Geeking Out 0

My old Zareason laptop started showing signs of age a couple of weeks ago. In particular, the display was going dark unpredictably (not blank–just dark). I’ve had it so long that I don’t remember how long I’ve had it. As my old mechanic in New Jersey used to say, it doesn’t owe me a dime. (Unfortunately, Zareason is no more; it has joined the ranks of businesses that have fallen victim to the pandemic, which is a damned shame, as Zareason was a pleasure to do business with; indeed, I’m typing this post on a Zareason desktop.)

So I spent today configuring my new laptop from ThinkPenguin, which arrived yesterday right on schedule.

I ordered it with Debian, which has long been one of my favorite Linux distros. ThinkPenguin installed Debian with the default desktop environment of Gnome. As I loathe Gnome with the fire of a thousand suns (Gnome spells “simplify” d-u-m-b-d-o-w-n), I installed KDE Plasma (in Linux world, multiple desktop environments can coexist quite nicely on the same machine) and started tweaking Plasma.

So far it’s working like a champ

It’s almost where I want it, and I’ll have it all tuned up in a day or two. The top things left on my list are to configure the hosts* file, install and configure GKrellM, and set up a cron job to updatedb every night.

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*Yeah, I know the link is to a Windows-centric site, but a Windows HOSTS file and a Linux hosts file work the same way, because they both must comply with internet standards. I’ve been using the MVPS hosts file for two decades in my campaign against pop-up windows, and it works quite nicely, thank you very much.