8th April 2015 - A taste of spring and Linux experiments

Spring certainly has arrived. We experienced a couple of warm days. The change of the clock contributes - it's now brighter again in the evenings. I took the liberty and took pictures with my phone the last days.

Skerries Harbour last Easter Monday. I had too much Easter dinner on Sunday so I had to go for a walk around the harbour. And look, no clouds in the sky and the water is very calm as well. Unfortunately, I didn't quite anticipate the weather to turn out like this so I was still wearing my winter coat and roasting away in the heat.

This is a picture of a tulip tree. Everyday on my way to work I pass by these beautiful houses at the train station where I get off. The first house on the left once you leave the station has a huge tulip tree in his garden. It's a pity they don't last very long. Still, I think they are beautiful.

Well, to explain the second part of the post title, I have to give a few explanations. A while ago I changed my large laptop (17.2") to run Ubutu 14.04, a Linux-based operating system. Turned out that I wasn't quite happy with it and for a good while the laptop remained in my wardrobe unused.

Last week I decided to give it another go and install a different operating system on it. My netbook is running on Linux Mint Cinnamon and personally I love it, however found that it didn't quite agree with the laptop.

I called upon dear old Google to have a look at couple of different operating systems and after another not so successful installation of Korora 21 KDE, I settled with Korora 21 GNOME, 32-bit version. The other system didn't allow me to log into the root to run necessary updates (which turned out to be a whooping 522) and instead I was faced with constant error messages. I liked Korora - it's a deviate of Fedora after they split from Red Hat and I have to say that I'm happy that I moved again. Installation also went much smoother.

I have a thing with butterflies at the moment and decided to use a different desktop background for this computer.

On the left-hand side you can see some preset shortcuts to applications. The bottom icon allows you to look into other applications currently available. From there you can link them to this task bar.

I have to admit that I'm quite the fan of Thunderbird - easy setup even with more than one email account and the import of emails goes rather quickly. Now Korora offered me Evolution to set up my emails (after I remembered all the passwords) and I have to saw that I prefer it over Thunderbird. Set up is easy as well, also adding more than one email account. However additionally it has a calendar, address book and to-do task feature makes it a bit more usable compared to Thunderbird.

I'm still experiencing problems with the root access but I will sort that out hopefully soon. I've also set up OwnCloud and taken advantage of a German Cloud provider, BlauCloud, that offers me 2 GB for free on their servers. I wanted to make sure that I can exchange none-sensitive data between my laptop and netbook without the use of a USB stick. It's just something that has started to annoy me even though I have a good selection of sticks available now. Still the netbook to set up though and then I hope OwnCloud is the solution to my problem.

Overall, Korora seems to be doing well, nothing bad to report except for the root issue. Somehow it reminds me of - and this is just a personal opinion and no criticism - an Apple IOs on LSD. It's very colourful.

On a last note, I currently have a bit on a small house so I hope to have some great news soon.