ForumGarden

LarsMac wrote: Thu Jul 09, 2020 8:00 am Thanks for the reminder.
I have 2 laptops running Windows 10, and they are working fine, so far, but I have three others than need OS upgrades.
I really don't want to spend the money to install more Windoze
Hopefully, we will be fully relocated by end of the month, and I will have time to explore OS options, again.

I'm considering Linux options, and the only thing that might be off the table is Red Hat. I tried installing it once some years ago, and hated the experience, very much.
RH also was a severe pain in my workday, trying to troubleshoot storage networking problems, for which their "support" people were obnoxious and uncooperative.

I’m glad it’s not just me

LarsMac wrote: Thu Jul 09, 2020 8:00 am I'm considering Linux options

What I found helpful was ordering five 32GB USB3 memory sticks at $5 each, so I could make a set of bootable live systems before installing anything on a hard drive. And if any of your drives are still not SSD it's silly not to take the old drive out as a fallback spare and drop in an SSD. Ebuyer.com here sells "WD Green 240GB 2.5" 7mm Solid State Drive £30" which is $37 and it changes a machine entirely.

(here's their memory stick, for reference: Kingston DataTraveler 32GB Datatraveler 100G3 USB 3.0 Flash Drive Black £ 3.70 inc. vat)

spot wrote: Thu Jul 09, 2020 11:17 am

LarsMac wrote: Thu Jul 09, 2020 8:00 am I'm considering Linux options

What I found helpful was ordering five 32GB USB3 memory sticks at $5 each, so I could make a set of bootable live systems before installing anything on a hard drive. And if any of your drives are still not SSD it's silly not to take the old drive out as a fallback spare and drop in an SSD. Ebuyer.com here sells "WD Green 240GB 2.5" 7mm Solid State Drive £30" which is $37 and it changes a machine entirely.

(here's their memory stick, for reference: Kingston DataTraveler 32GB Datatraveler 100G3 USB 3.0 Flash Drive Black £ 3.70 inc. vat)

That's a good idea. I should try that. then I can play with 2 or 3 different Linux OS systems. I have several USB sticks left over from work. A couple are even 256 GB.
Once this move is done, I hope to have a lot of "play" time on my hands.

Humph, Mint 20 has dropped 32 bit support and the first of my laptops is a Thinkpad X61, vintage 32 bit.

Got all the way to the dist-upgrade before it fell over with dependency errors

That must be frustrating, I didn't know.

I'm not sure the surface variation Ubuntu and Mint make is vital. https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/cu ... bt-hybrid/ has an XFCE offering and you know your way around apt

Though actually, XP is still - just - an option.

What do you mean, nonsense...

Right, I'm now running Debian XFCE on the X60

A bit of a game, mostly my fault I suspect. I downloaded the basic ISO ignoring the extended one with the non-free drivers as it wasn't supported by Debian, created the bootable stick and ran it up as a live boot which worked fine but had no internet connection. When I moved on to run a graphical install it turned out that I need a proprietary driver for the wifi card. I had to download that on a different machine and load it via a usb stick which appeared to work.

Then I chose to partition the drive with a separate home area. Again appeared to work but after the system files had been copied over the machine shut itself down whilst I wasn't watching. I reran (connected via ethernet) and again it shut down after displaying half a page of text of which I only managed to read the last line - requesting power down.

I then tried to run it as a live boot again but it powered down again (again whilst I was not watching). Another try and it booted up OK and I noticed that the home partition was completely empty. This made me suspect that splitting the partitioning had caused a problem.

At this point I ran the live install (a different installer to the graphical installer) and changed to a single partition and it went through to completion. Then I added the non-free repositories and, using the ethernet connection, installed the wifi driver.

Now I need to get used to the interface and the different utilities. I'll report on progress later.

Did you spend that £4.95?

Consider opening a phone hands-free to walk through the GUI a bit.

spot wrote: Fri Jul 10, 2020 1:39 pm Did you spend that £4.95?

Consider opening a phone hands-free to walk through the GUI a bit.

Not yet - I found some new for £9.99 but I'm still looking for the promised price.

I'll practice with the set up out the box for a while and see what *has* to be changed and what I can work with.

So far I've added a search facility to the file manager (without enabling the search database but it's quick enough as is) but nothing else stands out as yet.

Having used it for a couple of days I’m very pleased with it.

Direct comparison with Mint 19.3 is very positive - it’s far quicker and more responsive and even with only 2gb of memory I’ve yet to run over 50%. I find libre office ramps up the cpu even when it’s not active but not to the extent that it slows other processes down.

For a machine with a cpu passmark of 452 (which makes my usual workhorse twenty five times more powerful) it is a viable option.

Bryn Mawr wrote: Thu Jul 09, 2020 2:30 pm Humph, Mint 20 has dropped 32 bit support and the first of my laptops is a Thinkpad X61, vintage 32 bit.

Got all the way to the dist-upgrade before it fell over with dependency errors

I'm confused.
Looking at Mint website they are touting Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana" - Cinnamon (64-bit)

LarsMac wrote: Sun Jul 12, 2020 7:14 am

Bryn Mawr wrote: Thu Jul 09, 2020 2:30 pm Humph, Mint 20 has dropped 32 bit support and the first of my laptops is a Thinkpad X61, vintage 32 bit.

Got all the way to the dist-upgrade before it fell over with dependency errors

I'm confused.
Looking at Mint website they are touting Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana" - Cinnamon (64-bit)

I'm using Mint 20 at the moment, but the release seems not to offer a 32 bit x86 option which they've always previously made available. Linux is known for supporting old hardware so it's a backward step.

I guess it makes sense.
Ya gotta draw the line somewhere on what you'll support.

LarsMac wrote: Sun Jul 12, 2020 1:42 pm I guess it makes sense.
Ya gotta draw the line somewhere on what you'll support.

True, but if it still works I don’t like to throw it away

My Tempest-hardened daisywheel electric typewriter still fills a niche.

Bryn Mawr wrote: Sun Jul 12, 2020 1:59 pm

LarsMac wrote: Sun Jul 12, 2020 1:42 pm I guess it makes sense.
Ya gotta draw the line somewhere on what you'll support.

True, but if it still works I don’t like to throw it away

Tell me about it.
I have an old 386 AT that I run some of the old PC games on that the grandkids like.

Some months ago I switched this Thinkpad back to slackware-current. There's other stuff in the building that has Mint but this is my daily machine now.

I've used Microsoft for as long as I can remember but recently I've had issues. I prefer a mouse on a laptop to a touchpad and I found the mouse started behaving with a whole life of its own. It was highlighting anything and everything it could and switching my tabs without me actually asking it to. It got embarrassing when it starting liking things on Faceache without me realising It would do this for a little while and eventually it would get so bad it made the laptop unusable, eventually it would stop being possessed and be useable again. It was all very odd and drove me to distraction! I couldn't find a fix, it wasn't the mouse or the drivers there just seemed no answer to the problem at all and I wasn't the only one experiencing this madness either. The touchpad would also behave in the same way when I gave up the mouse in frustration one evening so it wasn't mouse specific. After months of this and after trying several suggestions found on google and from a computer expert I have given in, one of my laptops is now running on Linux Mint. Will see how it goes.

Betty Boop wrote: Thu Jan 20, 2022 10:57 am I've used Microsoft for as long as I can remember but recently I've had issues. I prefer a mouse on a laptop to a touchpad and I found the mouse started behaving with a whole life of its own. It was highlighting anything and everything it could and switching my tabs without me actually asking it to. It got embarrassing when it starting liking things on Faceache without me realising It would do this for a little while and eventually it would get so bad it made the laptop unusable, eventually it would stop being possessed and be useable again. It was all very odd and drove me to distraction! I couldn't find a fix, it wasn't the mouse or the drivers there just seemed no answer to the problem at all and I wasn't the only one experiencing this madness either. The touchpad would also behave in the same way when I gave up the mouse in frustration one evening so it wasn't mouse specific. After months of this and after trying several suggestions found on google and from a computer expert I have given in, one of my laptops is now running on Linux Mint. Will see how it goes.

I have an ASUS laptop that was acting in a similar fashion.
It turned out that the touchpad is always active since I upgraded it frim Win 7 to Win 10.
So a casual brush of the touchpad by my thumb while I was typing could cause any number of interesting things to happen.
It has taken me a while to train to keep my thumbs away from the touchpad.

Betty Boop wrote: Sat Jan 22, 2022 9:18 am

LarsMac wrote: Sat Jan 22, 2022 9:15 am

Betty Boop wrote: Thu Jan 20, 2022 10:57 am I've used Microsoft for as long as I can remember but recently I've had issues. I prefer a mouse on a laptop to a touchpad and I found the mouse started behaving with a whole life of its own. It was highlighting anything and everything it could and switching my tabs without me actually asking it to. It got embarrassing when it starting liking things on Faceache without me realising It would do this for a little while and eventually it would get so bad it made the laptop unusable, eventually it would stop being possessed and be useable again. It was all very odd and drove me to distraction! I couldn't find a fix, it wasn't the mouse or the drivers there just seemed no answer to the problem at all and I wasn't the only one experiencing this madness either. The touchpad would also behave in the same way when I gave up the mouse in frustration one evening so it wasn't mouse specific. After months of this and after trying several suggestions found on google and from a computer expert I have given in, one of my laptops is now running on Linux Mint. Will see how it goes.

I have an ASUS laptop that was acting in a similar fashion.
It turned out that the touchpad is always active since I upgraded it frim Win 7 to Win 10.
So a casual brush of the touchpad by my thumb while I was typing could cause any number of interesting things to happen.
It has taken me a while to train to keep my thumbs away from the touchpad.

No, it wasn't that this time. Yes, I have had that issue in the past and have always looked for a touchpad that is central so that when I am touch typing my thumbs aren't catching it. I more recently started just turning the touchpad off, although that said the highlighting was happening with the touchpad too when I removed the mouse and re-activated the touchpad.
I'm using a laptop with microsoft installed at the moment, I'm hoping that last night the little bit of random stuff that happened was a one off and not it all starting up again

No different to last time, looking back. Rock solid combination all round, that is.