My post Reinstalling Windows concluded with “Right now the laptop is just a Windows system. I suppose I will turn it into a dual-boot system by adding some flavor of Linux, probably Debian or Ubuntu.”
Dual Boot Failure
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Category Archives: computers
GPT-4 and similar systems
Elon Musk and other tech leaders call for pause on ‘dangerous race’ to make A.I. as advanced as humans. This has gotten a lot of attention. I found it from a link in TLDR.
The next link in that issue of the newsletter was about $335,000 Pay for ‘AI Whisperer’ Jobs Appears in Red-Hot Market
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Reinstalling Windows
I have an old (2011) Lenovo ThinkPad which I used for various tests that I have documented in these pages. At some point the Windows installation on it got corrupted. I tried reinstalling Windows from the recovery drive that I had created, but that failed. So I tried again with a USB drive that I had created using the Windows Media creation tool. I think I had created this on another system, but it worked just fine after I put in old Windows activation code for the system. It took a while to download all the Windows updates it needed, but I expected that.
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WordStar on FreeDOS
After last time I tried to ftp a file from my Linux host to FreeDOos. The connection worked, but I could not do the transfer. Somehow my C drive was full. 0 bytes free. So I looked again at How to Backup VM(s) on VirtualBox to see how to restore my snapshot. This worked, although I had to use the “clone” option to restore it under another name. After the restore dir c:\ showed plenty of free space. So I tried the ftp again. I ran cd c:\net\mtcp and then used ftp (the basic ancient ftp client) to get Ws4.zip from the host. I had used this program a lot back in the 1990s. This particular zip archive has the installation files for WordStar 4.0, which was released jn 1987 and which I used at home in the late 1980s and into the 90s.
Reinstalling FreeDOS
After Installing FreeDOS I tried to get networking up. This is did not work, and I completely trashed the system. Fortunately I had no data on it, so I lost nothing but time. So I reinstalled FreeDOS.
Installing FreeDOS
After mentioning DOS in Programming in Pascal I Downloaded FreeDOS 1.3. I had previously installed VirtualBox on Ubuntu 22.04 system using Synaptic Package Manager. For the installation I followed How to install FreeDOS on VirtualBox. It seems that I have a later version of VirtualBox than the video, so I did not see exactly what is in the video, but it was close enough. Per the video I used the VDI file type for the VM file. The installation was successful. A couple notes:
Programming in Pascal
Back in 2021 I wrote about APL, a computer language that I used early in my career. I have not seriously worked with it in the last 30 years, but it is still around.
Recently I read that Apple Just Released Code for Its 40-Year-Old “Lisa” Computer. This sentence caught my eye.
Much of the code is written in Pascal, an early programming language dating back to 1970, which was also used for some of the Mac’s early software.
Web Site Updates
- Under History/Early Modern History added Religion in the Scottish Highlands: 1600-1670. Like other pages under that heading, I wrote it for Clann Tartan‘s newsletter.
- Under Physics and Astronomy added two essays from my old web site:
- Under Miscellaneous, added a short page about UFOs and Extraterrestrials, to replace a dead link in Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Spoiler: I am a skeptic)
I fixed some dead links and made other minor corrections and updates, but did not make any drastic changes in the longer pieces, so their style reflects the times when they were written, years or even decades ago. However, I think they are still relevant to the subjects being discussed.
Windycon 2022
Firefox problem with Ubuntu
Following up on Jammy Jellyfish and System Updates I have been using Tyrone, my newer Ubuntu 22.04 system, for my daily work. In doing so I found an issue with Firefox: The “Save page as” “Print/Save to PDF” commands were not working on that machine under Ubuntu. I tried various Firefox troubleshooting options, but they did not help. The commands work fine with Firefox under Windows, and also with Firefox under Ubuntu 22.04 on another system (Donegal), which, however is an upgrade from 20.04 rather than a clean install. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 