Linux and more Linux Distro testing

Posted on March 29, 2009 by venagozar

I had some free time this week, and the Sidux Linux I am using has drifted from leading edge to leading as the Sidux Team introduced a new revision. I was very happy with Sidux and recommend Sidux if you want a stable fast Linux on your computer.

With that being said it was off to Distrowatch for another round of trying out new flavors of Linux. The current roundup is very impressive, and my final decision still is not made. I started downloading PCLinuxOS from their server using my Mac. The download rate was pretty slow, so I killed it waiting for a different time of day to try again.

As I looked over the current offerings, Crunchbang Linux caught my attention. It is purported to be a smaller faster Ubuntu Linux. I downloaded the most current version and installed it on my little Asus 1000. It is a snappy little distribution. It is complete as it comes for most users. I would have been happy with it, with the exception of the color scheme. It is shades of black upon shades of black. I do not know if there was a statement in the color scheme, but with so many choices I decided to let Crunchbang go for something a little more colorful. If black is your favorite color, and you desire a fast lighter distribution, check out Crunchbang Linux.

My next choice was Vector Linux. Vector has a new version out, and I know from past experience that Vector Linux is one very fast distribution. It has been some years, and many revisions since I ran Vector, but knowing how quick it was, I was curious to try Vector Linux again. I was not disappointed! Vector is everything it always has been, and more.

One of the options during the install was to load the works, that was not the option name, but the idea is the same, so I chose it. The whole meal deal was exactly that. Vector Linux was stuffed with more software than I imagined one cd could hold. So much in fact, I felt it was more than I wanted. It was replaced, but I plan to go back and install the regular flavor next week.

Puppy Linux is making a bigger name for itself every week. At around one-hundred megs one is challenged to find a competing distribution that packs so much software and is so fast. As luck would have it, Puppy Linux released two new versions yesterday for revision 4.2.

Puppy Linux from Puppy's site

Being greedy, I downloaded them both, and ran the version that is not the retro edition. What a pretty desktop I had! Loaded with all the software I could want and then some, with the exception of a few games, Puppy is a very pleasant Linux. I had a problem making my memory stick bootable, but once I figure that out, I will have a portable Puppy on a flash drive, and Puppy Linux may make it to my hard drive.

I always wanted to give Zenwalk Linux a spin, but I was never too sure about my wireless support. Since I have decided that wireless on my Asus is not all that, I downloaded Zen Linux and completed an install.. Zen Linux is everything it claims to be. Zen Linux is a nice mix of software. Each program is a leader in its separate category. Zen is very fast, and responsive, with a nice collection of software in the repositories. Zen Linux claims a place on my hard drive this go around.

I am ever curious about Mepis Linux, so I downloaded Mepis. For whatever reason the server timed out in the last thirty seconds of downloading, and I never managed a complete ISO. Mepis is a good distribution, though probably a little heavy for my little netbook.

Along the same lines, I managed a complete download of PCLinuxOS, and burned a cd. It is a little too much for my netbook without undergoing some major changes. It is very pretty as always and performed well for me on my desktops. I am sure that remains the same

I am torn between Zen and Puppy Linux. They are the best for my needs right now, and it is a tough decision. Maybe I will use them both as my mood changes?

Personal Construction Set For Life Building

Posted on March 27, 2009 by venagozar

Wouldn’t it be nice to have our own personal construction set? Think of the possibilities. Anything we wanted, we could make or create. If our car broke, or there was a plumbing problem we could reach into our construction set and pull out the needed tools to fix the problem.

If we needed something done in our life, or wanted to modify someone in our life, it could be the same process. Reach into our construction set box, pull out some tools and off we go. Fixing, modifying, creating, changing someone around us into someone better for our life.

There is some good news about our construction sets. We all have one. Our construction sets are standard equipment given out when we are born into this world. It is always with us, and it is always in use. From the moment we wake, perhaps even in our sleep, we remove and use tools out of our construction set. We are busy shaping our world into something we feel is more like what we want.

Looking around it is obvious that some people are very good at using the tools in their construction set. Their life appears to be perfect, they have everything anyone could want. At least it looks as if they have everything you and I may want. It seems they are master craftsmen and have used their tools with all the skill and finesse becoming a master craftsman.

When we look at our own lives we see a different picture. Some parts of our life are working pretty well, and some other areas need some major work. It could be in how we manage our resources, perhaps our relationships, or maybe even our time. For some it may seem that we lost our construction set somewhere along the way and most things in our life need fixing.

There is something valuable we may have missed about construction sets in general. All the tools we need to create, change, or modify our world are inside our box of tools. For the most part, we are masters in the use of all the tools we have in our constructions too.

Our live consists of a lifetime of repair, modification, change, level, and rebuild. Our construction sets are complete when we were born, but we are not. We have all the tools we need and we know how to use them, but it takes a lifetime, sometimes longer to create the world we envision.

In the meantime, though, we have all the tools we need to keep working on our masterpiece. All it takes is being true to ourselves, knowing what we really want for our lives, and not letting ourselves be distracted from our future. Sounds simple, and perhaps for some it is, but for the rest of us, there is one important tool in our construction kit that we often overlook.

The tool we overlook the most is checking our progress against our plan. We made a plan sometime in our past, and we get so busy we never stop to check our progress against our plan until it is obvious something went wrong somewhere along the line. The great thing is when we do learn to occasionally check our work against our plan, this tool becomes one of the most important and least overlooked tool in our personal construction kits.

Don’t Spring Into Spring

Posted on March 24, 2009 by venagozar

Spring time is here in New Mexico, and I know if it is not yet spring where you live, it will be soon. From my time in the military I know that spring is a time when people hurt themselves. We go out and start doing things we have not done since last fall, or maybe even before that. We remember we used to run, jump, skip, hop, lift weights once upon a time and we are suddenly in a hurry to get right back into it.

There is a small issue though. Our bodies are a number of months older, and we have not done a lot other than hang out on the couch and snack over the winter. If the young men and women in their late teens and early twenties were hurting themselves when I was in the military, and they are in better condition than most of us, what do you really think your chances of surviving your spring weather exercise plan is?

exercise4 Surviving a hastily put together exercise plan is not as good as the chance of hurting yourself. I joined a gym for a year some time ago, and I had the good fortune of spending an hour with a trainer who really cared about proper training. After listening to me and what I thought I could do, he instructed me on what I should do.

I should start out slow. After all it took me many years to arrive at whatever physical state I was in, and there was no rush to get into top physical condition in the next few weeks. What surprised me the most was the amount of weight he had me start out with for my ten or so weight machine exercises. I was to start using ten pounds

I thought that was silly, after all I was used to lifting much more than ten pounds going to the pet store for cat litter and cat food. I humbled myself though, and told myself he was the expert, not me, even if I did not believe what he was telling me. Then he said, “No pain, no gain was a lie.” What!? No pain no gain is a lie? I could not believe that one, but he promised me it was true. A few months later, I had passed the average person on the weight machines, and never had as much as a sore muscle.

It was well worth it to listen to an expert and heed their advice. Unfortunately I am not that expert. But I do know from the experience of watching others hobble around with a bad leg, or sporting a half cast that starting slow and doing less than you think you can is the best method.

When spring fever hits you, and you get the urge to get out there and get back into shape, whether pounding the pavement, or swimming across the ocean, take it slow. The race goes to the surest. The fastest usually end up on the side lines, hurt. Take your time and be around to enjoy the summer rather than watching it pass you by from the porch.

The Canvas of You

Posted on March 23, 2009 by venagozar

I wrote about aligning what you really want with your actions in this post. If you have not read it, here is a capsule version. If what you think you want and what you do are not in alignment, one or the other needs to change.

For many of us change is easier said than done. We want to change; we want our secret desires to be our public desires, but something holds us back from making this change. We plod along with our secret desires hidden where only we can see them. Our public desires remain something we can live with, but not always what we really want.

It should be a simple matter to make our private desires public, and let our public desires go. We don’t really care about some of our public desires anyway, they are the expectations of others upon us. It really should be quite easy to walk by a trash can and drop our public desires in, and walk on.

happy1 Yet we do not. Why can’t we just drop our public desires and start living the life we really want? No matter what reasons we think we have for not allowing ourselves to be who we want to be, all reasons are rooted in one common place.

We fear…. We fear what our parents will say. We fear what other family members or friends will say. We fear what the world will think of us. We fear what will happen if we start to change. We fear that allowing ourselves to change will somehow make us different, and we do not want to be too different. We want to be the real us, but we would rather no one noticed, so we stay the same.

What happens when we allow this fear of change to run our lives? Well for starters we are miserable. We are unhappy because we know we are living a partial lie. We want to change and quit living in a lie, but we do not change. We would rather be miserable as we are than change and become who we really are.

The great artists of the middle ages painted some beautiful work in their day. These same artists also created some less than okay paintings. Where did all the less than okay paintings go? Artists who paint discovered a wonderful secret that we can all use in our life.

In days past, canvas for painting was very expensive. One did not simply throw a bad painting away. Great and not so great artists of the past did one of two things. They either modified a bad painting into something they were satisfied with, or they painted it over completely and started fresh.

Artists in general do not worry about failure. Failure is creation too, and a learning process. Every artist knows every painting is not going to be a masterpiece. Great artists use this secret to recreate on the very same canvas something better than what they had created in the first place. In essence they reinvented what was on the canvas.

We are all artists in our own way. We are our own canvas. We are the creators of our own painting. It is the only painting we have of ourselves, and most of us do not like what we have created. We have the freedom to repaint it as often as we wish, and there is no time like the present. We are the only person who needs to approve of our painting. If we approve of what we have created, others will approve of us too.

Unleash the artist in yourself, and recreate who you really are. Cleaning the canvas of us, or modifying what is already there is what we need to be doing to improve our lives. If your first attempt is not a success, that is okay. Because we are our own canvas, we can paint over our mistakes as many times as we need to in the process of getting us right.

Stairwell of Life

Posted on March 20, 2009 by venagozar

empty-canvas Do you ever wonder who you are? I mean the inside you, not your physical relationship with the people around you. Usually after our schooling ends we discover we have lots of free time. We spend a lot of that free time thinking, usually about us. What better subject is there after all?

We have a thin veneer formed around us by this time in our life. It is what has formed from what our parents, other family members, and friends think about us. What they perceive or think we are. This thin veneer is a good guess of who we really are, though at other times it does not wear so well.

When it does not wear so well, it is because there has been lots of time for serious introspection about ourselves, who we are, and our place in the world. It dawns on us slowly that those ideas and thoughts that others want us to be are not us. The thin veneer that has been placed upon us does not fit quite right. Or perhaps it does not fit at all.

Looking inside ourselves for what is really the first time, these differences may appear. The clothes we have been wearing all our life suddenly do not seem to be the right style for us. Our hair style, which we have had since we were children now belongs to a stranger. We wonder how it ended up on us, and how we went all this time without realizing that we are not the person we see in the mirror.

For some of us this is a sad and occasionally scary time in our life. As we are programmed to fight or flight, so we normally do one or the other. We change our looks, habits, and other things about us as we fight the idea of us we see in the mirror.

Others run away from what they discover. Why that has to be us. That is how we have been our whole lives, how can it be any different? We pretend we never noticed that we are not who we see in the mirror. We go about our day as if the discovery never happened.
For those who embrace change, and start on a quest to discover who we really are, it is a ride full of ups and downs. Imagine you are the person in the picture. You spend your days going up and down the stairs, trying on this clothing and that clothing. Cutting your hair and letting it grow out. Wearing clothes that do not quite go together, but they seem more like you than any other clothes you have been wearing.

I think we do a disservice to our young adults. We no longer have any formal ritual, or initiation process where one can make the change from being a child to being an adult. We do not have a process where someone is sen as their own person and have the freedom to be who they think they are.

Generally for some, it is a painful process for everyone around. Expectations parents had for their children are not met because as young adults the child may not know who they are, but they know they are not what the parents think they should be.

If you find yourself in this situation, there are a few things you can do. The first thing one should do is remember this is your life, and it does not belong to anyone else. It is your life to do whatever you want to do with it, within some boundaries of common sense.

If you are a parent, it is important to understand that children grow up, and need to be respected for who they are trying to become, not what you may think they are. You have done your job getting them to this point, now they need your support and understanding until they become who they think they should be.

The stairwell of life goes up and it goes down. This period is the spring time of adult life. It is a rare time when we have the freedom to start finding out who we really are and what we are about. It may feel like we are on level ground, but none of us are really. No matter who we are, we are either going up or down the stairwell of life.

Happiness Challenge

Posted on March 18, 2009 by venagozar

happy-ii1 I have a short two part happiness challenge you can take if you want to? It will take about two minutes, and no one will know the results except for you. Sound like something you want to try?

Ready?

Find a piece of paper and something to write with, or open up notepad or whatever you use to write notes with on your computer.

Without thinking about it, start writing or typing words and short phrases you think describe happiness in your life that have meaning to you.

Pause for a few seconds when you are done. Use the backside of your piece of paper, or open a new notepad while leaving your first notepad open. If you do not know how to do that, hit return seven or eight times so you have a new space to type on.

Now think of the happiest person or people you know. Start writing or typing words or phrases to describe them, pretend you are telling someone else about them.

When you are done, compare your phrases and words. How do the words and phrases you use to describe yourself compare to the words and phrases you use to describe your happy person?

Are they the same type of words, or are they distinct and different? Can you tell what words describe you and what words are describing your happy person?

Did you use words and phrases such as: content, happy, filled with joy, peaceful, or friendly to describe those really happy people you know?

Did you use words, such as: worried, bored, anxious, lost, empty, or wondering, to describe yourself?

Perhaps you used a mix of words that move back and forth across an imaginary happiness line?

If the words you use to describe yourself are not similar to the words you used to describe the happy person(s), how are they different?

Happiness does not happen on its own. Happiness needs help to take root and thrive in your life. You can make happiness happen if you want to.

Pause and reflect and decide if you want to make a happiness change in your life? Some people really do not want to make changes in their lives even though they talk about it.

If you want to make a change to bring more happiness in your life, start using those words and phrases you used to describe the happiest person you know to describe you.

Tell yourself at every opportunity, how happy you are. Using the happiness defining words you used to describe your happy person to validate yourself.

You should do this many times a day, at least every hour for the first days, until you start to believe it. It is very important to do this when you first wake up, and before you go to sleep.

When you meet someone new, or see someone you have not seen in a while, let them know you are a happy person, and you like people. Use some of your new words on them when you talk about yourself. It will feel funny at first, but you will get over it quickly and it will start to be a conversation ice breaker before you realize it.

Change does not happen over night, but if you keep at it you will wake one morning and you will be the happiest person you know!

Welcome, Ven a gozar!

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Monthly Archives: March 2009