Cabbage and salt...just that

Simple things: #1 Sauerkraut

Unbelievable. Shredded cabbage. A tiny amount of salt. That's the ingredients list. Clean knife and hands and a sterile jar. There's a fantastic transformation stage too, as you rub the salt into the cabbage, where suddenly there's no mare grainy salt and resistant shreds of white cabbage, and they've been replaced with a pliant, softer cabbage with a slightly wet feeling to the surface. A few days in the sterile jar and it lets out that familiar juice, but with an unfamiliar (to us who've only had the commercial varieties) fresh crunch and absence of any mass-production overtones. It would tweet with #itCan'tBeThisEasy.

I've tried...

...honest, I have, really. I've managed to run a Windows pc for almost a year, but over that twelve months the performance has deteriorated, the last straw (1) has been the insistence on running and failing to install the same two updates at every shutdown; and the last straw (2) came when I started it up alongside a (comparatively) ancient, underpowered, under-RAM-ed and under-processor-ed netbook running Crunchbang Linux. The Crunchbang machine was ready and able and logged onto the wifi and all that, while the Windows (comparatively) all-singing all-dancing (it should be like a Ferrari leaving a Morris Traveller in it's wake, spec-wise) was still saying “welcome”. All very friendly and everything, but I'm busy and in a rush and everything.

The Chrome browser on the Windows machine had also slowed to a crawl, and kept opening with that “Chrome didn't shut close down properly” thing (it did) and then repeatedly telling me that Flash had crashed and the pages were unresponsive and generally grinding to a halt.

So the question is: which version (distros they're called – short for distribution) to install? I like Crunchbang – fast, easy, and it has a brilliant (but slightly techie) minimalist user interface that I like. A lot.

But then Mint keeps getting rave reviews and the latest version (they ABC them with names) is Olivia, so that's made my mind up. It's downloading (or the .iso file is, anyway) right now and this evening I'm going to try and install it direct from that (if Daemon tools lite do their stuff).

Well, that could've been easier. Windows didn't like the pretend DVD drive or the .iso mount from Daemon, and didn't fire up Mint on a restart (deliberate, probably) and I've had to burn a bootable usb stick, go into the BIOS and change the boot order, and run the installation package from that. Getting onto the wifi was the usual faff and fiddle, but I got that connected after about ten minutes of cocking about. The installer is doing its thing now, an d it's only nine in the evening Might be up and running by ten (or, knowing computers, is that ridiculously optimistic?).

Success. The usb stick has been removed, and it looks like we're getting a Linux Mint 15 'Olivia' startup screen. In. Working. Now there's just the usual shedload (221) of updates to apply. Selective as ever: select all, install all. Hope no-one else is on-line. In the county.

All done, loaded, and the first important stuff done, like getting the email accounts into Thunderbird and Arseblog into the Firefox favourites. Here's the difference:

I want to eject an SD memory card:

Windows:

Hit the hidden stuff button in the right-hand tray. Wait. Hit the eject media button. Wait, drum fingers, think “jebus, how long can this possibly take?”, do something else, which stops the process dead in the water and it has to be started again with another hit of the button. Windows says “oh, you want to eject something, eh?” [thinks: yeah, why else was I hitting the 'eject something' button, numbnuts?]. Windows then says: “wait right there a minute, I'll see if I can't bring up a list of what you can eject, and we'll take it from there, eh?”. After more waiting there's the list. One item long. After hitting eject, eventually there's an annoying speech-bubble thing confirming it's safe to remove the SD card.

Linux: right click, instant menu, 'unmount', left click. SD card unmounted.

The (Not Responding) thing. There's two versions of each piece of Windows software. The rare, far less commonly seen normal version, such as Outlook, Word, VLC Media Player, etc. The more commonly seen not responding version, as in teenagers in the morning. There's Outlook (Not Responding), Word (Not Responding), VLC Media Player (Not Responding), and etc (Not Responding). The only point of software is to take on board mouse and keyboard (and touchscreen) input and act accordingly. If it 'aint responding, I may as well be looking at a placemat or the cover of a Jeffrey Archer novel (I was lost there, for examples of uselessness).