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Partial decommissioning of Gandalf


The project is to build a Linux Mint machine to have the identical functionality and ergonomics as the existing Windows 10 machine.

After a few months of continuous use of Linux Mint – mainly for simple browsing during workday lunchtimes and weekdays –  the headline of the project remains that wholesale migration from Windows to Linux is not functionally possible, for the reasons cited therein.  In this instance, the short story is no Microsoft Excel, no Foxit PDF browser for Windows, no on-the-fly VPN client.

Consequently, there is no further development use of Gandalf.  Gandalf has other issues as well: even in last days as a Windows machine, the hard drive had developed a nasty habit of intensive operation, wasting time and resources on misadventure not commanded by the user.  The habit has returned to Gandalf as a Linux machine, meaning that the user needs to sit around for up to fifteen minutes from time-to-time while Gandalf faffs around for no good reason.  There could be an underlying hardware issue of the hard disk.

Two apps give rise to the symptoms in Linux: rm and timeshift.  Timeshift is easy to resolve: just uninstall it.  But rm is fundamental to the operating system; difficult to see how rm could be usefully removed.

Rather than re-install Linux on Gandalf, Gandalf had the following applied:
  • Deletion of non-admin user account;
  • Uninstallation of FoxIT PDF Reader for Linux;
  • Uninstallation of Bleachbit;
  • Uninstallation of VeraCrypt;
  • Uninstallation of grive2;
  • Installation of secure-delete;
  • Running of sfill -lvz /.


With no user data to sync, Legolas uninstalled FreeFileSync.

This leaves Gandalf as a useable machine for a really patient user for light browsing only.

Google-drive-ocamlfuse remains on Gandalf.  A future session would need to create a new non-admin user account in which to run google-drive-ocamlfuse.

Gandalf thus reverts to a nearly-identical functional build as new laptop Sibelius, running Linux Mint 19.



End of post.

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