Author: John Chappell
It Could Have Been Worse
Last year I reported that I was venturing into Linux World. I’m back to report that while interest is still with me, progress isn’t. There’s always something else that’s a higher priority. Examples? Leaky faucets, car repairs and maintenance, taxes, trying to catch up with email, trying to resolve glitches with one thing or another, getting things done for the very few clients who haven’t accepted my retirement, and more. I thought retirement would give me time to do things like update my various websites, install and learn Linux, write stories or even books, travel, play my harmonicas, strum my ukulele, learn to use the unused set of wood carving knives I acquired decades ago, touch base with old friends, and so much more. At age 75, the sense of running out of time before the final deadline arrives generates anxiety which can be disabling and interfere with just about everything including sleep, exercise, and diet which ought to be a top priority instead of irregular events. The only consolation about the failures in such things is that once I die I won’t care. While yet alive, there’s some consolation, albeit rather small and rather fragile, in knowing that things could be worse. But, how pathetic that, at the end of one’s life, the best one can say about it is, “It could have been worse.”
Here I Am On Linux
For many years I’ve entertained a notion to try Linux. For most of those years, it was all I could do to keep up my career and such competency on Windows as was necessary. Then came cell phones with their operating systems and apps, mostly Android. Last week, having supposedly retired from my career, I felt I could spare some time to get into Linux. So far, I’ve played around with Ubuntu Mint and Debian Plasma on bootable USB drives.
It was pretty easy to get both Linux systems booted up and running with internet access via wifi. I couldn’t get Debian Plasma going on my old Acer laptop, because of choices I made about UEFI and MBR/GTK when burning the .iso file to the USB drive. But Mint is working okay on it, and Plasma runs on the less old Lenovo laptop. With both, I’ve run into “insufficient space” errors while installing programs. I didn’t notice anything about this problem in all the articles and forum postings I read about “How to Install Linux”. Possibly, it’s fixable by resizing the partition Rufus set up when burning the .iso file to the USB drive. I tried some different Rufus settings in the hope of curing the problem, without success. The only thing I accomplished was to make the Plasma USB unbootable on the old Acer. That’s okay for now. It was my impression that most of the authors of the articles and posts I read considered the bootable USB approach to be for trying out different Linux repos before picking one to install on the computer’s hard drive or SSD. Quite a few, nevertheless, just used the USB approach, and quite a few others went with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) approach. I used WSL myself, which worked fine and had some advantages, particularly in being able to quickly switch to either Windows or Linux, and to run Linux programs right from the Windows Start menu. I still ran into the “insufficient space” problem while installing Linux programs.
What I haven’t done yet is find the best way to run a working “localhost” in order to test web pages I may be working on. You see, Linux is often touted as “the choice of developers”. I think this notion is mostly intended to encompass programmers writing code in Python and C++ and other languages to develop programs and games. But I think “developer” reasonably extends to those who create (develop) websites with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and associated frameworks. For a couple of decades (well, it seems that long) I’ve used either Xampp or Wamp to get a Localhost Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) server running on my PC as a “sandbox” in which to test (develop) websites and their pages and other parts before uploading them for public access on my web hosting provider. So far, I haven’t found the Linux version of either Xampp or Wamp; and it seems like it’s always during the attempt to install Wine that I incur the “Insufficient space” error. Wine supposedly enables one to run native Windows programs on Linux.
I’m sure I’ll figure it all out before it makes me any crazier than I already am. Meanwhile, I thought it might be fun to fire up Firefox on Linux and do something else I haven’t done in a long while — post something on one of my blogs. And so, here we are! One of the nice things about this particular blog is that nobody but me and searchbots, spambots, scambots, and other non-human webcrawlers visits it more’n once in a blue moon, if that. Consequently, I needn’t concern myself with the quality, craftsmanship, or literacy of what I write here, nor whether it offers anything that’s newsworthy or otherwise of interest, much less compelling interest, to anyone, even myself. Hmm, it just now occurs to me that this blog could be like a memoir or personal journal (a/k/a diary) that one or two people might find and look at after I die. I’ll have to think about this; but, not until after I solve “insufficient space” (probably by actually installing Linux on the HD/SSD) and get a LAMP running on Linux.
Verdict on Linux so far: I discern no difference between blog posting with Firefox on Linux and blog posting with Firefox on Windows. This is no surprise, of course. As for website work, none of the widely acclaimed text editors for developers (IDEs) that I’ve found and installed so far seem likely gain my favor over what I use on Windows. Probably, professional web developers would attribute this to my “tyro” skillset.
That’s all for now. There might be updates about this. Or, maybe I’ll think of something that would actually be of interest, or merit inclusion in a memoir.
Strange Beasts
June 16, 2026
Language, Wisdom
No Comments
John Chappell
Why do I enjoy the Tarzan books of Edgar Rice Burroughs? Partly, it’s gems such as this conclusion of Tarzan the Invincible:
“This man has a casket,” reported one of the warriors, “which he says contains The Father of Diamonds.”
“The true Father of Diamonds, which Herkuf just brought with him from Thobos,” said Chon, “rests here in its casket on the altar before me. There cannot be two. Let us have a look at what the man has in his casket.”
“No!” shrieked Alan Thorne. “Don’t open it! It is mine, and I have been waiting to open it in Paris. I shall buy all of Paris with it and be king of France!”
“Silence, mortal!” commanded Chon; then, very deliberately, he opened the casket, while the trembling Thorne stared with mad eyes at the contents — a small lump of coal. At sight of it, realizing what it was, Alan Thorne screamed, clutched his heart, and fell dead at the foot of the altar of the true god.
“For this false and accursed thing,” exclaimed Brian Gregory, “we have all suffered, and many have died; yet the irony of it is that it is, in truth, The Father of Diamonds.”
“Men are strange beasts,” said Tarzan.
altarsBurroughscoaldeathdiamondsGodTarzan