This is a ‘technical’ post. You probably won’t be interested, so you should stop reading now. Of course, if you are interested, then I hope you enjoy it!
I’ve been using Linux Mint 15 (and recently updated to version 16) on my laptop for the past few months, and quite enjoying the experience. It’s new, it’s fresh, it’s fast and trouble-free. Very enjoyable.
(Not my desktop.)
I’ve become quite competent at installing and setting up various Linux distributions. I’ve been trying them out on my Windows computer, via VMware Workstation. I’ve got half a dozen different ‘distros’ sitting in it as I’ve boeen playing around with different versions, but I’ve come upon one that I decided is better than Linux Mint.
It’s called Xubuntu.
That’s my desktop. It’s very clean, smooth and fast. It’s got a taskbar at the top, like all OS’s, that gives you access to programs and functions, as well as a dockbar that I decided to place on the right side of the screen.
It’s a faster and ‘lighter’ than Linux Mint, and looks a little bit different without being too different for me to navigate my way around it.
And that’s why I decided to upgrade my laptop today to Xubuntu (I’m using it now as I write this). I originally started using Linux Mint on the laptop because it was faster and lighter than Ubuntu, but Xubuntu is a step up again.
I’ve talked about installing and setting up CJDNS in the past as well, with Project Meshnet and Hyperboria. It used to be a struggle to get it all going, but now I seem a lot more competent at it than I used to.
Now I can install CJDNS onto a new Linux distro in just a few minutes, which is a nice achievement for me (compared to how much of a struggle it used to be back in the beginning!).
Zorin OS
One of the distros I played with via VMware, Zorin OS, was promoted as Windows-app friendly, because of strong integration with Wine (Windows emulator, allowing you to run Windows apps in Linux systems) built into it. With high interest, I installed that, set it up and played around with it. But I was left sorely disappointed.
The Wine integration sucked. Absolutely nothing worked at all, and with the hassles I’ve had playing with Wine in the past, I didn’t want to waste any time on it trying to make it work in a system that promoted it as already working. So that one was removed.
Which was a shame, it was a nice system too, with a nice toolbar. Here’s an image of it.
And now onto the Ghost blogging platform.
Because of the familiarity I’ve gained with setting that up and configuring it, I’ve decided to start promoting myself on fiverr.com as someone that can do it for others.
Maybe I’ll get some gigs from that, I don’t know. But I thought it was worth experimenting with.
My Ghost issues from today
This morning I was securing my passwords using LastPass, going through a security check and starting the process of creating unique passwords for every single site I have an account on. Yes, a tedious process.
But in the process of doing it for my blog, I found a bug which was mighty inconvenient. The platform accepted a password change that accidentally had a different password in the password confirmation field. Just as I pressed submit on the password change, I realised the number of asterisks in both fields were different.
When I tried going into the blog with one of the passwords, it failed and wouldn’t let me log in. So then I tried to do a ‘forgot your password?’ reset, but discovered that the mail setup in the backend coding wasn’t working.
So I had to go into the Ghost coding and adjust the mail setup, only to find after a bit of testing that Gmail (who I had setup for blog mail) didn’t like that I was using them via my blog’s backend functionality and decided to suspend my account.
After getting that fixed, I set up a new email account with an email provider that was recommended by the official Ghost creators, in accordance with their Help documentation. It worked!
So I was finally able to get my password reset and log in to my blog again.
Happy days!
That’s all from me today. I’m all tuckered out from my adventures around Ghost and Linux…
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