Computer Log

Just looked at my LinkedIn profile and noticed it said I was a Joomla developer, WTH? I did one small project using that and would never say that…or even desire a job in that area! As a matter of fact on my personal web page I have emphasized for years my lack of web design abilities!

Being somewhat older than most programmers today, and desiring to reenter the computer field, over a year ago I decided that perhaps my best shot was to brush up on COBOL, because I had read that there are still a lot of COBOL programs out there and many older programmers, have or are going to…retire! If you do a search today in this log file, there are 5 pages with COBOL references, beginning with a simple COBOL compile in October 2018. I also have 6 small COBOL sample programs on my github placed there in 2019. So I definitely didn’t jump on the COBOL bandwagon. Recently, since COVID-19 there has been a lot of talk in the news about companies looking for COBOL programmers. Ironically now after preparing, I can’t even pursue any of these jobs.

My mother, who until about 2 months ago was living independently, has become very ill and needs watching. I’m not complaining or blaming her because she has, as usual, been my biggest cheerleader over the years. I can’t do enough to repay her. The only complaint I have is the irony of the timing. I didn’t recently decide to learn COBOL because of the resurgence of interest in it. I attempted to show proactively, my desire to, at some level, return to programming. I am a person who was actually a IBM mainframe programmer who also wrote many COBOL programs, and who has been brushing up on my COBOL, in hopes of getting my foot back in the door. COBOL syntax, is only part of the problem, because it also helps to understand JCL (on IBM mainframes) and the concept of job streams and batch programming. At least I assume that is still true. I myself could use more JCL experience. But I do have some JCL jobstreams that I put together recently to test my MVS programs. Of course that doesn’t take into consideration the advancements in z/OS. I also wrote CICS programs, but don’t claim to be useful in that area anymore, because I have forgotten too much! Also I’m a pretty healthy older person who over the last 2 years has lost 40+ pounds and walks everywhere. So I have the potential to be able to offer many years of mainframe programming availability.

Oh, the irony…oh, the humanity : (

Installed the latest Linux Mint Mate 19.3 on moms computer, was version 18.1. Since I’m sitting with her all day, I took the time to partition her hard drive, as I have mine, separating root ‘/’ from ‘/home’. Hopefully this newer version will be more reliable than the old which frequently…at times would lock up. It locked up on me 3 times a few days ago while playing videos on the vlc player. I didn’t have any stalling problems on her computer that I had installing the latest Mint Cinnamon on my computer a few days ago. However I did have to re-download Mate because Mint said my media was corrupt…or words to that effect. Since I already destroyed the existing Mint I had to do this using the 19.3 flash drive.

Wow…had to install vlc & Gimp on Mint 19.3! Maybe Mint has become a beginners distro.

    Two Gimps offered Gimp and the one I choose...GNU Image manipulation program!

Reinstall Manjaro because of a Kernel panic at boot. I should mention that like Mint, Manjaro has a hold-up period at install start where it says “waiting for 1 module”, where it seems to wait over 10min.. This time I Clonezilled it after reinstall and 1.5GB of updates. For some reason many icons were missing. Fixed by applying Breeze2 Dark icons from settings. Not sure why the Kernel panic…out of the blue.

Finally got Mint Cinnamon 19.3 working! It was a permissions problem. The solution was to chown my home directory to bill even though the directory appeared to be already owned by bill. I did this by booting Mint single user mode. At first I was under the assumption that /home wasn’t being mounted, but realized single user mode doesn’t mount drives.
bill@bill-MS-7B79:~$ ls -la /home
total 56
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Apr 24 2018 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 Apr 11 14:35 ..
drwxr-xr-x 165 bill bill 12288 Apr 11 14:31 bill
drwxr-xr-x 19 bill bill 4096 Jul 31 2018 bill-new
drwxr-xr-x 36 bill bill 4096 Apr 20 2019 guest001
drwxr-xr-x 22 bill bill 4096 Sep 21 2016 guest001x
drwxr-xr-x 3 bill bill 4096 Sep 21 2016 hold
drwx—— 2 bill bill 16384 Sep 9 2014 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 18 bill bill 4096 Mar 17 2019 temp2
bill@bill-MS-7B79:~$ sudo chown -R bill:bill bill/
bill@bill-MS-7B79:~$

The goal was to upgrade Mint Cinnamon 18.3 to 19.3. But as I reported before, the install would hang. Googled and tried many suggestions, which meant multiple boot attempts with various boot overrides (for example nomodeset), but nothing would work. Actually abandoned an early attempt to double check locations because I didn’t want to overwrite anything. Used gparted on old Mint which seemed to hang scanning /dev/sdc. Looking at the monitor it didn’t really seem to be doing anything no CPU or disk I/O to speak of. But after about 15min it finally completed the scan. So that made me think perhaps the Install was doing something similar. So I reattempted the install and set a timer for 15min, all the while it really didn’t appear to be doing anything.

But sure enough the install finally proceeded after ~15min and I was able to complete the install. But I couldn’t logon to Mint afterward. I would enter my password and it would just pop back to the signon screen! Looked familiar and my first thought was a wrong pointer to Mints /home. OK I’ll research on Manjaro. Except selecting Manjaro from grub resulted in a Kernel Panic and hang. This also looked familiar. I think a past Mint install didn’t set up Manjaro properly in grub, So now neither distro works!

So I’ll reluctantly reinstall Manjaro. Manjaro has updated so many times since the original install that I decided to download the current Manjaro rather than use the old ISO…so I did that using the install media. I felt confident in a Manjaro reinstall. Sure enough I could logon to Manjaro after the install. Afterwards Manjaro needed to update 431 packages. I only wanted to update Firefox because it didn’t like the newer Firefox config files, and Keepass. I foolishly tried to use the pamac GUI that sits in the trey. So I searched for Keepass and selected it, at that point only 2 other packages were on the screen. I clicked apply not realizing that it was also going to try and apply the other 431 updates. I say foolishly, but it really was logical and my misunderstanding. Afterwards Manjaro did a better job setting up Mint in grub than Mint did setting up Manjaro. However I still couldn’t signon to Mint. So I altered grub to start Mint in single user mode. In that mode it appears by doing a directory that /home was empty. And the mount command doesn’t show Mints home device…/dev/sdb5. So I need to continue with this tomorrow. Probably start by looking at the log files. What fun!

Very easy to keep Keepass up-to-date on my Android (Google spy phone) after making changes on my PC using the Linux NextCloud client which is setup to sync this file to the server. However not obvious to me where this file is located when I select download using the Android client. Anywho I found it here…”/sdcard/Android/media/com.nextcloud.client/nextcloud/…” and then move it where Keepass is looking for it!

I don’t like that Yahoo is the facilitator for AT&T email. Isn’t that backwards? Shouldn’t a large ISP handle there own email servers? It’s probably at the root of my AT&T problem. Anywho Webmail now works on Manjaro. It’s now working…somehow! I wish I could say how. It’s magic. And I don’t like magic when it comes to solutions. I made changes. I write things down when they make sense. Although it now works I can’t point to a change to anything that makes sense. Somehow, using some link, Yahoo reported that my AT&T (actually bellsouth) email had One account linked with that email and that was my yahoo email address. I changed my Yahoo email password and now I can now logon to my AT&T webmail using my old AT&T email password. I was worried that somehow my Thunderbird POP email server would stop working due to an invalid password, but it still works.

Having a problem logging into my AT&T web mail account on Manjaro. It’s not liking my userid/password. But this same userid/password works on Mint. This problem seemed familiar to me. I think I had a similar problem a few years ago. I could successfully log into my Webmail [remotely] in Miami but it failed locally. I don’t remember the resolution. I think I assumed a routing problem. However it can’t be a routing problem because this is using the computer at the same location just dual booted to a different Linux distro.