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: ollama pull <model name> So if you wanted to pull Llama 3.2 you would type: ...

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: ...

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 disconnected and the video card out. ...

Most of the hardware is assembled 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 anticipated. I finally finished the build at 10pm last night (and it’s still not quite complete). Fig 1. I used an Intel Core i3-7100 CPU for lower power consumption ...

Past Isopropyl is a great way to clean up a lot of plastic, but I found that while it’s helpful for removing grime, caked on stickers (Goo Gone), and other crud, it doesn’t always leave a nice finish. A few years back a volunteer at the Computer Recycling Project mentioned interning at a small computer store where they used Mr. Clean Magic Erasers to clean-up the top of ThinkPads. True to what he said, Mr. Clean Magic Erasers do seem to be a pretty good job on the top of ThinkPads. ...

Moving more to a low-power solution Several months back I replaced the motherboard in the KODI media centre PC that sits in our living room. For many years our media centre has been rocking a Gigabyte motherboard with a second generation Core i7-2600 CPU. The Core i7-2600 came out in Q4 of 2010, making it almost 14 years old at the time I’m writing this. Still, it’s not a bad CPU. For several years it was the system I was compressing our movie collection on as the A8-5600K 4 core APU that was in my workstation (at the time) had about half the performance of the i7-2600. But about six months ago I replaced the CPU and motherboard with a still old, but more modern solution, a MSI motherboard and an Intel Core i3-7100. ...

Note: This is an older post, reposted from the old web site. The project has since mostly switched to Linux Mint XFCE versions 21.3 (Virginia) and 22.1 (Xia). We still have Xubuntu 24.04.2 on our PXE server, but only install it on request. Our checklist has evolved and we’ve separated some steps into other checklists. See my github repositories for more info. Workstation class hardware at a deeply discounted price Every now and then the Computer Recycling Project at The Working Centre gets a really interesting piece of hardware donated. As a not-for-profit project, most of our equipment is aimed at people who are lower income. This generally translates into lower prices, even for some equipment others would list for a lot more. But that doesn’t mean the project just wipes the machines, installs Linux, and dumps the equipment on a sales shelf… often equipment requires a little, or a lot more work. ...

Note: While I tried using Linux Mint XFCE at home for awhile, I still found Xubuntu 24.04.2 works best for my use cases. There are some filesystem differences, and while I was adverse to snaps because of control issues, I’m finding they have some advantages over flatpak that I like. This is a repost from the old website. Xubuntu Linux version 24.04 is out Version 24.04 of Xubuntu Linux is now out! Xubuntu Linux has been a staple of the Computer Recycling Project @ The Working Centre since 2010. With the project switching mostly to Linux, it’s now more important than ever that we’re up to date on trends, and new developments that affect the project. This new version of Xubuntu has a number of nice improvements, but in my testing on several different machines I’ve run into a number of issues as well. ...

Migrating the KODI entertainment system On May 5th I mentioned that we’re Running out of space on our media center. In the comments of that post I followed up outlining a plan to buy another 8TB drive (for a total of 3 x 8TB drives) in order to do a RAID Z1 (for 16TB of space). But in order to do that I would need to reformat the drives, which means I also needed a plan to back up our media center data. I hinted at that solution in the comments too: 4 x 3TB drives in a RAID Z1 – which would give me 9TB of space (1 x 3TB is the spare), just enough to back up all the data. ...

Prince of Persia - a classic game for DOS When I first ran Prince of Persia on PC-DOS I remember thinking, “finally, a DOS game that rivals the fun I had on Commodore 64 games.” I was never very good at the game (and that continues today), but it’s a classic game. The original DOS version has a port for Linux which you can find on github here: (https://github.com/NagyD/SDLPoP?tab=readme-ov-file) The simplest method to install SDLPoP on Ubuntu/Xubuntu Linux If you’re on Xubuntu, or another Ubuntu-variant, there is a snap for the game (called sdlpop). To install the snap simply open a terminal and type: ...