Computer Log

I was tired of always going to my appimage folder and double-clicking the appimage to run it. I looked at so many write ups on this with no success. This didn’t seem like rocket surgery. TBH many of them didn’t even seem logical. For example just create this text file and the app will show-up in your menu. I even logged out then back in. One of them seemed like it should have worked, at least go further than it did (right click on start menu then click configure) on Cinnamon but didn’t. Nothing popped up when I clicked configure. That seems like a Cinnamon problem. A write up should be clear enough that I can follow it. This isn’t like compiling the kernel.

I finally found a YouTube video that followed a Arch Wiki so I was a little skeptical…but it worked. I already felt better when he showed the “update-desktop-database” command and it was available on my system. In my case “update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications/”. I mean really just create a textfile and it should work? Seems logical to me that you need to tell the system that there has been an addition you should be aware of.

Here’s the entry for for Bitwarden…/home/bill/.local/share/applications/Bitwarden.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Bitwarden
Comment=Bitwarden
TryExec=/home/bill/AppImage/Bitwarden-1.33.0-x86_64.AppImage
Exec=/home/bill/AppImage/Bitwarden-1.33.0-x86_64.AppImage
Icon=/home/bill/AppImage/icons/bitwarden.svg
Actions=

Name[en_US]=Bitwarden
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/bitwarden;text/html;

Yes Name is there twice I entered the 1st one. Which apparently it ignored and added it’s own Name= at the end along with the MimeType=. However it’s name appended .desktop which looked tacky in the menu so I removed it. For Icon= I usually looked for .ico but this was a svg, which also worked.

Here’s the video…

Where’s my Popular Electronics Altir 8800 issue cover…it’s gone! I’s been my Start page since I started using WordPress. Luckily I have backups. Still it’s concerning.

Well I found it. It’s visibility somehow got set to private.

I had this video suggested to me a week ago or so…

I was interested because a company I worked for had a DG Nova 3…I believe. His Data General is not the same but the colors and console are familiar. My first thought when seeing this is Where’s Garth? I immediately thought of Wayne’s World. If he saw me he’d probably think where’s the other Bozo. Anyway he seems like a nice guy with a passion for computers. He also has 141k subscribers so with my interest in retro computing supported by the videos I watch why am I just seeing his channel? So I subscribed to his channel. He has many other very interesting videos on retro computing, such as the IMSAI 8080 and others.

At this point, I think I’ve got as much as I’m going to get out of his course. I like him and have learned a few things. However he’s at a point where he’s building a hypothetical app…in this case a web app. Which seems like a popular thing to do in tutorial videos. But creating hypothetical programs doesn’t work for me. I much rather apply what I’ve learned to my own programs. For me usually the 1st thing I do after getting familiar with a language…is learn how to do I/O on files, then learn string handling routines to work with those files. I usually have some type of file I want to work with. In today’s world the web has become central to many things, so I understand the importance.

Perhaps I’ll try another Udemy Go teacher… Todd McLeod. I heard him say in a preview of “Web Development w/ Google’s Go (golang) Programming Language” something that I truly relate to. He said Go encourages you to think like a programmer. He mentioned other languages and mentioned Django and said programmers use code that is abstracted away and you use some method and that’s the way they get stuff done. Wow..this is the exact reason I stopped taking a Udemy Django course when they showed how to set up a database, it seemed very convoluted and honestly seemed to me easier to set up the databases directly in SQL myself than to use the Django method. But somewhere some programmer thought that was a good way. I’m not even saying I’d take that specific course, but perhaps another Go course he offers. Perhaps his, Learn How To Code: Google’s Go (golang) Programming Language“. I looked at the description and didn’t see any “Let’s build this app that you may have no interest in building “. I know a lot of it will be review. But, If you get the courses on sale it’s hard to go wrong. If I can learn only a few new things it could be worth it.

This takes nothing away from Derek. He’s very likeable and prolific when it comes to computer languages and picks them up with ease. And I’ve followed his YouTube channel for years.

One last thing…Derek’s Go course includes a section on PostgreSQL which I do intend to check out. I used it many years ago and only concentrated on MySQL because it was the only choice in my Web-hosting package at the time. I’ve always assumed PostgreSQL was superior to MySQL based on everything I’ve read.

Purchased for me by my parents…$849.00!

I’ve run across him through the years, but never really checked him out. His free CCNA YouTube course is cool for two reasons…so far.

1. This Cisco Packet Tracer that he introduced me to is awesome. Because it takes the OSI layers which to me has been abstract, and makes it clear as you can watch the packets or frames travel to a destination and you can see the layers at the next stop.
2. His seemingly genuine excitement in explaining things.

I took a Cisco router configuration class probably 25 years ago. But I didn’t understand things the way I should. Because it was abstract to me. I wasn’t the network guy but I was helping out the network guy. Probably because they could see I had an enthusiasm for almost anything related to a computer. They sent me to Cisco school and I understood it good enough to configure, and assign IP address to the routers for 50 branch routers. But I didn’t understand it like I wanted to. And just when I though I was understanding things better a Cisco engineer would come in and start talking about things that made me feel like a network amateur. So all this Wireshark, GNS3 and Cisco Packet Tracer stuff is pretty cool.

Attempted to take and/or start NetworkChucks free CCNA course on YouTube. However he needs you to install Cisco Packet Tracer. So after registering with my email and agreeing to all kind of terms, I downloaded the 64bit deb installer for Ubuntu. But the installing like I usually do by double clicking…failed. My sinuses are particularly aggravating today, and I don’t have the desire to track down the problem, especially when a deb install rarely fails on my system and it’s proprietary. I might try and proceed with the course and see how valuable it is without Cisco’s packet tracer. Perhaps I can use Wireshark in place of Cisco’s packet tracer. No after looking at the video further, this Packet Tracer has a cool simulation feature.

OK after watching the cool simulation I thought let me try the install again…even though I’m not feeling much better. However I remembered seeing a command line install which worked better because it asked questions I could reply to. But it failed with some type of permission problem so I thought I’d rerun with sudo. But when I used command recall I could see it already used sudo…sudo apt-get install ./Cisco_Packet_Tracer_820_Ubuntu_64bit_696ae64b25.deb. So I hit enter again and this time it said it was already installed, and surprise…it was! And it looks like this (with Chuck’s test file)…

A still picture doens’t do it justice. As you can watch the packets moving on the line. Check it out on YouTube.

I thought I saw some display adaper driver message problems. And also the blue as can be seen below, on my screen seemed lighter than most blue Windows screens I’ve seen. And the recommended screen resolution was 1024×768 however it did accept 1920×1080 as also seen below.

And the Redhat QXL Controller (seen below) as seen in the Device Manager says “This device is working properly”. So I assume all is good…if not perfect.

Also I found that Virt Viwer in Virt Manager for the machine has it’s own screenshot menu item. Which allows me to save to my Linux host. Much easier than doing a Windows screenshot then copy to shared folder.

I have no real need…but no hate either…for MS-Windows. Maybe the most useful thing for me is to familiarize myself with MS-Windows so I can help my daughter with her laptop.

Also I hear people say Linux Mint (I think Cinnamon especially) is most like Windows. Well I don’t see it. I think it’s just another thing “advanced” Linux users like to say to put down newbie Mint users like me who have been using Linux since the mid 1990s. When I use a different distro or desktop environment like KDE it all still seems very easy to work with to me. I didn’t feel that way with Windows 10. It even seemed very different to the last version of Windows I worked with…Windows 2000. Where are the virtual desktops?

Well I found the virtual desktops (click Task View below in red box) …

These are the Readers Digest version…in other words brief instructions

You have to download from spice-space.org on MS-Windows the spice-webdavd and execute it then
Add Hardware/Channel on the QEMU info page selecting the webdav name under channel device

Then on the Linux host type in a terminal…
virt-viewer –connect=qemu:///system –domain-name win10