Stupid Linux! Be more funny

[AArdvark]

A friend of mine was throwing away her old laptop computers, recycling, really. Naturally I asked if I could have them. If I can't use them for anything then I will recycle them. Got a Toshiba Satellite and an Acer Aspire mini. The Toshiba had a broken screen and was slow as shit but it did have a good HD in it and a 1 gig mem stick so I kept those. The Acer had a crap 8gig drive and 256m of onboard. I put the 1gig stick in it and a 125G Kensington SSD drive I had in a box downstairs. At first I put Lubuntu on it but decided I wanted a (fucking stolen!) Microsoft product so I loaded in Tiny7. Using it now on my back deck to see what it's like. It's faster than my Inspirion but I have to lean way close to see anything. It's better than a phone because of the real keyboard, even if it's built for people with fingers like pipe cleaners.

[AArdvark]

Update: putting Debian in the Acer mini. Results to follow

[AArdvark]

Sucks, back to XP.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

What did you not like about it?

[AArdvark]

The machine is an Acer 1.5Ghz laptop with 1.5 gigs of ram. When I click on a file navigation window it takes five seconds to open. At one time those specs were cutting edge. I want an OS that bang-zooms it's internal stuff when I ask it to.

THE
OPEN SEZ ME
AARDVARK

[AArdvark]

Eh, going to try putting Windows 98 or 95 in it. Boot disc in my usb floppy drive and all the .cab files on a flash drive

[RealNC]

Eh, going to try putting Windows 98 or 95 in it. Boot disc in my usb floppy drive and all the .cab files on a flash drive

Try a Linux distro that uses either LXQT or XFCE for the desktop. That is fast even on 20 year old machines.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

RealNC has the goooooooooood shit.

[AArdvark]

What I want is for the laptop to boot right into a Commodore emulator. The Acer is going to be my C64 machine. But it needs to do it fast, fast. I was considering Dos 6.2 but there's driver issues. XP works except it's slow as fudge.

[AArdvark]

[AArdvark]

Update: put Q40S Linux something-something in the Acer. Win98 has memory issues and keeps BSOD-ing me. I put the Commodore emulator in my Dell. I thought the charging port was messed up because the power cord would run the machine but it wouldn't charge the battery. Turns out I needed a new Dell charging cable, it fixed everything. Yay.

Rolled my desktop pc back to 7. Win10 used to go through this awful malware scan every time I turned the machine on. It sounded like a coffee grinder and practically locked the pc up for the first fifteen minutes. Plus the added fun of updates that do nothing every month. 10 was OK but too clunky, 7 is pretty fast. I never had 7 in this machine before because I never figured out the legacy BIOS/UEFI settings before yesterday.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I set my Ubuntu machine to upgrade last night. I went into the terminal today and it is displaying a "[OS^" character when it waits for input, or before it outputs anything. It has made the terminal totally unusable.

I don't care how or why it happens. They have to test this stuff, fix it and BE BETTER.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I installed zsh and then ohmyzh and I guess it is fixed. I should have had that installed anyway. I just didn't. GET OFF ME. STOP. STOP. STOOOOOOPPPPP. Okay. God. Stop. All right it's there, Jesus.

[AArdvark]

Ok, I decided to work smarter, not harder. I went back to Win10, even though it has this long-ass malware scan every time I boot up. I took the 120G solid state drive from the Acer and put it in my desktop as a C drive. The other two terabyte drives are now storage only. The malware scan takes mere seconds now and I don't hear a thing. I should have done this a long time ago. Of course the Acer mini is now recycle fodder but I wasn't really using it for anything except farting around with Linux distros.

THE
HAPPINESS +5
AARDVARK

[Flack]

I gave my Acer mini away. I couldn't sell it and no one in my circle (that's computer friends and relatives) wanted it. When I was 10 years old I would have accepted any electronic device for free that flashed, beeped or blooped. My nephews took one look at this thing, decided it wouldn't play Fortnite, and said no thanks. I spent a lot of time brainstorming things I could use it for but every solution I came up with was a far stretch and something that could be easily done by a different device, almost always better. The last project I attempted to cram it into was as a music hub for out in my workshop -- all I needed to do was connect it to an amplifier, buy a Bluetooth adapter, and set up a bunch of software. I ended up buying a stereo amplifier the size of a deck of cards with Bluetooth built in that did everything I needed for like $50. Whenever I buy a new laptop I always keep the old one -- I feel like it's been liberated and can serve a function other than being my main machine at that point -- but this one was like five or six laptops down in the chain and it was just time for it to go.

For my oldest laptop in circulation, I dumped Linux and installed ChromeOS Flex, which is the Chrome OS designed to run on Intel processors. It boots in a matter of seconds, patches are nearly instantaneously applied and non-intrusive, and it runs 10x faster than Windows did on that old thing. The tradeoff is you have to buy into Google's infrastructure (you have to log in with a gmail account to even get started) but if that's not a deal breaker, it's a great solution. It's not a fully functional operating system and app support is lim ited, but if you're just "online" stuff like surfing the web and streaming content, it's a great solution.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

You have written the first post that ever got me interested in Chrome OS! Because the iPad 2 I got Melissa was ruined by Apple, and because another Android tablet I once had stopped being able to do anything, I sort of "gave up" on tablets. I realize now this is not a tablet OS. But something an older laptop could have.

Yes, even just running APPS would be nice. Thanks, Flack!

[AArdvark]

I looked into the Chromium OS but could never log in using my Google account. Maybe I really needed a Gmail account instead. Oh well.

[Flack]

When I discovered my laptop had a second HD slot I added a 2TB M.2 drive and when I told my kid he said... why? And when I told him I wanted more storage he said... why? And when I said so I could store pictures and eBooks and music and movies and documents he said... why? It's an entirely different mindset. We grew up in the era where hard drive storage was like a dick measuring yardstick. In the Commodore 64 days, only lame BBSes ran off of a single floppy disk; decent boards had at least two drives, and the really elite ones had hard drives (which started around $800 for 10 megabytes). When I ran the Gad Chamber BBS in the mid-90s on my PC, nobody took any warez board seriously unless they had > 1GB of storage. (I paid a lot of money for a six-disc CD-ROM changer, which made my BBS instantly popular). That's old man thinking. I owned more than 1,000 audio CDs and neither of my kids have ever owned a single one. That's who Chromebooks are for, people who don't know where their data is stored and frankly don't care. I'm not sure it would ever be a primary solution for me -- too limited on apps and games -- but for something to take on a road trip and use in a hotel room, it's a great solution.

[AArdvark]

Q: do the kids of tomorrow only want to rent ones and zeros?

When Napster became a thing I gobbled music that I never even listened to, just because I could. Maybe it's not having it 24/7 growing up that makes us old folks stuff hard drives like that. The only music I had, apart from WBBF was my mom's Reader's Digest big band collection. So current.

In other news, I'm powering down the White Monster pc and trying out the Forum Minis pc for a week and see if I can deal with that (again). The last time I used it there was no sound and I couldn't get drivers for all the hardware inside. My mom's pc, the Dell Precision 490, had some issues recently and I figured I should start looking for an upgrade for her. While looking around I found a driver package for my peanut butter sandwich pc so now I have sound and Bluetooth working. I bolted it on the back of my new monitor and have been futzing around with all the games my mom plays
In hopes of moving her up to Win10. Meantime I've been playing Diablo 2, Path of Exile and Sacred (still trying to get that working) on Windows 10. Maybe it'll be her Christmaspresent. All the games that do not require an internet connection to work.

[Casual Observer]

Q: do the kids of tomorrow only want to rent ones and zeros?

When Napster became a thing I gobbled music that I never even listened to, just because I could. Maybe it's not having it 24/7 growing up that makes us old folks stuff hard drives like that. The only music I had, apart from WBBF was my mom's Reader's Digest big band collection. So current.

In other news, I'm powering down the White Monster pc and trying out the Forum Minis pc for a week and see if I can deal with that (again). The last time I used it there was no sound and I couldn't get drivers for all the hardware inside. My mom's pc, the Dell Precision 490, had some issues recently and I figured I should start looking for an upgrade for her. While looking around I found a driver package for my peanut butter sandwich pc so now I have sound and Bluetooth working. I bolted it on the back of my new monitor and have been futzing around with all the games my mom plays
In hopes of moving her up to Win10. Meantime I've been playing Diablo 2, Path of Exile and Sacred (still trying to get that working) on Windows 10. Maybe it'll be her Christmaspresent. All the games that do not require an internet connection to work.

Wow, your mom plays videogames? She's super cool. The only mom playing videogames was my friend's mom played win solitare like it was her only passion.