And the Magic is Ready!

Two weeks ago, DistroWatch reported that Mageia 9 had been released.

Back then, I was swamped with work and, even when the Mageia notifier displayed the announcement a week later, I could not perform the upgrade.

Well, that, and the fact that I normally prefer to do clean installs.

However, I do not have the time I need to perform a clean install right now, so I decided, rather adventurously, to do the upgrade.

Yes, this can mean that, if something goes terribly wrong, I might actually end up doing the clean install to fix the problem, which defeats the purpose.  And there are things that can go wrong: the printer-scanner, Steam, my personal configurations...

The notifier told me that I needed 9GB or so of space. I found that rather excessive, but, since I had space, I proceeded.  The upgrade took like 3 hours to complete and the notifer told me that everything was ready and I needed to reboot.

So, I rebooted expecting, well, the worst.

After a while (there was a new kernel, so I counted that as normal), the splash screen showed.  It was a bit different.

Then the login screen looked a bit nicer.  My icon was there, by the way.  It was not removed.

I logged in and the KDE animated cat that I had installed was still there and I landed into my old desktop wallpaper, with the neon icon theme and everything seemed the same.

Oh, but I noted that the machine was more responsive.

I printed.  It went fine.

I sync'ed my documents.  All normal.

My Firefox bookmarks were kept.

And the Steam games worked fine.

I, scratching my head, was dumbfounded.  This felt like my same old machine, but with a renewed vitality.  The upgrade was perfect.

The magic was performed.

 THANK YOU, MAGEIA DEVELOPERS AND COMMUNITY!

 

 

Artificial intelligence, education, and the forgotten 13th anniversary of this blog

Maybe it's just me... Who knows.  The thing is that I feel that my workload this year is going through the roof in a nice tower that reminds me of those gigantic toothpicks piercing the landscape, all in the name of cellular signal and communication.

Yet, even 5G seems like a foggy dream of a distant past.  The new technological wave that everyone is surfing is AI.

So, in addition to my normal work activities and my family responsibilities, I have been interacting with the chatbots in www.poe.com.  Hey, if they are going to steal my job eventually, at least I want to meet my replacement!

I have devoted a significant amount of time to talk to Sage, GPT-4, Claude-plus, Claude-instant, Dragonfly, ChatGPT, and NeevaAI.  Somehow, I am beginning to sense their different "personalities" as I read their outputs, be it to simple or more sophisticated questions.

I have even "created" my own bots to see if they are capable of providing a distinct response, something that makes them unique.  

In any event, I have been so busy with all of this that I missed the 13th anniversary of this blog!

And then I got this poem:

 

 

BoingoPlus (yes, it IS a JoJo reference!) is the chatbot that my brother created in www.poe.com.  This bot answers with riddles and poetry. I must say that I really liked the poem that BoingoPLUS wrote.

 

For fun, I even made a simple YouTube video about this experience.

I believe that the pretty-much-undisturbed educational world in which we grew up is changing abruptly.  It's like Pangea dividing.

And I am afraid that, as is usually the case, people in the education sector are not paying enough attention. I hope we do not miss this second opportunity to shift our Victorian-inherited teaching practices (and evaluation!) to something that is more humane and congruent with the realities of the Information Age... 

-------

P.S:

I ran this blog post through the chatbots to see how they analyzed it.  

"The world has changed, Johnny.  You wouldn't believe how much the world has changed"  (Jake Tremont, Dad, 1989)

 

Using dd to clone my portable Mageia Linux desktop

Since I returned to the office in 2022 after the remote work mandate was lifted, I have been using portable Linux desktops that I made.

These are convenient USB drives with persistence that I boot and so I can circumvent the restrictions (not to mention the spying) in the Windows desktop.

Anticipating that the USB drive can eventually fail, I have made several copiesÑ I have two MX Linux machines and two Mageia machines.

Even though I synchronize document files using FreeFileSync, I need to make absolutely sure that all the settings of OBS studio are updated, and since I keep changing the configuration for the didactic live streams, the best solution is to clone the USB drive machine I have been using to the backup USB drive machine from time to time.

Doing so is very easy.  First, I plug the source USB and open the Mageia Control Center just to make sure which is the source device (I need this machine in dev/sdb).  After that, I plug the other USB drive, which is the backup.  This is the target USB (the system must identify the target device as /dev/sdc). 

Then I open Konsole in Mageia and type su and my password to be able to type this command:

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=1M status=progress

The status=progress part lets you see how things are going while dd is doing the copy, otherwise the command line gives no feedback and, since the process takes a long time, one might think that nothing is happening.

 

First 2023 post: OpenMandriva Lx ROME 23.01 is here!

Two days ago, Distrowatch published the announcement that OpenMandriva is making its debut into the world of rolling distros with its ROME (Rolling OpenMandriva Edition, I presume) release. 

I had upgraded the system not long ago, but I wanted to make sure that I am using this release, so I followed ben79's most detailed walkthrough here.  Big thanks, ben79!!!

Everything worked perfectly and my system is stable as a rock.

I checked with uname -a and kernel 6.1.2 is running, so everything is updated and working.  So far, no disruption whatsoever.

AWESOME!!