In a Food Coma

Let me say this. It’s incredibly hard to write when, essentially, you’re in a food coma.

By 4:00 yesterday afternoon, I was wondering if I’d reached the highest tryptophan levels possible in humans without crossing over into raging toxicity. Of course, by 4:30 I was so soundly asleep in the easy chair at my mother-in-law’s house that even the screaming nephews couldn’t wake me. The laptop, taken on the off chance that I’d get a chunk of time to write today’s newsletter, lay still in its case in the corner. I guess I was sawing logs pretty loudly. I’ll have to take their word for it since I was asleep.

The day wasn’t a complete food ‘n’ snooze fest, though. I managed to download the Slackware isos for this week’s chapter of the Great Distro Review. For some reason, I had a very difficult time getting the second disc from LinuxIso.org. The download hung, stalled and otherwise crawled. OK. I realize the phrase, “crawling download” is a relative thing. I spent nearly four years on a dialup, during which time I wouldn’t have even considered a 650Mb download, let alone two. For the sake of those of you still on dialups, I won’t whine too much about it. I’ll just say that the second-disc Slackware download was slow. I ended up leaving the download halfway through to head for the annual poultry-fest. It’s now burned, along with Disc 1, awaiting the posting of this issue of Penguin Shell for installation.

And, yes - it’s two days earlier than I’ve been doing these installs. After the problems with Debian, I learned the value of a bit more pre-planning. That’s one of those things that makes me think maybe, just maybe, I’m starting to get this newsletter thing down! It’ll be nice to have the weekend to play with a new distro, and I should be able to cover a bit more detail, too.

Penguin Shell reader Marcel made a great suggestion a week or so ago - and I have to listen ’cause he’s been with us since the very beginning! He suggested that I create and post printable versions of commands and options that we cover in the newsletter. He was kind enough to provide one for the discussion of vi, and I’ve posted it. It’s offsite right now, until I can get clearance from the happy traveler to post these on the Lockergnome server.

Finally, you’ll notice that I’ve skipped DIY Friday this week. With the aborted Debian install and the day off yesterday, there really wasn’t alot to pass along. Hopefully, y’all will flood me with email this week.

Read on and enjoy. I wonder if there’s any pumpkin pie left …

Tony
Steidler-Dennison