Walking back home yesterday, I was beyond appalled to see an oversized red truck with a massive plow driving illegally all over the sidewalk and grass outside the Church of Ascension, on the corner of North Street and Linwood Avenue. The driver didn't just stop at the snow. He took a good chunk of the grass, dirt and pavement along with the snow and then, flouting all sense of common decency, tossed all that snow and dirt all over Linwood Avenue, over the driveway of
(e:pmt)'s house on 24 Linwood and heaped the rest on the sidewalk in front of the LinNor Apartment building across the street.
Is this kind of plowing authorized by the Church of Ascension? I find it despicable that a church, whose main goals are to serve the community cares so little about its neighbours that it goes out of its way by hiring or authorizing obnoxious illegal plows to make life more miserable for them.
I was also extremely shocked to see this church-hired plow truck driver almost run over
(e:Matthew) who told me later that he had stepped out to express his concern over this plow outrage. When
(e:Matthew) asked if the church-hired plow truck had a city license to drive and plow all over the sidewalk and generally be a menace to the neighbourhood, the driver did not respond well and drove off in a huff, heaping even more snow over the lawn of 24 Linwood.
(e:Matthew) was left to clean up the tons of snow he had just shoveled before the plow truck destroyed all his efforts.
Agreed that it is a church and churches do serve a religious purpose, but this definitely does not give them a blanket approval to do whatever they wish, break the laws and overstep common courtesies to their neighbours. At the very least, I hope city hall takes a stern view of this very objectionable, disruptive and quite possibly, illegal snow plowing authorized or encouraged by the Church of Ascension, issues a warning for future violations and fines the church authorities.
Ya right click on your gnome panel at the top. Select add to panel. Then choose the system monitor widget. Its got it all.
I forgot to ask.. do you know of a simple gnome-based resource monitor to see what is using the most CPU and RAM at any given time.
Have you tried running top or the GUI based system resource gnome panel widget. Just like the task manager on windows it shows you what is running and how much CPU, memory, etc is being used. I find my fedora box uses almost nothing unless I am actively running other programs or there is a system update running. Using that tool you can get a feel for anything taking up resources. Then you can remove those things or use the GUI, or the nice command to reduce the amount if CPU given to those tasks.
I could help you with it after yoga on Wed night if you want.
You are right and unfortunately, I am finding it very difficult to work up the energy or the vision to share your bigger picture about the necessity of passwords. On the surface, your post sounds rather paranoid and it's easy for people with lazy tendencies like me to dismiss extreme scenarios and shut our eyes to anything that seems a bit of an inconvenience. You see, this is not that different from all those people who simply refuse to learn the ropes of i2. I am laughing at my own hypocrisy because I am doing the very same thing with linux as people generally do with i2.
However I do know that it's not really as over-the-top as it might sound. After all, we definitely know that something of this sort happened when the Chinese government paid hackers to control the gmail accounts of political activists last year. It was probably made easier by 123, abcd like dictionary passwords or worse shared passwords. It does pay to be safe than sorry.
As for switching distros, my motive was to give R the maximum resources it possibly could get without system resources hogging RAM or CPU power - hence the preference for a lean system. As you noticed, I am not a very good code writer and improving my code skills could be a time-consuming alternative. I instead opted to throw bigger hardware at my poor code-writing. Searching for "easier" ways to make this bigger hardware be at least 95% available to R was what I was trying to do.
Anyway, you make very valid points and I have been running my models on Fedora Gnome and it's not been going as disastrously as I imagined apart from an occasional freeze up or two...
And as a funny endnote, all this tinkering with linux (maybe for all the wrong reasons) is making me more dissatisfied with Win XP everyday. lol
I am not sure why you are using linux anymore? It sounds like you are spending more time installing OSes than you would waiting for your windows computer even in its slowness. Besides your new laptop should be faster. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? If you just want a machine that executes R fast and for which R is easy to install, then fedora seems like a good match. Why the constant OS re-installation?
As for those passwords they have nothing to do with people stealing your computer physically. Without them your computer is totally vulnerable from being owned over the net.
The whole reason XP was so insecure was because it did not ask you for any passwords to do administrative tasks like install software and start and stop services. Thus when you ran as an admin, which you were, and you visited a website that had malware, which you could - it would simply auto install in the background and you would be owned. Your computer could seem normal but in reality it could just be waiting for commands from the master.
Even if you don't care about your own data safety, which you should - you should care about contributing to the terrorists, mafia, foreign hostile governments, etc which all use these methods to exploit your computer and others into giant zombie super computers that they can use to reak havok on the world at large.
Imagine if no one cares, and if the OSes are not more secure than it becomes pretty easy to create a zombie infrastucture which could attack our own systems like the electric grid, nuclear power, etc. If you don't secure your computer than you should not network it at all.
Every OS requires passwords to do administrative tasks at this point. Either that or the system is horribly gimped and tied to some commerical account that you install software through, e.g. iOS, or tied to your google account android.
I mean how hard is it for you to type in a password? It you are incapable of remembering it you could switch to a system with a smartcard reader or a fingerprint scanner. Plenty of laptops come with those now anyways. If you really hate having a password you can remove it as root. Login as root with su. Then type passwd -d -f USERNAME, replacing USERNAME with the user you want to remove the password for.
I will try the uid solution and see if that message goes away in one of my other laptops (which is running peppermint Ice now). I might change that laptop to linux mint...
Thanks. :) I have put in Fedora Gnome now and I am completely hating all the passwords and logins its asking every single time. Autologin is a nightmare to set up. I really could not care less if my current laptop has ANY security whatsoever. Chances are it will never leave home anyway...
And, oh yeah, by the way, (e:tinypliny) did you have an existing persistent /home partition before you did whatever it is that you did? If you went from something vaguely Debian (aka Ubuntu) to something vaguely Redhat (aka Fedora) and kept the persistent /home partition, you could have uid(user id)problems because of different uid numbering conventions. /home/tinypliny could have an uid of 500 in Fedora and 1000 in Ubuntu. If you have that problem, you should change the uid to the right number in something like /etc/passwd (or yr distro's equivalent).
(e:tinypliny) - actually what I think you are experiencing are the joys of Windows. My assumption is that if Windows (or/and osX) did what you wanted, you wouldn't be mucking about with linux.
I concur with (e:paul). You might want to examine why you want a stripped down minimal system and decide if the extra hassle is worth it. If you want to use Fedora (or even Ubuntu (assuming no hardware issues), his advice is good. Remember you can always install openbox later and use it. Modern distros support multiple windows managers and desktop shells.
This month:
Windows - 73.05%
Mac - 14.27%
Android - 4.19%
IPhone - 2.45%
Linux - 2.31%
I would suggest not using the ldxe spin. Not because there is anything wrong with it but because, based on the hardware you purchased there is no need to par down.
Instead I would just run the default fedora gnome desktop that installs off the live CD. Becuae many more people run this default install it will be much easier to find support than it you run a non mainstream desktop manager. Looking at this report from os news :::link::: you are not having any if the same limitations these systems are designed for. The amount of memory you ate saving is meaningless on an 8gb of ram system? Is disk space even am issue anymore? I would say it's not worth the risk of having things be more complicated. Nothing is going to steel major CPU either. Just don't tun a milling things along with your heavy r processing. Your new computer can handle it. Don't be scared to utilize it.
BTW, do user OSes turn up in your statistics for the site? Whatpercentagel of (e:peeps) actually run linux?
Downloading fedora-lxde spin now... It might be nice if I didn't have to wrestle with things for a change. :)
If you install fedora from the live CD instead of the DVD it will have way less stuff by default.
Fedora boots for me so fast. It also runs openbox if you need it. That being said, I think you may be complicating things by trying to be so minimal.
If you go super stripped down, then you will always need to install stuff everytime you need anything. And that can be great if you know what you are doing but its not a big advantage otherwise. Like the problem you had when trying to compile the other day but you did not have the dev library stuff you needed.
What are you goals. A fast box that runs a browser but can also run R code natively? If thats the case , I would just go gnome desktop on fedora and install R with "sudo yum install R" Then install chrome from the google site.
The trickiest part with Fedora is going to be installing flash or proprietary third party video drivers as it only comes with open source software. That being said, flash is relatively easy now and the latest fedora include open source video drivers that will be good for anything you need minus say, 3D gaming and animation.
With no applications when installed and everything left to the user to decide, maybe?
For instance do you know of a reliable Fedora distro running openbox?
:-) What is the smallest slimmest Fedora you know of?
Seems like something belongs to a uid (user _id ) that does not match what you have in the user db on your system. I have never seen this in fedora, just saying.