I type this from what I referto as the old/new eBay laptop. I paid 46 dollars for an old Compaq NC2400 computer. It came complete, except for a power cord. I bought the power cord for another 7 or so. This morning, following a kind friend's recommendation, I installed Fedora 18 ("spherical cow") LXDE a Linux distribution ("distro"). The LXDE refers to its lightweight desktop environment. The install took about an hour. The original desktop was a simple solid blue, so I changed the wallpaper to include a photo I took during my lunch hour some weeks ago:
After the install, I went to church at Suncreek United Methodist Church. They had a grand opening to the service when a handbell choir played a set of variations on "swing low sweet chariot".Prior to the service,the minister came to me and said "Hi, I'm Tom", which I thought was kind of him. He then introduced me to a fellow a row ahead of me. We belong to another Methodist church in Allen, but I like to go to this one sometimes.
After church I went to Bethany Lakes Park and saw yellow-rumped warblers, northern shoveler ducks, turtles, and a gret egret. My wife had a big project for a club to which she belongs, so I went to lunch by myself.I was going to get a sandwich, but saw a little Korean cafe called Mr. Tofu. The food was not tofu but good teriyaki chicken cooked Korean BBQ style and served with pickled vegetables.
After lunch I went back to working on the computer. Fedora is a bit doctrinaire about only putting free software with the basic distro, so I had to authorize a thing called rpmfusion to let me have things like flash and an mp3 encoder and a DVD codecs. I was frustrated when "flash" kept saying it was installed but did not show up. I had to read up that it was only installed in the package repository and still needed a new installation. I still am having trouble with installing Chrome, or its open source cousin Chromium. Fedora does not include it in their package repositories, and so I had to try to download it from google. But then Fedora professes not to be able to install it. But I got google music to work without having Chrome and I think that I can add google translate or another translator to firefox. I installed the very light browser Midori in case my computer was slow,but so far it is lightning fast. I wish I had put Lubuntu rather than Pear Linux on my young friend's computer,because as lovely as Pear Linux is, LXDE is very fast.
I got the codecs to install and played a DVD. I did this economically. I figured that installing
the media player VLC would automatically download all the codecs I needed. This proved accurate.
I downloaded LAME so that I can encode mp3s.I need to still download Audacity, and then I can figure out music-making software.
In the mid-afternoon I took Beatrice for a walk. The temperature was 70 degrees with no wind blowing. We passed a mockingbird on a green fence.
Then I took a lovely bicycle ride to Green Park. Green Park is a tiny park only a few miles from us. This time I saw a house finch, cedar waxwings, a robin, a mockingbird and starlings. Usually I only see mockingbirds.
Then I sat down and watched the Puppy Bowl program on Animal Planet. This silly satire on sports events had me laughing out loud. We watched a tiny snippet of the Super Bowl, but as I type this Downton Abbey is on the television and we each have a wonderful bowl of turkey chili.