Hi from doug in Maine ...former WPI netops geek,

before that a *NIX admin back to when Vax and Sparc were

corporate choices (I guess I've gotten over pining for BSD variants).

I supported many emacs geeks (sw/hw developers) then,

but never adopted emacs in my pea brain.

I guess I preferred vi's stupid modes and ESC and ":" ,

over CTRL-everything? in emacs. Or maybe I got bit by a macro as a child.

For some ancient emacs lore...its security hole Way Back Then is lovingly(ha)

mentioned in Clifford Stoll's awesome/fun? book "The Cuckoo's Egg".

Just to get root, back then. Access via hopping thru dialup 1200baud modems,

and a world where security was off-radar to the engineers owning systems.

Even MilNet systems. What fun ! Dumb hacker paradise! One fun line from below:

What do you feed a Trojan horse ?  Oooh, found a 52-page scan of the book at

But as always, I ramble.

 

George: Great question. I "(d)evolved" into a dumb linux Mint user (a great Ubuntu-based

distro ..though you gotta choose, Cinnamon,MATE,Xfce. I chose Mate, 20.1 is stable.

I forget the why's, but I know it's good with a few beloved windows keyb tricks like ALT-TAB).

As a sysadmin responsible for reloading/building systems, I had to fret packages once,

.....obviously this was the cat's meow compared to rebuilding from sources and "make".

I remember studying our typical < 1000 RedHat packages and feeling like I knew what

most of them were.  Now I've got > 2000 on Mint, and barely recognize half of them.

Today for fun (Thanks Tim), I looked to see...

if the one thing I recall needing to install off-package a few years ago = "chrome"

showed up in either my sudo logs (nope) or package list.  Chrome got into Mint's distros.

So my "apt list --installed" output (3mo old desktop load) shows 2028 packages

having chosen the "want 3rd party stuff?" install question...so wonderful..so I have both

emacsen-common/focal,focal,now 3.0.4 all [installed]              and
google-chrome-stable/now 91.0.4472.77-1 amd64 [installed,upgradable to: 97.0.4692.71-1]

From cmd line, google-chrome (I no longer need on

Final side track, I remember years ago saying "amazing...YouTube just works out of box!".

Final backtrack...wonder what emacsen-common has, since if I try to launch "emacs" I get

Command 'emacs' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install e3           # version 1:2.71-2, or
sudo apt install emacs-gtk    # version 1:26.3+1-1ubuntu2
sudo apt install emacs-lucid  # version 1:26.3+1-1ubuntu2
sudo apt install emacs-nox    # version 1:26.3+1-1ubuntu2
sudo apt install jove         # version 4.17.2.7-1

Pardon my endless rant, hope it doesn't sidetrack today/tonite.

I'll be fascinated to see what a recorded session looks like...with chat/comments?