chaslinux.com – Anyone can learn Linux

January 23, 2025

Lessons learned encoding media under Linux

Hardware and Linux Distribution Differences This post covers a bunch of areas of media decoding and encoding that I’ve discovered over a number of years using Debian-based distributions like Xubuntu, and Linux Mint. Primarily I’ll cover some of the differences between Xubuntu and Linux Mint, how various hardware (CPUs and graphics cards) encode video, and some of the “gotchas” when it comes to different methods as they apply to Handbrake…

Jazz Jackrabbit menu screen as seen using OpenJazz and the Holiday shareware ROM

January 17, 2025

How to play Jazz Jackrabbit on Linux

Jazz Jackrabbit – an introduction Back in 1994 the World Wide Web (WWW) was just starting to catch on, mostly via a dial-up connection. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were starting to be on the way out, but at the time I was running a bulletin board for a local computer club. One of the attractions of bulletin board systems (besides online games/aka doors, message boards, and chatting) were the extensive…

January 16, 2025

One of the reasons why command-line skills are important – Troubleshooting…

Introduction Recently I was checking out Youtube videos about a Linux-related program, and I came across a comment in one of the videos that I’ve seen before (I’m paraphrasing this to not identify the video or commenter): “Those commands don’t work. In Windows, you don’t have to write a book to install something. I’m going back to Windows.” – random comment on a Linux video There are three obvious things…

December 26, 2024

Errors vanished from TrueNAS server

It was inevitable… Not long after setting up our TrueNAS server I logged into the web interface and noticed that one of the drives showed an error. I almost expected this as one of my 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drives is a slightly different model, and was older than the rest. When I looked up the warranty, it had apparently expired in 2020 (leaving me wondering when I bought the drive…

Llama 3.2 large model running via Ollama under Xubuntu 24.04.1 Linux

November 19, 2024

Artificial Intelligence under Linux

Initial look at artificial intelligence We might be a bit late to the game, but I’ve started looking at what we need at the Computer Recycling Project to run artificial intelligence models locally (on the machine, versus on the server) under Linux. The Ollama project makes it very easy to install a number of artificial intelligence models under Linux. Once ollama is installed you can download a model by typing…

November 13, 2024

[Fix] Suspend doesn’t work on Linux Mint XFCE Lenovo Yoga S1

Suspend doesn’t work on some Linux distributions – Lenovo Yoga S1 Our experience with Linux Mint XFCE has been pretty good so far at The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project, but we recently ran into an issue where a couple of Lenovo Yoga S1 laptops refused to suspend when the suspend button was clicked. Now before someone goes on about Linux, I want to point out a couple of things:…

Linux Mint XFCE with Firefox opened to Google Photos and a thunar file manager session open

November 7, 2024

Linux Mint XFCE – Pretty Fantastic

The journey to Linux Mint XFCE The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project has been using Xubuntu Linux since late 2009. Xubuntu Linux is far from the flashiest, or most elegant Linux distribution (collection of software), but it tended to work really well on the older hardware we were refurbishing. When Xubuntu 20.04 (2020) was released there were enough changes that we started looking at the possibility we might want to…

September 27, 2024

Our TrueNAS

It Lives! It dies? Our new TrueNAS server is up, and all the hardware is working, but not without some hiccups on the way. After taking a lot longer to build than expect, I was so happy the other evening when I posted about the successful Power On Self Test (POST), and the new RAM (32GB) being properly detected. Exhausted at the end of the day I left the drives…

Fractal Define R5 with 4 x 8TB Seagate Ironwolf hard drives

September 25, 2024

Building the NAS (Hardware hiccups)

Most of the hardware is assembled A couple of days ago I mentioned that I was planning on building our first regular NAS after work: https://chaslinux.com/2024/09/23/more-progress-on-the-truenas-build/. The past few weeks have been extremely busy, so I knew last night would probably be the only time I would get this week to work on the NAS. I’m glad I started building the NAS last night as it took much longer than…

September 23, 2024

More progress on the (True)NAS Build

Planning steps are done It was way back on June 1st, 2024 when I started posting about my plan to migrate our KODI media centre PC to a NAS: Dell PowerEdge T110 II Network Attached Storage (NAS) build That “backup” PC, a mini-TrueNAS server consisting of 4 x 3TB drives in a RAID Z1 array got built and was just barely enough to backup the 8TB drive in our KODI…