February 4, 2013

  • Generations as Reiterations

    This morning, [CM] and I are up early because she has some homework to finish in the morning before she can head out to the hospital to shadow in the Emergency Department.

     

    I'm taking this time to procrastinate from writing my final paper for my summer class by doing a bit of electronic housekeeping.  Well, it's more like renovations, because I'm not just talking about taking care of email backlog-- I'm reinstalling my OS.

    The current laptop I'm using has quite the history to it.  I bought it in South Korea from Yongsan with [Zanshin], so it's a korean machine in some respects.  Even has the korean keyboard.  So this machine is now over 7 years old.  It's still trucking like a real trooper though, and I have Linux to thank for that-- this hardware would be pretty crippled by modern Windows requirements.

    I'm currently installing Linux Mint 14.

     

    There are a few changes to the way I'm doign things this time around, which are probably more technical than the average person cares, so if you're not into this kind of stuff you might as well skip the rest of this post.

    • I've got multiple partitions on this laptop's 250GB hard disk.  Mostly that's because whenever I installed a new operating system, I chose to install it "alongside" the old one rather than just wiping the whole thing clear.  As a result-- I've actually got an install of two older versions of Mint and one of Ubuntu!  Yes, it's rather sloppy, and  waste of hard disk space-- what I really should have done in the first place is made a separate partition for /home, because all I really wanted was for my docs to persist.  However, when I first starting Linux with this laptop, I didn't know what /home meant, much less how in the hell to understand the installation procedure beyond any of the defaults.  So one of the big changes this time around will be that I'll have just three mounts-- one for "/", one for "/home" and one for swap.  Once I get things set up, I'll copy the contents of the old installs' /homes (which are not separate partitions, they're all on the same partition as the old / installs) and then merge them all into the single separate partition.  Then, if things are working out, I'll erase the old installs' partitions and reclaim the otherwise stagnant space.
    • I intend this install to be much more secure than previous ones.  Not that I'm guarding top secret information or anything, but I just like the idea of getting better at this stuff in general.  I'd like to start playing around more with port forwarding and stricter firewall rules in general.  Encrypting my data is also a priority.  I'd like to build some proxy browsing protocols into the default settings (although I imagine that could get annoying for some location based services, so we'll see how that goes).  Finally, this is a longer term goal if I can get the help of my flatmates, but I'd like to use MAC address filtering on the router (although that doesn't directly involve my laptop much).
    • I'd like the theme of the new setup to be persistence across devices.  That means that I need to find better ways of syncing things-- bookmarks, files, etc-- across my smaller netbook and my phone.  Yeah, there's a lot of cloud software to do that kind of thing, but I haven't really decided on just how to go about it yet.

    Hmm... looks like the install process is done. Time to reboot and see whether or not everything has exploded.