Here's a little blurb from the Wikipedia article on the piece: > The Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16, composed by Edvard Grieg in 1868, was the only concerto Grieg completed. It is one of his most popular works and is among the most popular of the genre.

> Grieg's concerto provides evidence of his interest in Norwegian folk music; the opening flourish is based on the motif of a falling minor second followed by a falling major third, which is typical of the folk music of Grieg's native country. This specific motif occurs in other works by Grieg, including the String Quartet No. 1. In the last movement of the concerto, similarities to the halling (a Norwegian folk dance) and imitations of the Hardanger fiddle (the Norwegian folk fiddle) have been detected.

This article offers a quick overview of Linux Mint, answering a few questions a potential (or new) user may have that are not covered by the official FAQ, such as how the scheme used for each release's code name works.

Linux Mint 21.2 and LMDE 6 releases are slated for release in the coming months! Additionally, the tooltips are being redesigned to achieve a consistent look, now using the accent color whenever possible.

Here's another excellent rendition of Horse-Racing, this time accompanied by piano:

John Erhu - Horse Racing

I love the energy of the piece! It's upbeat and evermore a joy to listen to.

Celebrate FreeDOS with this fun calendar! Each month shows a different screenshot from FreeDOS 1.3.

Take a look at the calendar images here:

https://www.freedos.org/images/calendar2023/

Note that there is a video (~24 minutes long; a transcript is available) accompanying the article.

The work on release 21.2, codename "Victoria", has begun! A preview of some of the planned features has been detailed, alongside some bugfixes to Cinnamon, and an upgrade of the new bluetooth manager, Blueman.

What a wonderful performance of the classic Christmas poem! Although familiar with it, I had never heard a musical performance till to-night on the radio.

So, go on, and give it a listen! I'm sure you'll enjoy it, if even not Christen!

The current moderator seems to have deleted their account. It's a low post-volume community, though I would nonetheless welcome another Linux Mint user as an additional moderator, should there be one interested.

While many on the related blog post for the 21.1 BETA release announcement page laud the new look of several applications, I cannot help but feel such changes rob Linux Mint of its distinctive look and charm, taking Mint from its instantly recognizable desktop to something decidedly more generic and bland. I cannot fathom the reason for new sounds, either. I'm not certain the goals of making Mint more trendy and beautiful were achieved. Unless these refer to making it look more akin to Windows 11, which nemo's new manila folders with blue highlighting echoes. The new, more vibrant colors of Windows 11 icons were also rightfully criticized as being poor choices, but Mint seems determined to follow in its footsteps. Good defaults matter, and I believe these UI changes are not.

That notwithstanding, the non-UI improvements everywhere are well justified and should make Linux Mint more comfortable for all to use. Flatpaks were rather inconvenient to use, and much work has gone into making those easier to manage. Especially exciting is the new ISO Verification Tool!

> Tintagel is a symphonic poem by Arnold Bax. It is his best-known work, and was for some years the only piece by which the composer was known to many concert-goers. The work was inspired by a visit Bax made to Tintagel Castle in Cornwall in 1917, and, although not explicitly programmatic, draws on the history and mythology associated with the castle.

--quoted from the Wikipedia article on Bax's Tintagel

For more of his work, check out Wikipedia's list of compositions by Arnold Bax. I myself am partial to his tone poems, though his symphonies are also excellent.

This topic has come up several times in the mailing lists over the past months; here is one such example. It's a good article, and the summary of the mailing list link is that FreeDOS won't run on newer hardware.

Gnome Boxes offers a painless way to run FreeDOS, for anyone looking for an easy way to get up and running!

Link to the new license: http://www.cpm.z80.de/license.html

This is an excellent introduction to using groff with the -me macro set. It is tailored towards anyone just looking for a quick start and even comes with some sample files at the end.

As stated above, I am curious to know how groff fits into people's lives. Do you write manpages, only take notes with it, prefer it to LaTeX andor ConTeXt for text formatting, or something else entirely? Which macros do you use, if any? Let me know!

As for me, I encountered groff after already learning LaTeX, but I instantly appreciated its concise commands and began using it to take biology notes with the simple -me macro. I'm slowly expanding my usage to encompass math and graphing with eqn and grap, respectively. My needs are not always met by -me as of late, so a macro switch is in order. GNU seems most inclined to continue work on -mom, so I'll likely switch over to that soon enough.

Announcement copied from the main page of the FreeDOS website:

" Please help us test the new release candidate (RC) for the FreeDOS 1.3 release! There are a ton of new changes and improvements from 1.2, including:

• New FreeCOM 0.85a
• New Kernel 2043 and an 8086 version with FAT32 support
• Floppy Edition now uses compression and requires about half as many diskettes
• The return of networking
• Some new programs and games
• Many many many package updates
• Some updates and improvements to NLS
• Improved install process, especially with the MBR
• Some support to automatically set the COUNTRY.SYS information
• Improved CD initialization for the boot media and installed system ... and much, much more! Get your copy of FreeDOS 1.3 RC5 from the FreeDOS Downloads page. Thanks to everyone for helping make this next FreeDOS 1.3 release candidate!

Things are looking pretty good in this release. We'd love to make this the last release candidate before the official release of "FreeDOS 1.3." You can help make that happen by downloading FreeDOS 1.3 RC5 and testing all the programs! Let us know of any bugs or compatibility issues so we can fix them. "

(link above is to the FreeDOS 1.3 RC5 downloads page)

Are you a downtrodden Linux user, forced to use Windows 10 despite your wishes? Do you long to typeset with the simple and powerful groff but aren't sure if it is possible on Windows?

Fortunately for the typesetting inclined, it is possible to use the magnificent groff on Windows as well! I decided to highlight this project in particular, because it allows one to use groff on Windows 10 in a most similar manner as on a linuxbox. The notable (improvement?) that this port of groff makes is automatically assuming pdf output, as ps files aren't supported out-of-the-box on Windows 10. Most importantly, the usual macros are supported as well! I don't use -mom, but -ms and -me seem to work flawlessly so far. The graphing package grap is offered too! Be sure to put the binaries in your path so they're accessible from cmd.exe. Coupled with vim and the ezwinports' manpages, the environment hardly feels like Windows 10 at all, which is a good thing, from my perspective.

The ezwinports from eli-zaretskii on SourceForge offers much more than just groff utilites, one example being texinfo, so feel free to look through the rest of the software binaries offered as detailed on the README :)

I would be curious to know if there ever was a Windows user who began to use groff without learning it first through a *nix operating system. Anyone know someone who fits the bill? It's a long shot, but I think it'd be a nifty thing to see. I'm certainly hoping to popularize groff within mine own circle.

Wondering how I possibly could have managed to find ezwinports? It's front and center on the GNU page about groff: https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/

!

Pictured above: a printout of an unformatted NRO source document (see link at bottom to get a PostScript or Plaintext copy)

What is NRO?

'NRO is a text processor based on the design provided in "Software Tools" by Kernighan and Plauger.' -- taken from the NRO description

(link: https://gitlab.com/FDOS/unix/nro/-/blob/master/HELP/NRO)

But that's not exactly helpful, is it? Put more simply, NRO is nroff for FreeDOS. Not sure what nroff is? For the GNU/Linux user, it's the program that makes manpages look the way they do. The GNU version used for GNU/Linux is called groff. For those unfamiliar, each line beginning with a period (.sp 2 for example) starts a formatting command. The letters specify which command is meant. All other lines contain the text that will be formatted. To learn more about nroff, look at the following Wikipeidia article on troff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff

Or visit the related Lemmy:

• https://lemmy.ml/c/groff

  (it's new: first post coming soon, but the sidebar has some info)

Does DOS need this? If so, why?

Good question! I am unsure. Nonetheless, it does its intended job well. It's possible to make easily readable documentation for DOS this way. However, groff can also be used for professional typesetting, akin to LaTeX, albeit with easier and simpler syntax. As I use groff primarily for this purpose, I was curious to see how the NRO version fared. For that, we turn to a printout of my NRO document:

!

!

The printout looks awful, and that's mostly due to the monospaced "typewriter font" that it's formatted with. Can this be remedied? Not without printing the document on a real PostScript printer with another font, I would think. Why don't I know for certain? I am printing this to PDF on Linux using CUPS, which creates a PDF document using the processed NRO output. Turning away from the font however, it's clear to see NRO did some fairly remarkable things to the source file. There is a header, an automatically numbered page, various indenting, bolded text, reasonable margins, and all the fragmented lines in the source file have been joined together to fill the page. Wow! It's just like every other word processor! But the real question is: should you start to use NRO? Probably not, unless you already use groff on GNU/Linux already, and want to continue to use it in FreeDOS.

Is there a better way to produce professional looking PostScript and PDF documents in FreeDOS? Up next on my schedule is exploring TeX in FreeDOS.

All the files shown here can be located / downloaded at the following address: https://github.com/sennler/nro/tree/main/EXAMPLES

Have you ever wished there were a proper desktop for your DOS system, and thought that the GUI options, like Ozone or Seal, weren't quite cutting it? They don't really come with much software integrated into the GUI, and the transition back to command line is rather jarring. What if I told you there were a better, more useful alternative?

Well, thanks to TheOuterLinux (link: https://theouterlinux.gitlab.io/), there's now an excellent TUI (text user interface) desktop for DOS! Packed with tons of useful software, such as web browsers, file managers, music players, and even a lock screen, PsychDOS offers an alternative to the entirely command line driven DOS while playing to the strengths text mode offers.

Get PsychDOS: https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/DOS/INDEX.HTM

Still on the fence about trying it out? Don't just take my word for it! FreeDOS founder Jim Hall provides an overview of PsychDOS on the FreeDOS YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQCiZtnJekU

Featured image: PsychDOS Page 3.5

(link: https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/DOS/IMAGES/PAGE35.JPG)

Image Attribution: TheOuterLinux

Image License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

More PsychDOS images: https://psychoslinux.gitlab.io/DOS/SCRNSHOT.HTM