an invisible first
you won’t notice. of course. but this is the first entry typed from the freshly installed and newly configured linux partition on my hard-drive, whose other components are firmly in the grip of, well, you know who. new universes. every click on this slick kde desktop feels like shyly uttering a new word in a new language, impatiently waiting to see whether the other side understood. was this a word, after all? sometimes they aren’t understood. clicks, i mean. because i forget that permissions have to be set. click on a bin that you aren’t allowed to execute, and nothing happens (sounds rather eerie, i know). because i forget that files are owned, on this system, and don’t just exist. new lingo. ./configure make make install rpm c compiler chown chmod su ls ps cat. aha.
now i can look at all those things i’ve always been interested in, never had the technical facilities to install, never even figured out what they could do for me. helma. vanilla. i’m sure i could also find something masculine with strawberries on top that this operating system can handle and do incredible, unfathomable things with. i can now exercise my poor capabilities at adapting other people’s perl scripts right here on my desktop. why, i might perhaps even learn to do something in perl. or in another language. well, languages.
i’m also convinced that this operating system has the magical capability of extending time, so that i can spend lots of time exploring it while at the same time still doing the job that i’m being paid for (thinking). if now someone could tell me what i need to configure my keyboard so that i can type diacritical characters from fonts for transliterating sanskrit and tibetan by pressing something like, say, alt+a, and whether true type fonts are portable to linux, and what to do to get star office to display text that doesn’t look like crap, crap & crap, i’d be happy. but i am happy. promise: you won’t notice.