Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Goodbye Ubuntu, welcome Mint

And so this morning my PC refused to start. It took about half an hour to get it going with an emergency disk, and it turned out my Ubuntu system was completely crippled.
It was possible to save the data, but everything else was gone – time to re-install the operating system.

Now, this is not a tragedy, actually, it’s more of an opportunity – I have been postponing the necessary updates to my OS for weeks now, and really, had I waited for the right moment – a free afternoon, no urgent work to do, no pending projects, I would have never done it.
But necessity pushes everything out of the way – I need my PC to work.

And this is also a great opportunity to move away from Ubuntu, that I love dearly but has become bloated and slow, and to try a different distro of Linux, to wit, Linux Mint.

And here I am, six hours later, exploring this different-but-familiar environment. Everything seems to work fine, my PC is faster and so far the only problem is getting Scrivener to work properly.
But I’ll work on it.
A minor catastrophe turned into a nice opportunity.


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Crippled dictation

My latest update of the Ubuntu System has somehow crippled some of the tools I was starting to use.
For some mysterious reason, I can’t access the settings panel of the system, in particular I can’t select the microphone I am using with my PC.
voice_typing2But the hardest hit is the sudden decision Google Docs took not to accept dictation through my system anymore.
This was an excellent tool for doing quick work – such as translating short texts and writing short pieces, and I was counting on the thing…
Instead, nothing.

This means spending long hours checking documentation and assorted blogs and websites instead of doing what I should be doing.
My, this is frustrating.

Enough, back to trying to find a solution.