Monthly Archives: August 2023

Installing Debian 12 on another laptop

I found an HP Pavilion g6 Notebook at a local garage sale. 64 bit system, 4 GB RAM, 600 GB hard disk, Windows 7 Home Premium edition. $30. It did boot into Windows 7, but I had mixed results when trying to access internet sites. This may be because Windows 7 is obsolete and no longer supported. Given that I decided to install Linux. The Debian 12 installer did not recognize the Windows installation. This may be because the hard disk is MBR and there were already 4 primary partitions. I might have been able to manually rearrange the partitions and add an extended partition, but that process would have been tricky and it simply was not worth the bother for Windows 7, so I let the Debian installer wipe the drive. With Debian there were no problems connecting to the internet and my configuration process worked perfectly. I really do not need this laptop, but the price was hard to resist and I enjoy computer necromancy.

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Windows hibernation file

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I discovered the C drive on my main Windows 10 system was almost full. I was not expecting this, since I use Linux most of the time. A lot of the trouble was a file in the root called hiberfil.sys, taking up 13GB. This is used if you want to hibernate your Windows system, and needs at least 40% of your RAM. I never use hibernation, I simply disabled it in an administrator command window with

powercfg -h off

and the file disappeared, as described in How to Disable Hibernation on Windows 10. I also moved a few large iso files to other locations and now have a comfortable amount of free space on the drive.

Installing Debian 12 on a laptop

More 21st Century DOS

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It is the third decade of the 21^st century and I found Running DOS on 64-bit Windows and Linux: Just because you can

I have experimented with FreeDOS. To conveniently have any networking you have to install it in a virtual machine. I have done this and it works. The problem is getting files in and out of the VM. This is doable, but it is certainly not convenient. I also installed it native on an old (2011) laptop, and then afterwards installed Xubuntu as a dual boot system. Xubuntu can see the FreeDOS disk partition, so I can copy files into it, then reboot into FreeDOS. There I can do whatever I had in mind, then reboot into Xubuntu to extract my output files. Even more hassle than using a VM. The only reason to do it is to experience DOS natively on (sort of) modern hardware. So I looked for other options.