Category Archives: computers

Installing Debian 12 on another laptop

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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 This may be because Windows 7 is obsolete and no longer supported.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

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I installed Debian 12 on a laptop. This was the same ThinkPad X130e on which I had installed Debian 11 nearly two years ago, but subsequently deleted. Installing Debian 12 was a lot easier. I had no trouble with the wifi. At one point the installation gave me an error during the actual software installation phase, but it offered the option to retry, which I took and then everything worked fine. Afterwards I had no trouble with my configuration process.

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More 21st Century DOS

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It is the third decade of the 21st 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.

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Computer Boot Repair

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I have used Boot-Repair-Disk a lot. It has saved my computer systems many times, since I do a lot of experimenting on them. The title program, boot-repair, can often fix the boot procedure on Linux systems if that has been messed up. This happens to me more than it should since my computers typically can boot Windows and one or more flavors of Linux. Altering one OS sometimes causes one of the others to be unbootable.

Other programs on the disk are also useful. For example, OS-Uninstaller does exactly what the name suggests. GParted lets you add, move, delete, and resize disk partitions, which I often need to do in preparation for adding a new OS (You need to be careful with this, especially for bootable partitions). The whole disk is actually a standalone Linux system, so with its Linux terminal you can access and work with any of the drives on your system.

WordTsar

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I read WordTsar Is Reviving the ’80s WordPerfect Writing Experience with considerable interest, but following it up with a look at WordTsar and WordTsar: Wordstar for the 21st Century quickly showed that the first author was not present during the word processor wars of the 1980s. WordStar lost to WordPerfect in that conflict, but still has some diehard fans, the most famous being George R.R. Martin, who still uses it on a DOS machiue. I have been able to run WordStar on FreeDOS, with FreeDOS running on a virtual machine. This was WordStar 4.0, which is now “abandonware,” i.e. free, but without any official support.

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More about the new(er) ThinkPad

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The 256GB drive on Another ThinkPad seemed a little small, so I replaced with 1 TB SSD. As in previous moves, I used Macrium under Windows to copy the contents of the existing drive to the new one, then rebooted into Linux and used gparted to add a new NTFS partition and a new ext4 partition on the larger drive. Following Lenovo ThinkPad X240 – Hard Disk Drive Replacement I physically removed the old SSD and installed the new one. Afterwards I rebooted into Windows and the new NTFS partition showed up as the D drive as planned.

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