Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

You, dear reader, are lucky. Lucky to be seeing a new issue of The Enterprise. On Friday my computer was booting up or updating or something during a power drop and it hurt itself. So bad it would no longer boot.

I tried various recovery procedures that did not recover anything although some of them spent over an hour not doing anything. I finally re-installed Linux and tried doing various things in it to get the Windows 10 part up, but nothing worked.

I finally downloaded the latest Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft, burned a DVD, and ran it … and it almost immediately hung up on “missing driver, please insert disk containing driver”. What driver? I dono. What disk? I dono.

So here we have the first issue of The Enterprise done on a Linux box. And what a pain it was, too. I tried my old favorite text editor Gedit first, and discovered that the only Gedit I was able to find was the new one with the insane interface that is almost completely useless, and iritating as well. I did finally find an older version of Gedit, but it was only source code. Shades of Slackware Linux! Those were the good old days, when the only way to install a new bit of software was to compile it. After a career compiling code I did not feel up to getting into all of that … I am an old man, after all.

I ended up using Windows editors running in WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator is what WINE means), and while WINE is pretty amazing, the programs do not quite work like they do under the real thing. Close, but no thanks.

Now, I have been trying to use software that was “cross-platform” for a long time: Windows, Mac, and Linux. When I could find software that I liked and found useful. There is not always software that meets that requirement, alas. Sure, there is FileZilla, and Libre Office, and, I thought, Gedit (Ha!). All of the file managers are clumsy compared to “V, The File Viewer”. GIMP is a gem. Firefox and Thunderbird do the job.

But! Not enough good enough. Phooie!

“And so it goes ….”

Finally, let me yell out a big “THANK YOU!” to those kind folks who donated a bit of spare change to the TLE piggybank so I can renew the hosting service for another year. It has been tight this winter.

And my wife is still ill, but she is trying hard to get better. After all, it has only been 3 visits of the Emergency Room, and 3 visits to the walk-in clinic, and stuff the last month or two. Me? Frazzled nerves? Nah. Okay, some.