Jolt Country

So for a laugh I fired up my Mac mini that had been sitting in a milk crate for the last five years. I had read about installing Linux on these things using a USB drive and bootstrapping and other hoops i'd need to jump through. then while browsing the menu inside the small apple icon I discovered an option to boot from unknown OS, the 32bit Mint OS in the CD drive, in fact. So I booted it up from that then blew away the hard drive and installed Linux on it. I like this a little better than my 64bit PC with the micro SD card running things. This Mac has less ram and a slower processor but it runs faster than the other one. Probably the really slow read times on the PC card reader port.
So ahminna try this for a while and see if I like it enough to keep it around. Better than sitting in the basement , right?

THE
STUFF LINUX
IN EVERYTHING
AARDVARK

It amuses me to see the Apple logo on the outside of the box (which looks like a plastic peanut butter sandwich container from Tupperware, BTW) and Linux on the inside. If I can stuff more ram in this thing it'll be a keeper.

THE
SPARE STICK OR TWO
AARDVARK

Traded out the 80g hard drive for a 160g that had been sitting in a static bag since the early oughts. My wife had this pink acer netbook that drank too much ginger ale and died.
I saved the ram sticks an hd just for this occasion.

Lubuntu rocks on my HP mini. Guess I'll install that when the new drive gets here. It might be some kind of Puppy linux for the Apple. Cinnamon was just too hardware hungry for the Mac. Plus it's too hot and slow, Like an overweight kid in a Boy Scout sack race.

THE
FOOD MERIT BADGE
AARDVARK

I just installed Kali (formerly Backtrack) on my old podcast laptop. It runs fast enough on a dual-core machine with an SSD drive. I can't get the Acer touchpad to work quite right, but it'll do for now.

If we do move to the new place, I have this dream, Vark - one computer that is fully able to play Steam games and not get screwed up and then another Linux computer that has no UI whatsoever, but I can use for my various scripting. Although I guess maybe that should be the Linode.

Linode changed their pricing, by the way. You have to go hourly. I'm sure they will find a way to screw up what was the most convenient thing in the world for me. Pinback says I should use AWS but I don't know, how can it be better than Linode? (Unless Linode wants more than $20 from me for having a fake computer on all the time.)

Linode has security issues, but it's much easier and cheaper than getting roped into AWS, where you can NOT run your own mail server, which was my deal-breaker. I don't think the hourly is going to make it more expensive, just change the billing.

Linux dual boot on my laptop STILL wont get the Wi-Fi adaptor to activate. I had this issue 10 years ago, figured it would have been solved by now but noooooooooo.

So I'm fooling around with the Chromimum OS, the one that Neverware modified to work with X86 machines. They use it on all the Chromebooks and I must say it's pretty snappy when the ethernet cable is plugged in. I have it running from a flash drive on my laptop. I might dual boot it with win7, I have doubts that it can do all the stuff I want it to do. Hint: TurboTax only runs in real Windows, no Wine allowed. And it's not the only program (programs, not apps, I have enough leisure time in my life to type the entire word 'program', sorry hipsters) that depends on real Windows, So we'll see how I like the whole cloud experience without getting too far away from big7

THE
OS GRASS IS ALWAYS
GREENER ON THE OTHER SIDE OF
AARDVARK

So last weekend a friend of mine said his other friend was throwing out an old computer and did I want it. I have learned from Earl Evans' podcasts that one should never say no to offers like that. I can give it the once over and recycle it myself if it's really junk. Turns out it's a Dell Precision 490. An old office server machine apparently. Dual 3.0ghz processors, 16 gig of ram sticks still in it and the guy was just going to throw it away because it's too old. I guess he's a gamer and just upgraded to a cutting edge Alienware machine or something. Naturally I vacuumed the thing out and stuck in a couple terabyte drives and now it's my new desktop machine running Linux Mint. Fastest machine I've ever owned.

THE
BANG ZOOM
AARDVARK

That sounds like an excellent candidate for a home server!

After further review the Dell is going to be my new music recording machine. I did a practice run installing all the Windows based programs through Wine and they all run pefectly in Linux.
Then I noticed a shit ton of open source audio software that I can fool around with. So not only will the studio get a hardware upgrade but Win7 is leaving the building cause I'm getting tired of WGA nag messages for an out of date operating system

THE
MUSIC MINDED
AARDVARK

Note that Reaper has a Linux port.

They also want me to pay for Reaper and I already own a pretty good paid program. Plus there are so many free programs that I'm sure there's something I can use. I gotta get the hang of Jack and go from there.

THE
MUSIC STUDY
AARDVARK

AArdvark wrote: Sat May 25, 2019 12:44 pm After further review the Dell is going to be my new music recording machine.

I would love to have a song for Cyberganked and I will pay you some money to use it. Songs without vocals work better because it's a text adventure, but you know how that is.

Every couple of years I try this and I just decided to try it again ... okay, the mission for this Ubuntu installation:

- I hook the joystick I bought from bxfoundry up at all times.
- It's always ready to play three retro games, to be determined. One of which will be Begin.
- I am going to try to put Steam on it and have a couple simple games there. Metal Slug 3 or whatever.

Baby steps.

AArdvark wrote: Wed Mar 13, 2019 3:07 pm Linux dual boot on my laptop STILL wont get the Wi-Fi adaptor to activate. I had this issue 10 years ago, figured it would have been solved by now but noooooooooo.

Tenda® adapters tend to run on everything. When I had the 66 lb. Mac® tower I ran it headless, w/o keyboard or mouse with VNC™ in the Startup folder, or whatever it was I did on OS X® to have a program run on startup. I had to download an older driver due to the machine's age but it worked great, when I used it I logged in via VNC™ on Windows®. The machine sat in the living room while I was in my office/bedoom 20 feet away.

You can get 150 megabit Tenda® USB® WiFi® adapters on Amazon.com® for about $9. The adapter is very small, about the size of a fingernail.

If they can work on old Macs®, I'm sure they have Linux® support. The website https://TENDACN.COM appears to be their official site and does have Linux® drivers.


————
And may sunshine and happiness
Surround you when you're far from home
- Rod Stewart. Forever Young

The laptop isn't worth putting in a new wifi card. I can use Win7 and it runs fine. I'm more miffed that none of the Linux drivers are able to run the thing after all these years.

And could you please for the love of toast stop with the trademark logos. It was cute for the first ten minutes but don't run it into the ground.

THE
REGISTERED
AARDVARK

P.S. I have that exact same trackball mouse. Great for playing Centipede!

So I got this wild hair of an idea. I want to run a headless machine in the basement and use it from the office upstairs. I have a couple nice towers sitting around doing nothing. At first I was thinking about getting a 100 foot long HDMI cable but then I looked up remote computing and there might be a chance here. Something like a media server, something....

THE
DOING RESEARCH
AARDVARK