House and Household

  Today my mac mini started to make strange sounds and eventually died with loss of the screen. Sot its heart (the hybrid sad drive) got transferred into a old Dell till I can find something better. Manjaro KDE worked well as does gnome. Loving manjar more as I get to know it. Afraid it does make the rpm and deb style systems look  a bit dated. Being able to use the community repositories to install “foreign” programs like scrivener of Xmind is a real plus. Adding printers is still a bit clunky though.

If you have one of these beasts linux installation can be a pain. Seems they use a 32 bit efi for the boot. So when you put any of the standard CD disks - yes disks as booting from USB doesn’t work -  it hangs asking you if you want method 1 or 2…. Early disks of ubuntu or fedora will boot but then you have to do a series of online updates. A total pain. I did want to do a Arch install but debian works - as ever so thats what I did. Debian will boot if you you use the mac image see;  http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/amd64/iso-cd/ Described in the following blog; http://sadevil.org/blog/2016/01/24/replacing-os-x-with-linux-on-my-mac-mini-21/ I did eventually get Manjaro linux installed by using a 686 net install version. https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?title=Installation_Guide_for_the_NET_Edition_0.8.10 It boots well on the 2.1 mini  boot and but you must ensure when installing that you set the whole thing up to boot in BIOS mode on all the i...

Still struggling with Linux and Mac OS. Yup still. Why? well I got stuck on speech recognition - see for me it works once you get over the self awareness thing. Speaking and not suddenly stopping because you feel like a dawk. Yes I have got it running in Linux using a previous version of dragon but it does work best for me in MacOS. Dragon is a pain because of the update policy - its greedy - pay every time you do a OS update... So as soon as I can dragon will be dumped. Thill then I have to run a laptop with Mac OS and Dragon so I can disappead into a corner and grumble at the screen. Word processor - doesnt matter - I use NoteCasePro - all I want is text I can past into scrivener - sync thru my drop-box then hope on to Linux to finesse. I now have a digital process that is mainly open and not OS specific. Zotero- biblio, Evernote - notes and searches, Scrivener structured writing, Xmind, ithoughts, simplemind - mindmaps for thinking, Projectlibre project planing from a m...