Just now was trying to boot into Windows, by plugged in the HDMI cable, which supports for video only. But then, I rebooted into Linux without plugged out the HDMI cable. Then, it caused no sound in Linux.

Try 1: I killed the pulseaudio, then delete the ~/.config/pulse, and rebooted Linux. Failed.

Try 2: Run alsamixer, turned on everything, and do Try 1 again. Failed.

Then I guessed it was caused by the HDMI cable, which the Windows may assume there is audio, then caused my computer somehow ouptut the audio through the HDMI, even I rebooted into Linux.

Previously I was using Xfce4. Then, because of the heavy working environment, I tried the lighter desktop environment, LXDE. But still, it has some limitations that made me choose to use Openbox window manager only.

Pros and cons of Xfce4

Xfce4 is lightweight comparing to GNOME or KDE. I like it, because of the conventional design like the task manager. Furthermore another thing I like is the “aerosnap” feature like Windows, which I can view the two windows side by side. However, when running Windows in VirtualBox and other applications, I can feel the obvious slowness in the computer. It is really reducing my working performance. That is why I decided to change to LXDE.

This is just an opinion, not the fact.

Not long ago, there is an announcement that Windows can run Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. Not only that, there is Windows subsystem for Linux.

Surely, Linux and UNIX have a lot of powerful features, especially developer oriented. That is why Windows has to adopt them. Because they really solves a lot of problems, such as bash and other commands like grep, find, and vi. Cloud computing is emerging, command-line is much more efficient than GUI. Text file for collaborative development is much more efficient (using git) than working on binary file, as you cannot diff and patch.

Due to the changes of the career, I invested on Dell Vostro 5459, after a long survey. I chose it because it is compatible to Linux. The compatibility to Linux meaning that, all the hardware devices are accessible by Linux. Besides that, it has the NVIDIA graphic card, which allows me to use GPGPU to do my research and study. Moreover, I can play high quality 3D graphics games.

Ubuntu

So, the laptop I bought was pre-installed with Ubuntu. And, I was impressed by the Ubuntu first boot video, which can be found here.

I was using jEdit. And once willing to change to, so called modern text editor, Atom Text Editor. Then I did some comparisons among the text editors. At the end, now my primary text editor for coding is Emacs.

Emacs requires some time to learn and practise. But at the end, I love it too much. It is so powerful, no other text editor to compare with it. But the primary usage is for coding.

What I need is performance, eye candy is optional.

My primary desktop environment is Xfce, as it is more lightweight than GNOME, KDE, or Cinnamon (Mate is out of my choice), yet it has more goodies (plugins) than LXDE. But due to my 4-year-old laptop, I found that LXDE has better performance than Xfce significantly. I can run multiple heavy applications at the same time, especially Firefox and Chromium. Xfce performance drops when I run both applications simultaneously. Switching between applications is slower. If running with Skype at the same time, and doing some development testing, the performance drops drastically.

My campus lab has the Dell desktops. I am not sure the model, but the network devices are Broadcom BCM43228. As a result, after installation of the Ubuntu (they were not installed by me), Ubuntu cannot get WiFi connection to online.

Since my student mentioned that Windows can use the ethernet cable to share the wireless network, I asked him to help to share the wireless network from Windows on the other Dell desktop, and connect to the target Dell desktop.

This is not a new stuff. You can get some tutorials from Internet. And it is very interesting when I did this, because I learnt new things. The following procedures are based on what I remembered. So, it may not be 100% accurate, since I am a forgetful person. 😅

What I did was reading the Arch Linux Wiki page. Then, followed the instructions as much as possible, and do some trials and errors. Remember to backup everything necessary. And try this at your own risk.

Introduction

There was a wonderful memory editor in Windows, that was Game Master. But it was not a freeware. And there is a freeware memory editor, it is ArtMoney. But it is also for Windows only. In Linux, there is only one memory editor, scanmem with GameConqueror as the GUI. However, there are some limitations from scanmem and GameConqueror. Thus, that is why I decided to create another one which can fit my needs. Therefore, I recently spent some time to develop this memory editor, namely Med.

Recently, I admit that Chromium is faster and smoother than Firefox. And now, for me, Firefox is my primary bookmark manager, reference manger with Zotero, and best ever download manager; yet Chromium is my primary web browser.

This is just like Windows is no more an Operating System for me, but a game console. I have no choice to admit this because playing games on Linux, is still far behind from Windows. The main reason is the developers usually target on Windows instead of Linux. However, it is truly worth for me to optimise the functionality of a computer by running Linux and sacrificing the gaming potentiality of Windows.