I’ve said it for decades at this point, but we really need to add philosophy to our standard curriculum;

YES!!! I’ve been saying it too! I’d leave out metaphysics other than an introduction to what it is with an example or two. We are seriously lacking in epistemology. I would focus it mainly on epistemology and ethics though.

Don’t forget R Kelly

He is being too nice. He needs to get a lawyer and sue that shitty company for harassment and whatever else.

ETA: The US isn’t overly litigious. We are under litigious if anything.

Oh, you mentioned you don’t want to keep a backup of the entire drive. That is fine, but absolutely back it up before starting the install.

I would just boot a live Linux image and dd the entire device file onto some sort of storage. That way you can get a bit for bit copy of the drive that you can make it how it was before you touched it. When all is well, then you can ditch the backup. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep if the stuff is important. Storage devices do fail.

Yes.

To do this, open a terminal, and do this:

sudo apt search ntfs

It will be called something like ntfs-progs or ntfs-fuse or both.

Then:

sudo apt install PKG1 PKG2

Alternatively, the synaptic package tool has a nice GUI

You could leave the Windows installation and not dual boot. Linux can read NTFS volumes. You will probably have to install ntfsprogs or whatever it’s called.

A swap partition is akin to the page file on Windows. The kernel will use it to move memory pages it doesn’t anticipate using in the near future to it so it can use that RAM for other things. It will also use it in a pinch when there isn’t enough RAM on the system. It isn’t strictly necessary, but it can prevent programs from crashing at a huge performance penalty. It is necessary if you want to use sleep or hibernate or whatever it’s called when it is powered off physically but resumes what you were doing instead of booting when you power it back on. That takes as much swap as you have RAM at minimum. If you want that, a good rule of thumb is 1.5 times physical RAM.

I have servers I administer for my job that have over 100GB of RAM with very little swap, like 4GB. The applications and machine are tuned and sized so the physical RAM is at ~85% and swap is barely used. The swap is mainly for non application stuff like IDS agent, backup agent, monitoring agent, etc.

If swap becomes a problem, you can adjust the kernel vm.swappiness parameter as needed. It might take some trial and error to get it right.

Source: I’ve been working with Linux professionally for almost 20 years now.

HR with an HP

Yes, Ubuntu 20 isn’t EOL yet. A lot of those downloads are probably IT staff or developers that are running Ubuntu servers or developing on those versions.

ETA: We still have some RHEL 7 and clones at my day job

Sure, that is fine for you if you are not so poor that you can afford the more ethical option.

ethical costing more than unethical is simply not always true. A bicycle is cheaper than a small car. A small car is cheaper than a canyonero. I’m in the US, I know bicycles aren’t feasible in most parts due to car dependent design, but nobody is forced to commute to an office in the suburbs in a monster truck.

Poultry is cheaper than beef. Rice+beans+lentils is cheaper than meat.

A reasonable house is cheaper than a mcmansion.

First, I don’t completely disagree with some of your points about problems in the US. I think you are infantilizing people to an extent by ignoring the agency they do have and what they can control.

I never made any of the claims you are arguing against. Please check usernames.

What’s wrong is assuming people even have the means to travel in the first place.

I never made that assumption.

All I did was ask what is the problem with not traveling when taking time off work. The person I responded to sounded like not traveling was somehow problematic. I just wanted clarification.

As two other exercises, how would somebody in a city with no public transport be able to drive less?

I couldn’t agree more. Car dependency is the cause of sooo many of our problems in the US.

Waste isn’t high because of individual lifestyle

Yes and no. E.g. A large segment of the US have CHOSEN to drive around in monster trucks and canyoneros instead of more reasonable vehicles. A large portion vote for politicians (GOP) who refuse to even acknowledge it is a problem.

I think the paycheck to paycheck claims are somewhat exaggerated. There are a lot of people with good incomes that this applies to because of bad choices like the aforementioned vehicle choices, buying larger houses than they need, hiring out every simple job that 99% of people could easily do with a 2 minute video (like replacing the flap in a running toilet), annual extravagant vacations, etc. I think the paycheck to paycheck claims need to be calculated by household size, local cost of living, and income. These people would both reduce their contribution to GHG emissions AND be in a financially better position if they made better choices.

As far as food choices, non beef options are available pretty much everywhere food is available. Beef is generally more expensive than other meats. Beef is the biggest contributor to GHG emissions. A person of limited means could easily choose the cheaper AND environmentally better options.

basically no choice on what they consume

Not entirely true. I can choose to buy a monster truck to commute to work or a small car. Ideally that choice would include transit, bike, etc. I can choose beef, pork, chicken, or lentils for my protein. Even at corner stores, fast food, etc, it is pretty easy to avoid beef. Sure, there are problems like car dependency and the ideal choice would include transit, bike, etc. To claim no choice isn’t really true. The kicker is, the greener option is often the cheaper option.

What’s wrong with taking time off and not going anywhere?

1. Don’t make it left or right. It doesn’t matter how right you are, a lot of people are going to have other ideas.

2. Focus on immediate benefits of mitigation, and don’t make it just about climate. E.g. ending car dependent design benefits drivers due to less traffic and less bad or impaired drivers.

3. Use their own rhetoric. E.g. right wingers claim to be about small government. Cars involve a lot of government interaction with licensing, registration, taxes for roads, getting stopped by LEOs. Other transportation methods require less government.

They’ll argue with Stallman about what GNU is.

What kind of non-coding work do you need done?

It was intended to be an OS and is if you use the Hurd kernel. In practice, Hurd isn’t really used, so it is just a bunch of programs and libraries. I guess it can go either way.

So much to unpack here.

GNU is not a Linux variant. It is a set of programs and shared libraries.

ISO 9660 has nothing to do with compression. Just calling it ISO isn’t a good idea for an intro class like that because it is a set of MANY standards. They should have put a little side blurb and called it ISO 9660 in the table.

tar is an archive tool. It has no compression.

Why no mention of compression algorithms algorithms vs archive tools?

Why not have different compression algorithms and their tradeoffs?

ETA: jar files are just zip files for Java libs/programs. You can open them with zip file tools.