved for the next time you start a computer from that Live USB.

So, first thing I did was order a cheap little 250GB drive from NewEgg.  Cost only about $20 I think.  Anyway, while waiting for delivery, I researched the problem.  Oh, there are many interesting looking instructions on how to create a Linux Mint Live USB with persistent storage.  Unfortunately most of these solutions looked to be a bit complex and involved and even somewhat confusing.

Then, I thought of it...  Another flash drive...  Just install Linux Mint from the Live CD to the empty flash drive!  Now...  this is SLOW.  I sat there for nearly two hours while it installed.  And the resulting Linux Mint install on the USB is equally slow but does work.

So...   the solution: install from Linux Mint Live USB to an empty USB.   My recommendation: spend a little more than the cost of a USB drive, buy an inexpensive hard drive and install there.

** BASIC DISCLAIMER 
Don't know if this solution will work in all cases.
I used Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena".
My computer had USB 2, not 3 or some other faster, better interface.
Some other things I can't think of at the moment.

Oracle VM VirtualBox - Just a Misleading Error Message

Three weeks of fighting a "cold from hell" gave me time to think about my little project to automate a search for meteor photos.  Sure, I have a PINE64 on order.  Sure, it may be delivered later in March.  Sure, there may be a flavor of Linux available for it sometime soon.  Sure, I may be able to build ImageMagick and other tools I need for the Pine64.  Sure, the performance may be acceptable for my goal.  Crap, no planned PXE/net-boot planned.

What if...  Let's see...  a complete Pine64 compute node with 1GB Ram and the OS on an 8GB flash drive will cost roughly $35 accepting a lot of "maybe" assumptions.  Let's remove the assumptions and calculate the cost of a good old AMD or Intel processing node.  Looks like a 64 bit AMD based system with 4GB RAM, with PXE boot will run about $85.

So...  I decide to emulate a 32 bit Debian text-only install on an Orable VM Virtual box using 4GB Ram to sort-of emulate the AMD solution.  Which gives me an idea for a new word...

umulate - An emulation that is not exact; allowing certain differences for the sake of brevity or simplicity.  "I am going to umulate this Debian install; the real machine will not have a hard drive, but will boot from a flash drive."  But...  I digress...

BUT SMACK...  An error pops up from Oracle Virtualbox when I try starting the virtual machine...

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine DebianPNode.

Under "Details" it read...

VT-x is disabled in the BIOS for all CPU modes (VERR_VMX_MSR_ALL_VMX_DISABLED)

Well, after some research and comparing this virtual machine with the operational virtual version of Debian, I arrived at a repair that seemingly has nothing to do with the error.  I changed the Base Memory for this Virtual machine to 3072 GB and SHAZAM.  No more error.  Keep in mind, my machine has 8 GB and runs a pretty lean install of 64 bit Windows 7.  Why this misleading message popped up, I have no idea...  but reducing the Virtual machine's Base RAM fixed the problem.

8 Reasons for a New Operating System

Many years ago you could find me sitting in front of my computer wearing one of my well-worn Linux t-shirts or baseball caps, just programming my brains out, secretly wishing the universe of computers ran on one flavor of Linux or another.  Today, well, I am happy to simply have my Windows 7 machines humming along in front of me for at least a week without pause or crash.  Anyway...  over time I believe Linux has migrated from an OS that performed well & was fairly simple to install and operate, intended to make any computer geek giggle with delight, to something somewhat sloggy and overly complex that now give those same computer geeks headaches and the occasional nightmare.

Anyway, not that I have the technical ability in my current state, I would love to write a new operating system.  Why?  Here are eight reasons:

1. Performance gains from increased hardware capabilities have been severely strangled by poorly performing code and the belief that the faster hardware will compensate for less than stellar code.  A new operating system should centrally focus on core performance at the expense of general purpose functionality.  
2. Malware...  Viruses...  Keystroke Loggers... Spyware...  One of the key reasons this crap is proliferating is because we have the same-old operating systems and code and utilities.  A new operating system should have some basic security in mind when designing basic low-level functionality.  And, simply by nature, a new OS would be impervious to these nasties for a while.
3. Current OSs are COMPLEX!!!  They try to be the do-all, know-all solution to everything.  Someone (or something) that tries to do everything will never do anything specific very well.  A new operating system should focus more on doing computery things, rather than everything under the sun.
4. Developer environments and tools for Windows and Linux are fragmenting so badly, researching solutions and problems, depending on the situation, can be a near-futile exercise.  A new operating system could provide a new & clean slate.
5. The windowing OS paradigm is dying.  Yes, I said it.  Don't get me wrong, the windowing paradigm will be around far longer than I.  However, it is my firm belief that virtual reality, tactile and audio human/computer interfacing will be the future.  A new operating system should have a low level text base interface for baseline operations, maintenance and debugging, and perhaps a windowing interface for coding, but should focus at these newer human/computer interfaces.  And, just as a note, all functions capable of being performed by the computer, should be allowed through the text interface.
6. The Keep It Simple and Stupid concept has been, for the most part, thrown out by most modern operating systems and development tools.  A new operating system should embrace the KISS concept.
7. Ever notice the slow access to directories with thousands of files?  OK, there may be solutions but it just peeves me off when I have 10,000 or 20,000 files in a directory and handling this many files is so slow (in both Windows and Linux) I can take an afternoon of coffee & smoke breaks.  A new operating system should minimally have the ability to support fast handling of large number of files.
8. Provide a more rich computer eco-system.  Sometime I think Apple and Windows and Linux devs are getting lazy, just hunting for and polishing the low-hanging fruit.  A new operating system that performs well, has a vibrant development environment will place pressure on existing ecosystems and provide evolutionary pressure.

What are you waiting for???