Objective

To get a hands-on experience on Ubuntu installation on a UEFI hybrid system.

Devices

• 120 GB SSD disk: /dev/sda
• 1 TB HDD disk: /dev/sdb
• 8 GB USB key: /dev/sdc

Stage 0: precautions

• Ensure that your machine has enough power.
• Disable Secure Boot in M$ Windows
• Disable Quick Boot in boot menu

Stage 1: Make your live USB key

I tried Xubuntu’s built-in disk writing tool to create a live USB key from the official ISO file. Like my Xubuntu 18.04 installation on Fujitsu LH532 , the installer crashed during the installation. After submitting the generated report to Launchpad, I found out that the cause for this crash: the integrity test for my live USB key had failed.

It’s FOSS’s after-installation guide #11 recommends TLP. However, this package stopped my laptop from shutting down and logging in. I resorted to remove it through TTY.

Why image optimization?

To save loading .

My old way

ImageMagick provides a great CLI utility to convert and compress images for any purposes. However, to -crop images, I have to specify the numbers in pixels. One certainly works much more efficiently with a GUI tool.

My new way

GIMP can do anything that Adobe Photoshop can do, even saving images for web. In the linked page to this powerful GIMP plugin tutorial, the link for the GNU/Linux binary file is broken.

😖 @ 📃! This post contains unpleasant images. If you don’t wish to see them, please view this page with a text browser or a text mode plugin of your browser.

Rationale

Why?

My Fujitsu LH532 has been serving me well as my production machine for almost six years.

The keyboard was quite dirty: it’s full of hair and dandruff. I had to clean it for personal hygiene.

• au sens propre: (comme en anglais)

  Un événement dans lequel un cavalier essaie de demeurer sur un cheval avec deux jambes levées.

  

• au sens figuré dans l’actualité

  Une façon dangereuse de conduite dont le conducteur lève la(les) roule(s) antérieure(s).

  

Le dicto Collins a recordé une utilisation très rare de ce mot. Récemment, on l’utilise plus fréquemment en raison de la lutte contre les rodéos sauvages.

Goal

To set up a reasonable content structure for my blog.

Before Hugo

In my old Octopress blog, images and posts were placed under source/images/posts and source/_posts folders respectively. They were so far apart that I needed to use copy and paste the URL’s so as to get them right. As the size of the blog grew, I could hardly retrieve an image without first listing the files in the post image folder. This significantly reduced the efficiency of blog writing. In my hometown, people take efficiency seriously.

pdfunite is fairly easy to use.

pdfunite PDF-sourcefile1..PDF-sourcefilen PDF-destfile

Another way is to use QPDF. I’ve learnt to add --empty from @qpdf/qpdf:#12.

qpdf --empty --pages *.pdf -- out.pdf

Problem

One can use xrandr to adjust screen brightness. However, the factor (default to 1.0) is relative to the current brightness. How to enable the brightness adjust keys / on the keyboard under Xubuntu 18.04?

Solution

Toz’s post on Ubuntu Forum works like a charm. The default value for GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX is an empty string. Changing it to acpi_backlight=vendor and updating the GRUB has solved the problem since the next boot.

I correctly set up the system configuration file manager GNU Stow and the version control system (VCS) Git on my Fujitsu Lifebook so that the former can automatically install system configuration files like modules, whereas the later can track the code in those files.

What I mean for correctly is that in the ssh folder of the remote dotfiles repo, there is neither SSH key files nor entries representing SSH keys in the gitignore file. You may view Jan Uhlik’s dotfiles on GitLab as an example.

Rationale

My Linux Mint 18.3 installed on Clevo N240GU was a long-term support (LTS) version. Although the official page didn’t recommend an upgrade for its own sake, I still performed it as a result of my conversation with a technician in a computer store. He thought that the display problem in the current version would be fixed in this upgraded version.

The old version of Linux Mint couldn’t detect the onboard Intel graphics card. Therefore, sensors reported a higher CPU temperature and the display resolution couldn’t be correctly configured.