Microsoft support for Window 10 ended on October 14, except for those who are willing to jump through some additional hoops, which I am not. I found relatively cheap Windows 11 systems to replace the Windows 10 boxes my wife and oldest son had been using. My own two Windows 10 systems also had Ubuntu and Debian Linux installed, so I deleted Windows 10 from them. They are perfectly useable with Linux. I am writing this on one of them now.
Following up on Replacing an old HP computer for $35: Debian 13 is now out, so I deleted the Debian 12 installation on that machine and replaced it with a fresh installation of the new version. The first thing I did was download debian-13.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso and put it on a USB stick with Rufus. Installing from this failed, with a message that some obscure file was corrupt. I don’t know if this was a file on the iso or one that had been downloaded in the installation process. A second attempt also failed.
My backup desktop system, an old HP SFF box, failed. It was running Windows 10, Ubuntu 24.04, and Debian 12. Somehow it stopped booting correctly. GRUB would not show all the systems. My boot repair drive failed to fix it. I replaced the SATA SDD drive, but that did not help. So I replaced it with another SFF desktop for a cost of $35.
I installed Ubuntu 24.04 on my Dell desktop. This went well, but after installation I noticed the same problem with Thunderbird that I had seen on an Ubuntu upgrade on an old HP desktop. When I wrote before about not seeing the issue on a fresh installation it probably meant my testing was inadequate. This is a big problem: I am not willing to give up my multi-level email folders.
I found a Dell Inspiron 3670 at Repowered. 16 GB DDR4 RAM, a 512 GB NVMe SSD, Windows 11 Pro for about $300. I need to get some experience with Windows 11, so I bought it. It is working out quite well for me.
The foundational tenet of “the Cult of Mac” is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:
From The antitrust case against Apple. See also:
I recently read Reviving the Glory Days: NsCDE Desktop for UNIX Buffs. NsCDE is based on the old FVWM window manager. When I was a lot younger I got a few chances to look at classic Unix workstations and I thought they looked really cool, but I never has a chance to try one. So I decided to indulge my curiosity.
I have worked some more on the HP Pavilion g6 Notebook I bought for $30 at a local garage sale. I did get the additional RAM I mentioned there. It seemed easy enough to slide into place, but I have not yet been able to get the machine to recognize it. So for now I am stuck with just 4GB. Not long ago that was considered plenty, and I was very happy with a 4GB system, but now “they” are saying you should have at least 16GB on a PC. So now I am looking at lightweight Linux systems to see if I can get some more life out of this system.
Continue reading
I recently watched Red Hat: why I’m going all in on community-driven Linux distros. from Veronica Explains, after which I decided to try to seriously use Debian 12 rather than Ubuntu in my daily computer work. This is working reasonably well. I have run into a variety of differences, but so far I have overcome them. A lot of these have to do with Gnome. I have learned a lot about Gnome in the last few days, chiefly how little I actually know about it.
Continue reading
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.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 