It was time to play with the newest Mageia 8. I installed Mageia 8 with the Xfce desktop on an ancient Dell Optiplex and it runs marvelously. Though the “web” does not really run that nice anymore on hardware from 2007. 
Even though it is a 64 bit capable machine it only has 2 GB of RAM and it really runs nicer with the 32 bit version. It is just lighter and does not use swap that fast. Mageia still supports 32 bit just like Debian but the default Xfce desktop in Mageia is a tad nicer than Debian’s stock looks and Mageia comes with 4.16 out of the box! So the crown goes to Mageia and it revived this old piece of hardware.
1 Like
Does the Optiplex have an SSD in it? Makes all the difference in speeding up old machines 
1 Like
No. It is not really in use anymore. It has an old HDD with only 80 GB of space but I forgot to add that this Optiplex is a single core, that being the biggest drawback. Otherwise you can do with it what you want. 2 GB of RAM is still usable. Writing, listening and even watching movies as long it is not streaming heavy web content is just fine.
My Linux week this last week has been mostly podcast related, myself and @zaivala recorded our 7th episode of Distrohoppers Digest last Wednesday, and on Sunday we joined our co-hosts and recorded episode 321 of mintCast.
I haven’t listened yet, but I just added these to my Antennapod app. Always looking for new Linux podcasts!
2 Likes
I would say better late than never… we recorded Episode 020 of Distrohoppers’ Digest this past Wednesday and Episode 356 of mintCast yesterday… We are having a blast, with new hosts added to both shows.
Didn’t know this would be in a stream… it was a response to someone responding to Tony Hughes back in November 2019…
I’ve been busy. Have 8 distros installed on my System76 Kudu 3 laptop, two on my Dell Insprion 7353, and 4 on my HP Z400, plus I’m getting a Z800 prepared as my wife’s new machine (upgrade from a Lenovo ThinkPad T430 with a laptop to follow in a year or two). I’ve installed Robolinux and Mageia 8 (XFCE on one machine, Plasma on another), and attempted but failed to install Emmabuntus.
2 Likes
This week I used an old Android smartphone as a crude webcam for my laptop, displaying its video on my Linux laptop through a scrcpy, which I then did a window capture on, in OBS. This old smartphone could get a much better focus than a mediocre webcam I had, for focusing decently on the screen of yet another (very Linux-incompatible) gadget (albeit, at a low refresh rate), which I was making a little video tutorial about.
3 Likes
Ah, neat. I’ll have to look into this. I’ve been using an Android app over ADB to connect to my PC as a webcam so far. The PC side client is open source but the Android app is not.
2 Likes
I finally got my work laptop.
It was ordered in October.
So installed arch on it with lvm on luks.
2 Likes
Happy that someone fixed the XFCE4-weather-plugin in Ubuntu Studio 20.04. The api for the weather data changed on March 1 and broke the widget. It was fixed this week. Whoever you are, coding stranger, I salute you!
2 Likes
I deployed a raspberri pi to run syncthing. Works amazingly well.
2 Likes
The poor weather plugin. Unfortunately it gets broken regularly.
I needed to reinstall my OS because forced restart during update broke something.
Then for some reason my new GRUB wouldn’t work. Tried to reinstall it few time. Same problem. Only creating new partition table fixed the problem. It was the disk with the Windows partition on it, so I’m no longer able to dual boot, but I haven’t used Windows on that machine in years, so I’ll be fine.
Did your Windows update nuke Grub?
If so, Boot Repair Disk can bring the dual-boot capabilities back: boot-repair-disk / Home / Home
Follow the instructions and it will auto-detect all operating systems. Excellent project and has saved me a lot of manual work on dual-boot Windows machines!
I got alacritty installed with a simple config that lets me run tmux as my shell, its super legit so far.
1 Like
No, IT was issue with my Linux instalatorom.
A new Thinkpad is coming to the house and I need a distro that I can try out on it. It will get exciting. There is so much great choice out there right now.
Fedora, Manjaro, Mageia or Kubuntu? I am still not sure.
1 Like
That’s a fantastic idea.
Exciting? There’s no slackware, gentoo or LFS on that list.
Installed qemu/kvm on my main system and have been testing out some other distros. I really want to learn NixOS, but the setup process is very alien to me.
The documentation is very descriptive in an abstract sort of way, but it lacks concrete examples. Say I want to set up a Sway/Wayland system. The manual tells you how to setup Wayland and how to set up Sway and that’s it. Nothing about support applications, management tools, or any of the rest of it. If you don’t have a checklist of all of the components that make up a system, you are left with a system that needs a good dose of nuke/repave. Hell, I couldn’t get it to work on my laptop because the wireless wouldn’t set up correctly. When i asked about that, they said to plug in an Ethernet cable. Except that my laptop doesn’t have a functioning Ethernet port.
The declarative nature of the nix package manager would make sharing “recipes” amazingly simple and having a central library to keep these sorts of things seems like a mindbogglingly obvious thing to do. Yet, when I mention this on their forums, I am met with questions of “why anyone would ever want to do that” and “can’t you just search GitHub” and “nix is so easy, there’s no need”.
And then there’s the “search YouTube” crowd. I am too much of a cantankerous old fart to deal with video instructions. Dead tree editions please. Concise, well written ones. I am about ready to print out the NixOS Manual and keep it by my desk. Hopefully it is formatted for printing.
I nuked the VM six times already and I am getting ready for lucky number seven!
Not the greatest answer here but the best thing I ever did was farm out my Internet/VPN connectivity to a mini router that connects to my home wifi. For devices without LAN I use a 10/100 USB to LAN. It’s a beautiful feeling during installations let me tell you, must experience to appreciate.
From my minimal experience of toying with NixOS, i’m part of that YouTube crowd who thinks that’s the answer.