Merano is a song in three parts. The first part is in the "Italian Alps" style; the second part is in the "American Rock" style; and the third part is a reprise of the first part. As the old Schoolhouse Rock song puts it, "Three Is A Magic Number".
There were two choruses prior to this one, and the reprise uses lyrics from both of them: "Oh I Get High When I Saunter By", and "Oh I Feel Great In This Bouncing State". Kind of a clever idea, and it's one of those touches that an audience won't really notice.
The Coda starts at m.57, and in the Royal Albert Hall version, there's an accelerando here. That never made any sense to me, as it's hard enough to understand the lyrics. We weren't going to put up subtitles, and I didn't like the idea of my audience not understanding what the ensemble was singing. So, we didn't do an accelerando. We did do the subito piano, as it is notated in the score and helps to break up the Coda from the chorus.
For the ending, I abandoned the Grand Pause in m.80, as I think this confuses the audience. Instead, I put a fermata over m.81, held it six counts, then spiked it on beat 7. The audience went wild at every show, so I think this change worked.
We had a scene shift at this point, to get us from the Alps into Freddie's hotel room, where he's playing chess against a computer opponent. This required some scene change music, so we played the Merano Reprise from m.16-31. It's common in musicals for scene change music to repeat the song that was just performed, as it's still fresh in the audience's mind. I usually pick a well-known section, and just repeat it as necessary.
Computer chess games appeared in the late 1970's. I had a Fidelity Chess Challenger 3, and although it wasn't exactly a grandmaster, it was good enough for my skill level at the time. Since the World Chess Championship in Merano was held in 1981, it seems likely that the computer chess opponent that Freddie is playing against is more like this one, with voice capabilities and playing at a ELO level of over 1750.
So we now know the history of Chess, and we know where the big match is going to be played. We've briefly met Freddie and Florence, and now it's time to start telling the story.
Mrs. Pianoman and I have returned from our Italian adventure. While in Venice, we visited the islands of Murano (glass) and Burano (lace). Unfortunately, we didn't have time to take in the waters at the spa of Merano. Maybe next time!
The Merano sequence is in three parts. The first part is the Mayor and people of Merano singing about how wonderful the place is, and how much they are looking forward to the upcoming Chess tournament. The third part is a reprise of the first part. The second part is the introduction of the brash American Chess grandmaster, Freddie Trumper. Freddies "tone" is good old American rock 'n roll, and that's where a lot of the electric guitar comes in.
But before we get to "Rock Merano", there's a small change that takes place in the ensemble. Bars 164-166 are replicated at measure 190; we're creating bars 190A-D, and cutting m.191. Bar 190C goes into 2/4 time. It looks like this:
Switching to 2/4 time helps to transition from the 6/8 feel into the 4/4 feel of "Rock Merano". Note that this is something that's not in the score at all, but it's here because I prefer a more gradual transition.
The London score that I was using has gaps at m.10 and m.33, and that has music that we want to use. For each of those bars, we're playing what we played in m.2. My guess is that these "extra" bars were removed during the West End production, but I prefer keeping them for musical continuity.
When we get to the "S.R.O" section, we had Freddie and Florence sing the first one, then we added the ensemble for the second one. I liked the idea of Florence joining in on "S.R.O", as this is part of her complete support for Freddie.
Someone in the cast had never heard that term before, as it's not commonly used these days. Actually, it almost never happens in theaters, as it's a total safety violation. For those who don't know: "S.R.O" stands for Standing Room Only Interesting factoid from the page:
Standing tickets are a key feature of the annual London concert season "The Proms", with up to 1350 "Promenaders" buying cheaper tickets to stand in unreserved space in the area and gallery of the Royal Albert Hall.
If you look at YouTube videos of the Promenaders, it reminds me of slam circles and mosh pits ... which is also a version of SRO, I guess!
"The Story Of Chess" ends with Arbiter alone on stage, setting up the next song. He announces that he's the President of the organizers of the tournament, which is between Freddy Trumper of the U.S., and Anatoly Sergievski of the Soviet Union.
During this brief piece of dialogue, the band plays the Arbiter's "theme", which is the first phrase of the Arbiter song: "I've a duty as the referree ..." This phrase is played twice here, and I reuse it late in the second act. It's interesting to note that Benny & Bjorn (to be referred to from now on as B&B) are using this theme before it's used in a song. Normally in a musical, a melody line is reprised AFTER it's been established; here, the melody line is "pre-reprised". "The Arbiter" isn't sung until halfway through the first act.
"#2 Merano" is supposed to start with 11 bars of underscoring, but it's unclear what this is supposed to underscore. The end of "Story Of Chess" has plenty of music for the Arbiter to give his lines. Also, those first 11 bars are labelled measures A-K, which indicates that it was added to the original score at some point. My guess is that there was a scene change here, and these extra bars were added to cover it. The original soundtrack album actually starts with bar 1 of "Merano", so after our Arbiter says, "Welcome to Merano!", we started the song.
It's coincidental that I've reached this point of the Chess Chronicles the night before Mrs. Pianoman and I are headed to Italy. Some folks from her choir are joining another choir in Rome, and they will be singing the Verdi Requiem at three locations across the country. Our trip will take us through Rome, Florence, Verona, Vincenza, Asiago, and Vcnice; unfortunately, we will be passing roughly 2 1/2 hours south of Merano, and will not be able to partake of the spa there.
The character of Anatoly Sergievski is loosely based on two Soviet chess champions: Anatoly Karpov, and Viktor Korchnoi. It's interesting to note that these two champions played the 1981 World Chess Championship in Merano, and is certainly one of the reasons Act 1 is located there. Another interesting chess fact is that the "Meran Varation" of the "Semi-Slav Defense" is name after the city following its successful use in a chess tournament held in Merano in 1924.
"Merano" is in a fast 6/8, and most of the lyrics are sung on eighth notes. This gives it a real "patter song" feel. The trick to making the song work is setting the tempo slow enough to where the audience can understand the lyrics, while keeping it fast enough to be bouncy and joyful. These are the residents of Merano, clinking their wine glasses together, and singing about how wonderful their town is, so it needs to be happy.
There are many great lines from the song, but my favorite is:
Right now we're Italian / We used to be German / The borders keep shifting around
This is a reference to World War 2, when Italy was occupied by the Nazis.
The Mayor of Merano is a pure capitalist:
Speaking as one of the patriarchs / I don't mind taking your Lira or Marks
For those of you born after the Euro, the Lira was the currency of Italy in the pre-Euro days. Austria is just north of Merano, and their pre-Euro currency was the Deutschmark - "mark" for short.
Each time the Mayor sings, the music ritards to a stop ... then there's a pause, and then off we go again. Normally, these moments are conducted from the pit, with the music director visible to the cast. However, the Lyceum Theater at Vanguard University doesn't have a pit. The theater was originally a lecture hall, and was converted to a theater ... and since lecture halls don't have pits, this theater doesn't have one either. There's not really room for one anyway, as the center seats are only a couple yards away from the stage.
Instead, the pit is elevated above the audience and the stage, to the stage left side. We refer to it as the "loft", or sometimes the "crow's nest". Since it's not within the normal sight line of the singers, we need to create ways to stay together in the absence of a conductor's bow.
In the case of "Merano", the way we come back together is four counts, in "normal" tempo, from the time I play the seventh note in the E7 chord, i.e., the "D". So literally in my mind, I'm thinking:
D, two, three, four
If you do that same thing enough during rehearsals, eventually the ensemble starts to intuitively sense when to come back in. Also, doing these kinds of things over and over helps everyone get used to the idea of "feeling it".
Most shows at the Lyceum utilize these workarounds to some extent. There are several more in Chess, and I'll note them when they occur.
One other quick note about this section has to do with the whistling. We tried it a few times during rehearsal, but couldn't get it loud enough to actually be effective. Since the cast was moving here, we decided to just abandon it. Put this under the category of, "Yes, this would be cool, but audience members aren't going to miss it when it's gone". I ended up playing the melody line myself.
After the "whistling section", there's a brief instrumental section that slows to a halt before restarting with the ensemble. This is another "cast can't see the conductor" moment, and so I decided to just skip the rallantando completely. So from the start of the whistling section, I maintained a steady tempo all the way until the ensemble came back in.
More about "Merano", and the first appearance of Freddie Trumper, in Part 6. For now, Mrs. Pianoman and I need to finish packing for our Italian adventure. Here's one of my favorite Italian songs, along with amazing animation:
In "The Story Of Chess", the Ensemble gives us a history lesson about the origins of chess:
Not much is known about the early days of Chess beyond a vague report that 1500 years ago, two princes fought each other, though brothers, for a Hindu throne. Their mother cried, for no one really likes their offspring fighting to the death. She begged them, "Stop the slaughter!" with her every breath, but sure enough, one brother died.
None of this rhymes, of course, so it's more like the Ensemble is singing recitative here. And it turns out this is probably not a literal story at all; Wikipedia refers to it as, "an apocryphal account of the origins of the game of Chess".
This story is found in the "Shahnameh", also known as the "Shahnama", literally translated as "The Book Of Kings", which is:
a long epic poem written by the Persian poetFerdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Consisting of some 50,000 distichs or couplets (two-line verses),[2] the Shahnameh is one of the world's longest epic poems, and the longest epic poem created by a single author.[3][4][5] It tells mainly the mythical and to some extent the historical past of the Persian Empire from the creation of the world until the Muslim conquest in the seventh century.
The story is about Talhand and Gav, two half-brothers who vie for the throne of Hind (modern day India). They met in battle three times. Gav won the first two battles decisively. At the end of the third battle, Talhand was completely surrounded and was in a position of no escape. Gav did not kill his brother, but Talhand died on his war elephant, exhausted by the battle.
The position of "no escape" was expressed by the Persian word "shah mat", which means "check mate".
Back to the musical:
Sad beyond belief, she told her winning son, "You have caused such grief, I can't forgive this evil thing you've done". He tried to explain how things had really been, but he tried in vain. No words of his could mollify the Queen. And so he asked the wisest men he knew to lessen her distress. They told him he'd be pretty certain to impress by using model soldiers on a checkered board to show it was his brother's fault. They thus invented Chess.
This part rhymes a little bit, and is less like a pure recitative than the first part. It's not exactly accurate to say that Talhand's death was his fault; Gav's army held superior positions and Talhand's army was wiped out. It's possible Talhand was to blame for them fighting a third battle at all; you'd think after losing two times, Talhand would have know that he was beaten.
Chess historians believe that the India game of "Chaturanga" is the common ancestor of games such as "Xiangqi" (China), "Janggi" (Korea), "Shogi" (Japan), "Sittuyin" (Burma), "Makruk" (Thailand), "Ouk Chatrang" (Cambodia), and "Shatranj" (Persia), which in turn was the form of Chess brought to medieval Europe. Chaturanga flourished in India by the 6th century, and is the earliest known game to have two essential features found in all later chess variations: 1) Different pieces have different powers (which differentiates it from Checkers and Go); 2) Victory depends on one piece: The King.
The most powerful piece was the Chariot; it moved the way a Chess Rook moves. All other pieces had limits on the number of squares they could move.
"Chataranga" is a word that means, "having four limbs or parts", and in epic poetry often means "army". The name originally refers to a battle formation that has four separate components: Elephantry, Chariotry, Cavalry, and Infantry. The "Mahabharata" describes a battle formation referred to as a "Akshauhini", which is a mixed formation of the four unit types, and is very much like the opening formation of a chess game.
Shatranj is the predecessor to Chess, and it differed from Chataranga in the following ways:
In Chaturanga, the King could be captured and this ended the game. Shatranj introduced the idea of warning the King was under attack by announcing "check". This was done to avoid accidental endings to games.
In Shatranj, a King could not be moved into check or left in check. As a result, the King could not be captured, and checkmate was the only decisive way to end a game.
The appearance of the pieces changed from animals to abstract shapes due to a Muslim ban on lifelike pieces, as they were said to have been too like idols. (Islam forbids depiction of animals and humans in art.)
In the song is the phrase, "Soon spread to Persia", when the reality appears to be that Chess as we know it originated in Persia, but was heavily influenced by a game from India.
This is all fascinating stuff, and it's very interesting to see how a single board game invented in India could have that much influence across the world, thousands of years later ... and how this apocrophal story ended up in a musical.
"The Story Of Chess" is the opening number in the London version; for the Concord Theatricals version, the opening number is called, "Prologue: The Story Of Chess". In spite of the name, the "Prologue" from the 2008 Royal Albert version isn't used here. It's a little confusing.
Like many songs in the show, this one is too long and repetitive. After a 55-bar intro, in which the whole chord sequence is played out, the Arbiter sings the first line:
Each game of Chess means there's one less variation left to be played
Each day got through means one or two less mistakes remain to be made.
These two lines immediately establish one of the show's themes: Chess is a metaphor for Life.
The ensemble then repeats what the Arbiter just said in four part harmony. Since I wasn't planning to use the ensemble harmonies for telling the story, I cut those 16 bars out (m.72-87).
M.88 is the beginning of the story ("Not much is known"). When we first rehearsed this piece, I wasn't sure what the director was planning to do with blocking, so I had the whole ensemble learn the melody lines. I didn't want to take the time to teach parts only to discard them later, so we just stuck with unison. The 2008 Royal Albert version assigns various parts of the story to different members of the ensemble, and in the end that's what we ended up doing.
Just to reiterate: We didn't do any harmonies during the "telling of the story". We also didn't do any of the "background vocals". For example, in m.88-94, we didn't sing any of the "Each game / Of Chess" parts. All we wanted was a single line, made up of one or more ensemble members, singing the melody.
In order to keep the momentum going, I cut m.102-116, and had the word "Died" overlap with m.117, "Sad". I think my approach is pretty clear; I'm not a fan of playing the intro chord sequence without vocals over and over, and it seems like that happens a lot in this score.
M.141 has an inexplicable key change to C# minor. I don't have the libretto with me any more, so it's possible that there's dialogue here. I decided to cut all of that out, and stay in the original key. We added a bar of C minor just to complete the phrase from 140, and called it measure 140A. Note that I'm establishing a precedent here; not only do I plan to cut bars, but I also plan to insert bars where necessary.
From there we jumped to m.196 as that's where the story is picked up again ("Chess displayed no inertia / Soon spread to Persia"). When we got to m.233, the entire ensemble came together to sing, "King and Queen and Rook and Bishop, Knight and Pawn" in unison; the ensemble drops out after m.239.
The Arbiter then finishes the story. The score has a great sixteenth-note passage from m.247-252, and it should be used if possible. The Arbiter and I gradually slowed this down all the way to the end.
CHANGES: Cut m.72-87, m.102-116, m.141-195; Insert m.140A, a Cm chord.
In Part 1, I decided to use the handwritten "London" vocal book as my piano/conductor score because it had everything I needed for the production including ensemble parts that were crammed into any available space on the pages. I still don't know with 100% certainty which version this book is, but from what I've seen online and from the order in the score, it appears to be the original 1986 West End version. (This is typically referred to as "The London Version".)
From my discussions with the director, it sounded as if she was going to stick to the 2008 Royal Albert Hall version for inspiration. This would include using the story as presented in the 1986 West End version ... which was the same production that I was using as my source for the music. So we were definitely on the same page there.
This gave me four sources that I would end up using to determine how the music would go:
The 1986 West End piano/conductor score
The original soundtrack album
The 2008 Royal Albert Hall concert, with Idina Menzel and Josh Groban
The Concord Theatricals rental scores
The next question was: How much was I willing to change what was in the score?
A quick explanation for people who aren't music directors: All shows are "changed" in some way in order to fit the needs of the production. In the case of ACTC, it's not a huge stage (the Lyceum holds 200 people), so music that's written for set changes, or to get people from point A to point B can always be trimmed down, Vamps are usually shorter, and I'm almost always cutting big chunks of music out of the scores in order to make it all work on a small stage.
There are also times when music is actually ADDED to the score, depending on the needs of the director and/or choreographer. I did a show for Vanguard once where the choreographer used a YouTube video in which a big dance number had been completely rearranged. By the time I found out, it was too late to change it, so I had no choice but to listen to it over and over until I had the arrangement figured out ... and then transmit that to my band. It ended up great in the end, but it was just a lot of work, and a lot of customization.
So making changes to the score is inevitable. But how much? Did I want to do the songs "pretty much how they're written"? Or did I want to lean into a lot of customization in order to get the music the way I liked it?
Here's the list of considerations that guided me in my decision:
The 1986 score SHOULD be very similar to the 1984 album as they were being produced at the same time
Making major changes is like eating Lay's potato chips -- "nobody can eat (or rearrange) just one". So committing to making a major change in one number is just going to make it that much easier to rearrange everything ...
The show is HUGE. Do I really want to make that many changes?
Endgame #2, which is the list of previous chess champions, is ridiculous. Who cares about these people? They have nothing to do with the story except for historical interest. Also, our chess champion is a FICTITIOUS person; so why would we care about presenting a list of REAL champions in music form?
Endgame #1 and the Prologue are essentially the same music, but it does nothing to advance the story. Three minutes of a standalone orchestral/choral piece in which no words are sung. What is this doing in the musical?
The 2008 version had some extensive changes made to several songs, as well as choreography which would result in rearrangement ... and I'm using the 2008 version as one of my sources.
My choreographer will almost certainly be using music that I don't have .. and so I'll be rearranging ANYWAY.
I'm retired now. I've got the time.
In the end (at the beginning?), I decided to go with rearranging wherever it was needed. Spoilers: This resulted in a LOT of customization.
The first, and easiest, musical change I made was to toss the Prologue. It's not in the original 1986 West End score, and the main theme has nothing to do with anything else in the show except for Endgame #1. There are a few areas where themes from the show are interpolated, but not enough to make it interesting enough to keep. So instead of starting the show with it, I decided we would start the show with The Story Of Chess, which is how the West End production was started.
Interesting note: The name of the first piece in the Concord rental score is: "Prologue: The Story Of Chess". I guess they decided they didn't want to use the Prologue music, but still wanted to use the name for unknown reasons.
And we're off and running. In the next post, we'll look at The Story Of Chess. Meanwhile, here's the Prologue from the 2008 version for your listening enjoyment:
I was originally offered the music director position of Chess on 19 Jan 2019. At the time, the plan was for ACTC to produce it in the summer of 2020. Somewhere between then and the cancellation of West Side Story in March 2020, Chess got pushed out to 2024. ACTC did Forever Plaid in 2023, and we did two productions of Marvelous Wonderettes in 2021 (music only, at Escencia Green park) and 2022 (full production).
There was a lot of time to prepare for Chess, and I wanted to get started as soon as possible. I reached out to a friend who has a lot of scores, and asked him if he had PDFs for Chess. He sent over the "Vocal Score", which actually had a full orchestral reduction as well as all the Ensemble music. These scores ended up being what I used in all the performances as I didn't like the rental scores at all. (Notes were too tiny, and too many mistakes. More on that in a later post.)
The Big Question that I needed to answer for myself was: What will I use as the basis for my approach to the score? Chess is a show that has been reimagined several times since the Cold War ended (around 1990). So would it be more like the original show? Would it be like "Chess In Concert"? How much choreography and blocking would there be? How much of the story would we be telling? And how would all of those elements influence the music choices that I made?
I started searching YouTube for performance videos, and the one that I kept coming back to was the 2008 Royal Albert Hall performance featuring Idina Menzel and Josh Groban. This wasn't a "fully staged version", but it also wasn't a full concert version. It was something in between, and seemed to have most of what I was looking for.
I'm also a fan of the original soundtrack album, released in 1984. This was the album with "One Night In Bangkok", which became a hit in the US (#3 on the Billboard Hot 100) and the UK (#12). Not all songs from the musical are found on the album, but the arrangements are excellent.
So my approach would be to create an amalgamation of these two sources, and figure out how to make that work within the vision of my director. This would be a challenge, but I was willing to put in the time to make it all happen. Like the title of my blog says, I'm retired now -- so I have more time to devote to projects like this.
In my last post, I said I had three things to do. Wishful thinking, to be sure. Make that SIX things to do:
Reinstall "tank" drives, and get Plex working
Reset crontab
Verify that Roku works from our TV
Restore Samba access to the "tank" drive
Revive my "To Do List" software
Either get Zina working again or find a new music streaming option
REINSTALL "TANK" DRIVES / RESET CRONTAB
"tank" is an old ZFS convention, and refers to a single logical drive made up of one or more physical drives. In my case, it's just a single 8T drive which contains all the media, in addition to other miscellaneous stuff. I also have a second 8T drive which is used as a RSYNC mirror via crontab.
I've been using RSYNC in a standard archive mode, which adds anything new from the active drive into the backup drive, which means that the backup drive grows larger than the active drive over time. Since I'm rebuilding the system anyway, I decided this was a good idea to wipe the backup drive and run a fresh RSYNC from the active drive. There's about 1.38M objects on the drive and 6.4T of data, so replicating everything took several hours. Once it was done, the following line was put into crontab:
This was my first time restoring Plex, so I was pretty nervous. If the restore failed, then all my organizing of the DVD would be lost. I downloaded the latest Plex, opened up the default port so I could talk to it from my Windows desktop, and verified that it worked.
Next step was to restore the library. I thought at first that this would be /usr/lib/plexmediaserver, but it turns out the correct path is /var/lib/plexmediaserver. The /usr tree is binaries, and replacing that with the old ones caused Plex to break. Restored the originals, and then verified that I could play content on my desktop. The restore worked, and I was able to play content by traversign through my categories. WOO HOO!
Next step was to get it working from the TV. Since I'm using Plex in a "non-authenticated" mode, all I needed to do was point to the new nodename, "kenny". I'm running standard everything, so this worked right away. It's nice to see that kind of success every now and then; it seems like most of these rebuilding tasks are a big hassle.
Plex is now working, and this is a big relief.
RESTORE SAMBA ACCESS TO "TANK"
Every time I go down this road, I try to use NFS on the Windows box. And every time, I fail. For some reason, NFS is the easiest thing in the world on Linux boxes, and a complete nightmare on Windows boxes. I can understand that being a problem in, say, 1998. But it's 2024 now, and this problem still isn't solved. I mean, MAYBE it works on Windows, but it's not trivial to set up. And it SHOULD be.
So I gave up on that particular road, and went back to basics of Samba. I made it all work using this tutorial page, and then customized it for my use. My entry in /etc/samba/smb.conf looks like this:
[tank]
path = /tank
browsable =yes
writable = yes
valid users = scott
read only = no
This is after using smbuser to create the "scott" account, which is what I use from the Windows box when I mount the share.
Once this was working, I remounted it on Windows as the Z: drive. (That's kind of what we call it around here -- "The Z Drive".)
REVIVE MY "TO DO LIST"
The only data that I lost was my project and TODO lists. This isn't a real crisis, as I can rebuild anything that's critical. Plus, revisiting this enables me to do things like using more recurring Tasks on Google Calendar, rather than locating them in a separate software space. Bottom line: It's lost data, but not a big deal
After looking around at various standalone programs, I decided to go with "ToDoIst". It's got a free option that will cover everything I need to do. I added three projects right away, then started populating them with tasks based on what I remember from the last few months.
This is a good example of "splintering" a program into multiple parts. Sometimes this is a good thing as it forces you to rethink what you're doing and maybe try a different way to achieve your goals. By splitting recurring calendar events from projects, I'm getting the project software more focused and less distracted.
REVIVE THE MUSIC STREAMER
I was having some trouble getting Zina back up and running. This is a program from 2010, and PHP has undergone three major versions since then ... so there were a few things broken. I found that by commenting out those lines that were complaining the most, I was able to get Zina to stream music again. However, Zina didn't know where the CSS files were, so it looked horrible.
Functional, but ugly. So I decided to try some alternatives: AirSonic, Navidrome, mStream, and Ampache. The problem with all these programs is that they don't allow you to manage your collection from a top-level Genres view. In the case of Navidrome, the "top-level" is Albums, which would be tens of thousands in our case.
It was going to have to be Zina. I dug into the problem, and it turned out to be a borked variable, which was pointing to a nonexistent spot. Corrected that variable, and my graphics problem went away. All my album covers were back, and I was able to play music just fine.
STILL A FEW ITEMS LEFT TO CLEAN UP
I need to get the Zina/MSJ support scripts working from crontab again. While I'm revisiting it, it might be a good idea to generate the reports in a cleaner fashion. Downloading album art is still a time-consuming process, and make this easier would be very helpful. Also, logging in from the main screen in the garage isn't working right now, so I'm being forced to run the iDrive backups from the command line. Which works fine, but it's just inconvenient.
That's about it. The system is finally working again, and hopefully it'll stay this way for a while.
My old garage server HDD, a 15-year old 1TB WD drive, finally bit the dust. I'm not going to panic, as this is what backups are for. And I've been through this process before, so it's just a matter of pulling all the pieces together.
I've got a few SSDs in the garage, and since the main part of my space consumption is on the 8TB drives, I don't really need a lot of root drive space. So I plugged in a 60G SSD, and started the process of trying various Linux flavors to see which one will work for my applications.
Tried Fedora 40, Fedora 27, and Linux Mint. None of them could do everything I wanted, so I went back to Centos 7.10. I like Linux Mint's support for GUI apps, and I think they could probably give Ubuntu a run for their money. But for what I'm doing, Centos 7 will work great. The only downside is that Centos is pulling support for Centos 7 in the next couple months. Not too concerned about that; even after Centos 5 and 6 went EOL, there were still repos out there that supported RPMs all the way up to the last minor version.
As of tonight, my backup program and media server are both running on the garage server. Next steps are to reinstall the "tank" drives, reset the cron job for keeping them in sync, and then verify that we can watch movies from our Roku TV.
Hi, I'm the Pianoman, and welcome to my retirement blog. I retired in 2022, and thought that starting a blog might be a good idea to keep track of my various hobbies. But I procrastinated, life got in the way, and the blog got stuck in the never-ending stack of projects.
The catalyst for finally getting the blog rolling was the ACTC production of Chess at the Lyceum Theater of Vanguard University, for which I was music director. I spent a lot of time on this score, more than any other musical I've worked on, and I thought it would be a good idea to get all those customizations captured in some format that could be useful to other music directors. Our production was pretty solid, and it deserves to be preserved in some way.
Besides musical theater, my other retirement hobbies include gardening, genealogy, golf, and the Hidden Mickey Wiki. I'm hoping I can use this blog to help with those other hobbies as well.
