A Leap of Faith

Life is a comedy. I mean comedy in not a funny way, but an oddly satirical and ironical way. You don’t always get what you wish for. Sometimes when you do get things that you wish for, you feel cheated because what you got was something that you had imagined to be good in your own way, and is now no longer relevant as you now know the truth. You feel cheated, when you don’t get what you wish for- you blame a higher power. But then, things don’t exactly turn out what they seem to be and you find out that it was good without it, because something better awaited your way.

The irony of life is you can’t really know what is good or bad till you know it, and even then you can’t be sure.

I was lost then. I am lost now, but I hope am not wandering aimlessly any more. I often recall the following from Lord of the Rings:

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

In the rat race of doing things the way other people do it, I believe I lost myself. Too often, we resist doing we feel is right, we resist following our impulses in doing as to what we believe is good, we resist doing in what we believe will make us happy.

I no longer want to be a rat. I no longer want to run.

FLY!

Yes, that is what I want. For once, when you finally think of something amazing, the idea catches up with you. You can longer be happy with running on the ground, for you have tasted flight- that gush of wind in your face, that thrill of flight.

All that is required is a Leap of Faith!

The Story of My Experiments with Linux-II

So, finally I found an almost perfect Linux laptop. I admit I had my doubts initially before buying this machine, but when I finally decided to take the plunge, it turned out to be worth it. A Dell Inspiron 3437. It is almost perfect as it does not feature an Intel WiFi card. The rig comes with an Nvidia GeForce 720m. I would have much rather preferred a 740m, but then in India, this is as close to perfection as it can be.

 

What the laptops does have is:

 

• Core i5 4200- U
• 4 GB Ram DDR3 clocked at 1600 Mhz
• and 4-5 hours of battery life.

This is pretty much awesome I think.

Now, Dell has a history of ruining Windows OS with their own bloatware. I thought maybe Linux would escape unscathed. On the contrary it was even worse. They had not only bloated it, but ruined it!

How?

Well, with the proprietary OEM drivers for WiFi. The driver registered with the kernel as a module. So, as soon as I pulled a kernel upgrade, wham! The WiFi stopped working as the previously installed module was not compatible with the current kernel. And, that was the end of the story.

I obviously, had to reformat the whole laptop, but this time to my satisfaction. Moreover, instead of the buggy Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, this time I installed Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander. I can’t ever recall a LTS version I have hated more than 12.04. Everything will break down eventually if you are using 12.04. Stuff works so much more smoothly in 13.10. Moreover, 13.10 contains updated builds of almost every package. If you are not using these, you are literally left out. To say 12.04 wasn’t properly planned or was overly ambitious and presumptuous would be a gross understatement. I almost considered switching from Ubuntu to maybe Linux Mint or Debian-unstable.

Now, that I am using 13.10, I am loving it. As of now, I am running a MySQL server and a self-programmed Web Crawler on my machine since this past week. Needless to say, the machine response is pretty much awesome. The CPU usage is hardly 5 per cent.

I do have a plan to push the CPU usage to 100% by using a brute force decryption tool. But that is a story reserved for some another day.

PS: I still hate Unity, but have learned to admire it for its ability to not break even when hell cometh over. I still wish to try Xfce though, but then, since, I am using my Linux machine as a development platform, my willingness to experiment has diminished in favour of stability. I need my machine to be available. I still have my fun, and a couple of scripts up my sleeve, which I will share soon.