Stotan!

After weeks and weeks of waiting the cherries are finally ready to be picked! 
My wife and I decided to go to Freitas Cherry Ranch in Brentwood, CA.

I know, I know, I normally talk library/geek here, but I’m branching out. 

My favorite site to find out fruit picking information is called PickYourOwn  which provides general crop availability calendars. 

Passing Livermore, CA off 580 Eastbound, we took Vasco Rd. Northbound.  Who knew the windmills were so close? 

We arrived at the site (#37) and were surprised they did not charge an entrance fee.  Of course it depends on the time of the season, the ranch, and the variety.  The last place we went to had fully ripened Raniers and Bing cherries which were delicious.  Apparently Freitas Ranch is one of the few that features Coral Champagne Cherries which is related to Bing which are huge and sweet.  At $2/lb they were a great deal too.  And apparently they make a great Cherry pie.  We bought about 9/lbs worth!

On the way up, we missed a photo op, but on the way back we found a perfect reason to put this cherry picking experience picture last.

The Arch Linux installation did not last long. We decided that the old machine had to be retired and that my PVR would become my new very very quiet workstation. I decided to throw Linux Mint on it and give it a spin. Here’s my review:

If you ever wanted Linux installed on your machine in less than 30 minutes and to almost never hassle with audio or video codecs, then this is your distribution. In fact it took me about 15 minutes to have the KDE Bianca Linux Mint edition up and running. What is Linux Mint? Basically it is Ubuntu 6.06 (Edgy Eft) but with an emphasis on elegance, usability and an out of the box experience. Of course there are still hoops and such to get used to, such as the default minty green theme and a few differences from the default KDE choices. The only real mar on this installation is my inability to figure out how to give permission to my user account to the external usb harddrive.

Installation: 10/10

In comparison to Arch Linux’s advanced user install, which I give a 3/10 and OpenSUSE’s easy install 9/10. The extra 1/10 here is the sheer quickness of the install. Granted it was on from an 800MB installation disc in comparison to OpenSUSE’s 3.5 GB disc.

Ease of Use 7/10

KDE is probably the easiest to use Linux Desktop Environment to work with, but I ended up installing KUser which is not installed by default on Mint. Also, while reading a few reviews about Mint, I discovered that it had been rushed and not all the KDE applications were polished as well as the Gnome version of Mint. These will trickle down through updates from repositories over time. However it comes with the latest Firefox (2.0.0.3) and OpenOffice already installed. Figuring out video / audio codecs for my original Arch Linux install was a huge pain. Linux Mint played all my videos out of the box (divx, xvid, rmvb, avi, and wmv). How cool is that?

Troubleshooting 4/10 (for the 4 hours I’ll never get back from my life)
The advantage of this system is many of the issues that plague Ubuntu can be resolved the same way in Mint. However, there were two issues that plagued me which one took me several hours to resolve. The other I’m saving for this coming weekend.

The first was getting dual monitors to work. This took about 4 hours to figure out that I would need to hand craft the /etc/X11/xorg.conf just right. In OpenSUSE it works out of the box. The other issue was trying to get the usb external harddrive mounted, recognized and then give permission to my default user account which it did not like. And still does not.

Conclusion: The installation is a refreshing good start for this distribution. The fact that you almost have a full fledged setup with little work is excellent. My only complaint is that it does not seem to cope well with my particular set of plug and play hardware, so be prepared. However, the Linux Mint partition is staying on my hard drive!

I was at a party last night having a good time. A little wine, some good food, film shorts, friends, and laughter and then all I remember is eating some Japanese candy and poof! I wake up like this! I’m having a real hard time reaching the keyboard, but at least I’ve stopped worrying about what to write!

Oh incidentally, the robes are comfortable…..