My Best Teaching Is One-on-One

一対一が僕のベスト

Of course, I team teach and do special lessons, etc.

当然、先生方と共同レッスンも、特別レッスンの指導もします。

But my best work in the classroom is after the lesson is over --
going one-on-one,
helping individual students with their assignments.

しかし、僕の一番意味あると思っている仕事は、講義が終わってから、
一対一と
個人的にその課題の勉強を応援することです。

It's kind of like with computer programs, walking the client through hands-on.
The job isn't really done until the customer is using the program.

まあ、コンピュータプログラムにすると、得意先の方に出来上がった製品を体験させるようなことと思います。
役に立たない製品はまだ製品になっていないと同様です。

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Mint LInux on flash SD (and Debian)

Meant to blog about getting Debian stable (squeeze -- see Toy Story) installed on my main box.

32 bit CPU and Adobe's rush to the 64 bit future that is not means that I don't have current flash there, which is disappointing for the kids. Some of their youtube  no longer works.

(I keep having to remind them that sites linked to from youtube are not guaranteed safe from malware and worse, but most of those sites are among those that no longer work.)

gnash works on some stuff. Iceweasel is way behind. Slashdot's ads sometimes kills it. Google's chrome works fine. The Gimp is great. Libre Office needs one to load extra fonts for the Japanese, but that's true in any distro.

Stable meaning a bit old is okay. Not really stale yet.

While messing around with the Fedora security spin on my netbook, I tried Mint on an SD card. It drags just a little, but nothing like Fedora on a USB (usb2.0, don't have or want usb3.0).

Let me repeat that. In bold:

Linux Mint is useable on a netbook (64bit) from an SD flash card.

[Update:]

But it contains Mono stuff. Tomboy and Banshee. And the Mate desktop has MS-Common-Language-Infrastructure libraries instead of the untainted versions. 

Darn.

Haven't found gold yet.

[End-update]

You can surf, in real time, use libre office, etc. In a live CD size image.

Here's how I got it onto the SD card. (/dev/sdb is where the card ended up. If you try this, remember to make sure you understand the dd and mount and umount commands before you start. Make sure you know where the card gets assigned under the device tree, because it may not be at /dev/sdb .)

cd /home/sharing/imageheap 
# or wherever you keep the downloaded images
umount /dev/sdb1 
sudo dd if=linuxmint-13-cinnamon-dvd-nocodecs-64bit.iso of=/dev/sdb

The if and the of should be on the same line as the sudo dd, of course.

And, yeah, I did mean /dev/sdb there. The whole card, not the first partition.

Well, there are lots of stories out on the web about flash media for live stuff. Each manufacturer takes different shortcuts. Both with the flash devices and in the BIOS of the machine.)

Some people recommend partitioning the flash drive, but you have to already have tools and a pretty high-level of knowledge to get that to work.

Keeping it in a single partition seems to work best when you don't have the tools or knowledge.

Some people find dd-ing the image to the first partition (sdb1 in my case) to work best, but that didn't work for me. My notebook didn't like the MBR (or absence thereof) mixed with the ISO9960 image.

Fedora's live USB tool didn't work for Mint. Not surprising, since they play with the MBR.

Maya. Don't have time to try all the options, like playing with Nadia instead of Maya. Going to get Mint-Debian into a spare partition on the main box to play with that. But Mint may be what I want to replace my sister's now ancient iBook G4 with.

(Wish I had time to play with building Mint on PPC. Wish my own iBook G4 hadn't died after being dropped too many times. Wish I had the money to replace my shoulder bag before the strap breaks.)

(Woops. s/play/study/ above.)