Installing Academix Linux - how to fix it when installing hangs at configuring network

I recently tried installing Academix, a Linux distro aimed at schools and universities. The graphical installer seemed to work fine except that it would hang up whenever it got to the stage of configuring the network. It was able to correctly connect to Wi-Fi when given the Wi-Fi password during the install, but never moved beyond that.

This problem was surprising to me, because when trying it out on live media I never had any problems with network connectivity. So I was blindsided by this issue coming up when installing. I reasoned that if I was having those problems, maybe others were too, and so I contacted the developers to ask how I should proceed.

I received a very nice response quite quickly, mentioning that in my situation it would be best to install without a network and add it in later. For me, that meant specifying my wired connection (which wasn't connected) instead of Wi-Fi during the install. It couldn't establish a connection, but fortunately was still able to continue the installation without a network.

After the install, I was able to add the Wi-Fi via the GUI, simply by clicking on the Wi-Fi symbol on the desktop. At this point, I had a working installation of Academix! It's a very beautiful and modern-looking distro, and it was pretty fast on the old laptop I had.

To sum up, if you are installing Academix (or any Linux distro) that hangs at configuring network, then you may wish to install with no network initially and then add your Wi-Fi connection via the desktop GUI after installation of the distro.

How to center images horizontally using Grav

I've been playing around a bit with Grav. I was posing the question to myself: for the relatively simple use-cases I'm dealing with, could it possibly work for my purposes as an alternative to ProcessWire? The problem I was initially dismayed to find that Grav uses Markdown as its editor, which does not offer native support for horizontal centering of anything (text or images). However, Grav offers some tweaks that help make it easier to do specific things you might commonly want to do. I tried writing a sample article, and I found that one of the hardest things to do was to center an image horizontally. And horizontal centering of images is something I would typically do in most of the articles I would write. So the lack of easy horizontal centering is a highly significant drawback IMHO (most people do want to center images in an article!) However, this issue is made up for by other things in Grav: the relative speed, ease and flexibility of custom theming and built-in suppor...

Life using the Linux operating system exclusively for the last few years

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Correct usage of unwind-protect and with-open-file in Lisp

Learning to use unwind-protect in Lisp typically crops up very early on when you're first learning the language. In fact, anything to do with I/O is going to be something you'll need to know early on. Yet unfortunately, I find that unwind-protect is not explained sufficiently well for a beginner to understand not just how to use it correctly, but why and when . Grappling with this myself, I found that hands-down the best explanation came from this YouTube video from Baggers: Luckily, in the case of file handlers, LISP already assumes you'll want to open a file with unwind-protect, so it provides the with-open-file macro for this exact purpose. It closes the file handler for you with a built-in unwind-protect. This is an advantage over manually opening and closing your file handlers, because if your program opens the file but never gets to the part with the close command (for example due to a run-time error in between those stages), the built-in unwind-protect make...

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