July 2018 - nmglug - lists.coactcloud.com

Note on some hardware and OS details,
by Ted Pomeroy 31 Jul '18

31 Jul '18

NMGLugers, We are scheduled for a meeting on the 2nd of August - this Thursday. I plan to be there at 5pm for our meeting to convene at about 5.30pm. I will bring a TOMU.IM - "Tom's Open Microcomputer Usb" for anybody to examine and try out. It is a complete computer, ie, processor and memory plus I/O system for hardware programming practice. Sam was good enough to pass this along to me at our last NMGLUG meeting. I can activate it and do one trick, but there is more on GitHub. I can also bring the remains of my Peppermint 8 OS experiment. I am not using it anymore, so the disks (32 bit) and one small hdd are here for the asking. I am having good luck with Debian in either 32 or 64 bit installs. It runds well, has a familiar GUI available and all of my favorite applications and the ones I needed to investigate the TOMU.IM. I may even switch over, though below I talk about the Xubuntu upgrade. Still, I like the Ubuntu family because I can give it to others and refer them to the copious information in clear and GUI format on the Internet. Oh yes, I am still using Xubuntu 16.04 at home, but will likely upgrade to 18.04 before the end of the year. I never rush ahead to upgrade a system till I am reasonably sure the upgrade tool is working well. Since the support overlaps for a full year, I like to see what others report about the process before taking it on. This also gives me time to weed out old files and do a complete backup of my personal files. My choice is to save files and accept that system and application settings and defaults will change. I may also have a laptop in need of assistance. The machine is taking care of the digital life of a friend and though the friend reports good health personally, there are some questions about the machine. I look forward to speaking to the machine itself to get its side of the story. I hope to see some of you there, at the New Baking Co., this Thursday. Thank you, Ted P.

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Tomu im
by Ted Pomeroy 20 Jul '18

20 Jul '18

NMGLUGERS, I had some luck w/ Tomu; got the cursor trick to work. The midi loads, but no audible. Lights & terminal confirm the loading success. I'll need help compiling from source so I can add a sound. See you at next meeting. Thanks, Ted P.

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Good bye to the Toshiba,
by Ted Pomeroy 10 Jul '18

10 Jul '18

NMGLugers, Well, I am dismantling the 2004 Toshiba Satellite and using a few of the parts, but it was not up to current use even with the Peppermint OS. The heat issue and occasional keyboard failures as well as memory and speed limitations made further efforts Sisyphean. So, on to further work with newer and older machines. Several friends are using Gnu/Linux and getting browsing and e-mail done and happy enough with these tasks. I did discover Quod Libet, a music player with built-in web-stream browser. This brings me back to the practice of listening to streaming audio and the many choices out there and also the fun of tuning in to New South Wales or a Paris suburb for radio chatter. this is something like the fun of short wave radio in shrinking the world and bringing distant lands to me here in the USA. By the way event the old Toshiba, 32-bit and less than 1GB of memory was a perfectly good player. It was too bulky to keep for that purpose, but it did work well. Nice enough speakers on it, too. I will bring the hard drive with Peppermint 8, 32-bit and a couple of disks to our meeting on the 19th so anybody who wants to try it at home can do so. In the meantime I have a slightly newer laptop running Debian 9/Stretch and doing much better. A whopping 2GB ram and better processor making this one worthwhile. See you at the 'GLUG, Ted P.

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Peppermint OS progress of sorts
by Ted Pomeroy 04 Jul '18

04 Jul '18

NMGLugers, I did convert to Debian Stretch on this rather older laptop. It runs well enough and avoided some of the builtin difficulties of the Peppermint OS. But I found an old hdd, so now have installed Peppermint OS 8 again and worked to iron out some of the bugs and settings not to my liking. Browser still an issue with 70-80% of cpu consumed. Elinks, non-gui browser much better and quicker. Oddly, dvd and video play as well as one would expect on older processor. For those interested I will try to remember to bring laptop and both hdd's to the meeting on July 5th. Also a Peppermint OS Live/Install disk to pass along. The developers figured to save hdd space by relying on web applications and ICE-SSB, their use of browser to "select site browse" locking the session to one site with their app. I don't see the logic of that for older processors. It makes this unit crawl and stall. Interesting parallel with educational test sites that lock the browser so you cannot get the answer from Wikipedia. Thank you, Ted P.

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