Category Archives: General

Happy 30th Birthday!

Posted on August 25, 2021 by Alan German

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the introduction of Linux by Linus Torvalds. References: Happy 30th Birthday, Linux!https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/08/happy-30th-birthday-linux

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Using portrait and landscape page formats in the same Calc spreadsheet

Posted on May 10, 2018 by Alan German

I have been developing a simple general ledger spreadsheet in LibreOffice Calc. Most of the account listings fit nicely onto a page in portrait format; however, the general ledger has more columns of data, and requires printing in landscape format. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Linux at 25

Posted on August 25, 2016 by Alan German

Happy Birthday Linux! Today marks the 25th anniversary of the announcement of work on the Linux kernel. “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)…” – Linus Torvalds, 25-Aug-91.

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Free E-books

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Alan German

GitHub has an extensive list of free E-books with a special emphasis on computer programming. There’s everything from A to Z – well, almost everything – the list goes from Ada to xBase (but there are no entries for K, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Linux course

Posted on August 2, 2014 by Alan German

Want to know more about the internal workings of Linux? The Linux Foundation is making their on-line Introduction to Linux course freely available through EDX.

Posted in General, GRUB | Leave a comment

SSD’s – The bigger picture

Posted on March 20, 2014 by Alan German

After my previous post on using TRIM for an SSD, I found a much more detailed article on SSD’s written by Brian Trapp for Linux Journal. In addition to discussing the use of TRIM, Brian also touches on the reliability, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Congratulations for the excellent text

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Alan German

As noted in the previous post, many of the comments I have received (or which have been immediately sidelined by the Akismet filter built into WordPress) have been spam. In fact, Akismet tells me that it has protected my site … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Anniversary Comments

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Alan German

January, 2014 marks the third anniversary of this blog and I thought I would take a little space to reflect on the past postings. On the average, there has been about one posting per week so, hopefully, I haven’t overwhelmed … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Light heavyweights or heavy lightweights?

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Alan German

When looking for a Linux distro that might be suitable for use on older hardware, it might seem prudent to select a “lightweight” version; however, it turns out that not all distros so described are particularly lightweight – at least … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Medibuntu is no more

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Alan German

Running a regular system update recently produced the error message: “Failed to fetch http://packages.medibuntu.org/ dists/precise/free/binary-amd64/Packages 404 Not Found” Initially, I thought that this was a transient glitch with a repository being off line or some such issue; however, the problem … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment