Debian package over flatpak, but get it from Steam Moving from Xubuntu to Linux Mint XFCE was not as seemless as I’d hoped it would be. The last time I gave Linux Mint serious consideration was over 13 years ago when the Computer Recycling Project at The Working Centre was looking for a replacement for Ubuntu 10.04 (the next version would include the Unity desktop which wouldn’t run on a lot of our laptops at the time). ...
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 (software) and MakeMKV. ...
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 “shareware” software collections. If you weren’t going to a computer store to buy software, you were probably calling a bulletin board to download shareware or freeware software. Shareware software became known as “try before you buy” software. In most cases software was fully functional, but limited in some way (for example: a game where you could play the first few levels, but if you wanted more, you had to send the shareware author money for the rest of the software). ...
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): random comment on a Linux video: “Those commands don’t work. In Windows, you don’t have to write a book to install something. I’m going back to Windows.” The comment isn’t a question, but a statement: Linux is difficult, Windows is easier. ...
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 ...
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: 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: ...