NMGLUGers, I plan on making the meeting this week and will bring along the current project: A 2012 laptop, AMD G-T56N cpu, 4 GB ram, 160 GB hdd, OS is Linux Mint 21.3 (virginia) which is the current latest version of this OS. So, eleven years old and working. Barriers to this were the bios password, a 2 GB ssd, yup that's not a typo. A mismatched power cord and years or months of idle storage were also remedied. It is a fully functioning, if slow, unit. No, I would not add an updated ssd, the MoB and cpu set the speed limit. Still, it is functioning, and 64 bit. For all this it provided a few hours of amusement and it works. What are you working on? Anybody still into rescuing not so old machines from their proprietary shackles? Thank you, Ted P
Yeah, Hi Ted (et al), I've sort of had my interests in Linux on the back burner for the last three or four years as my life circumstances have gone through some pretty radical changes since moving from Albuquerque to Taos. Haven't found much time or energy to study and fiddle with computers of late. I don't have any real career or professional motivations toward computers anymore as I'm pretty well totally retired now. So I've fallen into a bit of a comfortable but somewhat disengaged computer rut. But I've always been a packrat, and often hanker to tinker, so I still have every laptop I've ever owned. Also, I usually hate to buy anything new unless I can convince myself that there's a justifiable need or some demonstrable economy to be achieved over the long haul. All of which is to say that at this point my "new" computers are probably more than five years old and my "old" computers are maybe twelve? The comfortable rut is Debian with either Xfce or KDE Plasma desktop environments on everything, and either a 64GB or 128GB thumb drive or 128GB SD card "Live USB" backup loaded with MX-21.3 Xfce or Fluxbox for each. I do love to have a reliable fallback system directly at hand in case something goes bad. For a long time I felt a strong but rather pointless aesthetic attraction Antix, but these days MX with the Fluxbox desktop seems to scratch the same itch in a much more gratifying and less frustrating manner. It's a real thing of beauty. I haven't run Windows on even a virtual machine for more than three years now. Just felt the urge to blather a little. The flame is not very bright, but it still burns... Tom On 4/23/24 14:06, Ted Pomeroy wrote:
... What are you working on? Anybody still into rescuing not so old machines from their proprietary shackles? Thank you, Ted P
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Hi I am still on a quest to get to a point to become a solely linux user but because of work and other things not quite there yet as for the personal side.' If I can make use of wine for maybe a couple of programs that are just not available in linux I'll be happy. As it is wine has not worked for me. out of the box none of these programs are working with wine. I am lately using zorin and sofar like it a lot. i do prefer the more cutting edge distros since they allow me to run a lot of the stuff I need. I haven't spend a lot of time with wine to troubleshoot but frustrating that i have to spend all this time to make something work with wine. for email my other big issue with linux, blue mail sofar the best but in my opinion still could use some basic improvements but it works. mailspring was a great candidate but they totally drop the ball with o365 support and it's been a while. did I mention these are all on older desktops ? 🙂 still working well, Ted ________________________________ From: nmglug <nmglug-bounces@lists.nmglug.org> on behalf of Tom Ashcraft <trailerdog234@comcast.net> Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2024 2:59 PM To: nmglug@lists.nmglug.org <nmglug@lists.nmglug.org> Subject: Re: [nmglug] Mtg this week, Apr. 25th, 1730, Yeah, Hi Ted (et al), I've sort of had my interests in Linux on the back burner for the last three or four years as my life circumstances have gone through some pretty radical changes since moving from Albuquerque to Taos. Haven't found much time or energy to study and fiddle with computers of late. I don't have any real career or professional motivations toward computers anymore as I'm pretty well totally retired now. So I've fallen into a bit of a comfortable but somewhat disengaged computer rut. But I've always been a packrat, and often hanker to tinker, so I still have every laptop I've ever owned. Also, I usually hate to buy anything new unless I can convince myself that there's a justifiable need or some demonstrable economy to be achieved over the long haul. All of which is to say that at this point my "new" computers are probably more than five years old and my "old" computers are maybe twelve? The comfortable rut is Debian with either Xfce or KDE Plasma desktop environments on everything, and either a 64GB or 128GB thumb drive or 128GB SD card "Live USB" backup loaded with MX-21.3 Xfce or Fluxbox for each. I do love to have a reliable fallback system directly at hand in case something goes bad. For a long time I felt a strong but rather pointless aesthetic attraction Antix, but these days MX with the Fluxbox desktop seems to scratch the same itch in a much more gratifying and less frustrating manner. It's a real thing of beauty. I haven't run Windows on even a virtual machine for more than three years now. Just felt the urge to blather a little. The flame is not very bright, but it still burns... Tom On 4/23/24 14:06, Ted Pomeroy wrote: ... What are you working on? Anybody still into rescuing not so old machines from their proprietary shackles? Thank you, Ted P _______________________________________________ nmglug mailing list nmglug@lists.nmglug.org<mailto:nmglug@lists.nmglug.org> http://lists.nmglug.org/listinfo.cgi/nmglug-nmglug.org
I'll try to make it tomorrow night. My latest project: I've been chatting with some people on mastodon about barn-door trackers (a cheap low-tech way to track the sky with a telescope or camera) and that inspired me to dig mine out of the garage and see if I could fix the problems that plagued it (a slipping motor). I spent some time today getting my rusty arduino development environment working again. Two other little things I've been working on: first, a little python script that watches idle time and tells me to take breaks from the computer every half-hour. Some podcast, maybe Freakonomics?, recently challenged people to do that, and the people who took breaks reported they felt a lot better and more energized throughout the day. I have a tendency when I'm working on something to get way too wrapped up in it and stay at the computer longer than is healthy for me. Second, a guitar flash card program. I've been taking beginner guitar lessons online, and this program quizzes me on the chords and helps me learn. It's really cool what you can do just with the sox command line. For instance, here's a 3-note guitar chord with the command-line: play -nq -t alsa synth pl D3 pl A3 pl D4 pl F#4 delay 0 0.06 0.12 0.18 remix - fade 0 1.75 .1 norm -1 vol 0.5 Ted Reichelt writes:
I am still on a quest to get to a point to become a solely linux user but because of work and other things not quite there yet as for the personal side.' If I can make use of wine for maybe a couple of programs that are just not available in linux I'll be happy. As it is wine has not worked for me. out of the box none of these programs are working with wine.
I haven't had much luck with wine. There's really only one thing I care about that needs Windows: Adobe Digital Editions (for e-borrowing library books or buying e-books). Every now and then I manage to get it working in wine, and it works for a few weeks then stops working and I can never find a solution besides removing every trace of wine and starting over, possibly on a new Linux machine. I even tried buying Crossover, with the same result: ADE worked in Crossover for a few months, then stopped working, and Codeweavers doesn't support that app so there's no recourse. I don't know what it is about wine that makes things stop working after a while. So instead I keep a Windows VM (using the Windows 10 that came with my current laptop) that runs in QEMU off an external disk, which I fire up once or twice a month. ...Akkana
NMGLUGers, thank you al for the responses, I want to WINE a little. I am using wine on an irregular basis to print greeting cards and some other tacky graphics projects from a W-8 era set of CDs called "Print Artist." The graphics are not current, they weren't then, but I find them usable. My first trial with wine did not work. I set up directories and followed instructions. I eventually found a helper unit, but I do not have that handy in my human memory. Current wine associated packages are: wine, wine32:i386, wine32-preloader:i386 and libwine:i386. these are necessary due to the age (32-bit) of the program I run under wine. The real key item is called "playonlinux" which is a front end for wine. That 'helper' package got the kinks ironed out and I have a consistent experience with my one ancient program. One can actually do similar printing of cards and such in LibreOffice, but I kept the disks and have the graphics library on hand with a kind of index. So, take a look at playonlinux, and note that you may be needing a 32-bit environment for legacy programs. My OS is Debian 12, 64-bit. I don't recommend units as old as 12 years, but this one in hand had few scars and a 64-bit processor. It is too hot and slow to use too much, but may be good to pass on to someone in need. So bring an old laptop, if it is 64-bit and see what can be done; or a 5 year old, multi-core 64-bit unit that can pack in more ram - that is usually a good place to start. But one must be able to add ram, a newer disk or ssd. Some of the "thin" books are too tricky or soldered into a fixed configuration. Hope to see you on Thursday. Thank you, Ted P On Wed, Apr 24, 2024 at 4:19 PM Akkana Peck <akkana@shallowsky.com> wrote:
I'll try to make it tomorrow night. My latest project: I've been chatting with some people on mastodon about barn-door trackers (a cheap low-tech way to track the sky with a telescope or camera) and that inspired me to dig mine out of the garage and see if I could fix the problems that plagued it (a slipping motor). I spent some time today getting my rusty arduino development environment working again.
Two other little things I've been working on: first, a little python script that watches idle time and tells me to take breaks from the computer every half-hour. Some podcast, maybe Freakonomics?, recently challenged people to do that, and the people who took breaks reported they felt a lot better and more energized throughout the day. I have a tendency when I'm working on something to get way too wrapped up in it and stay at the computer longer than is healthy for me.
Second, a guitar flash card program. I've been taking beginner guitar lessons online, and this program quizzes me on the chords and helps me learn. It's really cool what you can do just with the sox command line. For instance, here's a 3-note guitar chord with the command-line: play -nq -t alsa synth pl D3 pl A3 pl D4 pl F#4 delay 0 0.06 0.12 0.18 remix - fade 0 1.75 .1 norm -1 vol 0.5
Ted Reichelt writes:
I am still on a quest to get to a point to become a solely linux user but because of work and other things not quite there yet as for the personal side.' If I can make use of wine for maybe a couple of programs that are just not available in linux I'll be happy. As it is wine has not worked for me. out of the box none of these programs are working with wine.
I haven't had much luck with wine. There's really only one thing I care about that needs Windows: Adobe Digital Editions (for e-borrowing library books or buying e-books). Every now and then I manage to get it working in wine, and it works for a few weeks then stops working and I can never find a solution besides removing every trace of wine and starting over, possibly on a new Linux machine. I even tried buying Crossover, with the same result: ADE worked in Crossover for a few months, then stopped working, and Codeweavers doesn't support that app so there's no recourse. I don't know what it is about wine that makes things stop working after a while.
So instead I keep a Windows VM (using the Windows 10 that came with my current laptop) that runs in QEMU off an external disk, which I fire up once or twice a month.
...Akkana _______________________________________________ nmglug mailing list nmglug@lists.nmglug.org http://lists.nmglug.org/listinfo.cgi/nmglug-nmglug.org
Ted Pomeroy writes:
Current wine associated packages are: wine, wine32:i386, wine32-preloader:i386 and libwine:i386. these are necessary due to the age (32-bit) of the program I run under wine. The real key item is called "playonlinux" which is a front end for wine. That 'helper' package got the kinks ironed out and I have a consistent experience with my one ancient program.
Neat. I've never tried "playonlinux" and perhaps I should. And on tomorrow night -- oops, is that an in-person meeting? I was thinking it was jitsi, and I have another meeting right afterward so I can't be in Santa Fe tomorrow night. Darn. Maybe some day I'll make it to an in-person meeting. Have fun, all! ...Akkana
Hi Ted, With regard to 'wine' I offer the following in the spirit of "In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king". Probably you're unaware of and missing one or more, perhaps several, 'dependencies' and helper programs and maybe also you need packages to support both 64-bit and i386 architectures. Depends on both the particular applications you want to run and your particular flavor of Linux. Try the wikis. If there is not a good one for your distribution, or maybe even if there is, have a good look at https://wiki.debian.org/Wine#Optional_Wine_dependencies and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wine . Be prepared to suffer a little brain damage. If you're not sure about anything don't be afraid to try things out. You're not likely to do any serious harm to your system. If things don't work or go haywire, remove the new stuff you installed and delete the entire .wine directory before you start over. As you may have gathered, I'm a big fan of MX Linux 'Live USB's. That is, you have a complete separate Linux operating system on a thumb drive or SD card. You can experiment and screw up all you want without ever placing anything on your computer's hard drive. Moreover, MX has it's own easy-to-use, tested-and-curated proprietary point-and-click GUI package management system, 'MX Package Installer', that lists 'wine' among its offerings. There's a high probability that it will be adequately configured to run whatever you install under it just fine, "right out of the box". 'MX Package Installer' also offers 'Virtual Box' under which you may install 'Windows' and then install the programs you need under that in lieu of using 'wine'. You might find that's an easier path to follow on your way to making a complete transition to Linux. As for Linux email packages, in my experience, 'Thunderbird' does everything you can imagine and works just fine. There's also the unofficial free desktop client for encrypted Proton Mail, i.e. a non-webmail version, called 'Electron Mail' that's very easy to use. That one is a bit confusing to install when you're still new to Linux (mostly because you must download it from github.) But there again, however, an MX Linux 'Live USB' might come in handy as a safe, low-cost and relatively painless sandbox to practice in. For what it's worth, Tom On 4/24/24 15:21, Ted Reichelt wrote:
Hi I am still on a quest to get to a point to become a solely linux user but because of work and other things not quite there yet as for the personal side.' If I can make use of wine for maybe a couple of programs that are just not available in linux I'll be happy. As it is wine has not worked for me. out of the box none of these programs are working with wine. I am lately using zorin and sofar like it a lot. i do prefer the more cutting edge distros since they allow me to run a lot of the stuff I need. I haven't spend a lot of time with wine to troubleshoot but frustrating that i have to spend all this time to make something work with wine.
for email my other big issue with linux, blue mail sofar the best but in my opinion still could use some basic improvements but it works. mailspring was a great candidate but they totally drop the ball with o365 support and it's been a while. did I mention these are all on older desktops ? 🙂 still working well,
Ted ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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participants (4)
-
Akkana Peck -
Ted Pomeroy -
Ted Reichelt -
Tom Ashcraft