Wanting to get off the Windows band wagon, I looked for something else, and selected "Cinnamon" on the Mint platform.
That was 2 years ago or so, but my "get down and dirty" with Linux did not happen until lately.
at first, it was all "how in the heck am I supposed to be able to do this?"
No clue on the command lines, I hated a command line driven OS, pure and simple.... that hails from back in the DOS days of working with Basic, and then dabbling in
C
and then machine coding with the 6502 cpu.Of course then, there was no such thing as "the Internet", I was big into Ham Radio ( Amateur Radio ) and first licensed in 1958.... so I built up a code reader and other such things.
Fast Forward to about six months ago, what with my wife having passed, and a big hole in my mental stability, I really needed something that I could divert my thinking onto instead of sulking around the house under a black cloud.
18.3 Cinnamon caught my eye and I went for it.... Deep, I wanted to get a "Daily Driver" laptop that would do what I wanted, when I wanted it, and for the Desktop to look like I wanted it... "wide scroll bars", little toys like that.
Then about a week ago, I have it all polished up nice and neat, and get to thinking: "Ya know ole sod, you better make a backup of this thing"....... and that eventually led to me learning Clonezilla....
Actually, that led to a disaster with Clonezilla and I managed to direct the "stored image" to the /dev/sda2 ext4 partition where every thing important resides.
Clonezilla stopped with an error message
no room on device
Hmmmm, better reboot and see what is happening? Well, grub menu shows and then a message
Bad Block
and it stops with the cursor blinking on a black screen.Of course, the first thing I thought of was, oh crap, I should have been playing around with one of the old 32bit laptops for this learning curve…. But, too late now, on with the show.
So, back to the Win7 desktop and TuxBoot makes me up a new Flash drive stick for 18.3 Cinnamon…. My experience with LiveCDs had already given me a foul taste for how slow they run.
With the stick in place, the laptop was up and running about 30 minutes later…. Nice an trim, no fluff, just a nice and quick responsive machine.
Did a Timeshift and labeled it ‘Fresh Install’ and then I added on a few basic apps that I wanted….. but what was more important was that none of the detritus of my prior experiments with every “gee whiz great toy” apps was installed, I left all of those off.
As I had taken a lot of detailed notes and stored them on my Evernote cloud account, it was fairly easy, and pretty fast to get back to where I was before, “only better now”….
Two days of playing with it, and I have it all polished up nice and bright. A few copies of Timeshift, and one good solid Clonezilla backup. All directed to the extUSB HDD so nice and safe. And pulling back all of my Personal Data from the extUSB HDD, it looks like, and has everything I had before. All the pictures, Downloads, etc... it is all there to use as I decide I want it, or not....
Now, I can get back to what I was doing before the crash, reading the Linux Mint forums to see what is going on, watching TV, talking to friends on the phone, deleting trash spam emails, LOL
Life is grand, and the world did not end with a crash