MX Linux

MX Linux OS

These are the show notes about MX Linux that I did along side a podcast I have posted on the HPR (Hacker Public Radio) http://hackerpublicradio.org/calendar.php to be released on Friday 19^th May 2017. 

 

I’ve recently done shows on current Linux distro’s that are suitable for older hardware but with a modern look and feel and fully featured with the latest software available.

As you have probably gathered by now if you have listened to my other shows I am a big fan of older Lenovo Laptops. My main Lenovo is an X230i i3 with a 2.5G cpu and 8Gig of Ram and a 120Gig SSD,

Used Laptop Lenovo X61s

I currently record podcasts for Hacker Public Radio a daily community podcast. I recently did a show to be released in the RSS feed on 28th April Ep2280 about using the Lenovo X61s Laptop as a cheap second laptop or child's homework PC.

This is an edited version of the show notes from that episode.

Laptop was bought at auction and cost:

• Cost £36 including auction fees
• OS Free (any Linux will work well) finally used Linux lite
• Upgrade to 120Gig SSD £40 of ebay
• New 77wh Battery £16 
• Total outlay £92

New Toys - The story of my PC hardware journey in last 20 years

This Blog post comprises the Show Notes from a recent Hacker Public Radio Show I did, hpr2097 which I thought might interest my readers.

I was a latecomer to the world of personal computing having been at school in the Late 60’s and early 70’s when we hadn’t even got calculators, if you were lucky to be able to work out the intricacy of it you may have had use of a slide rule. Even after calculators started to be more widely used I had a lecturer at college while studying marine engineering, that was so good with his slide rule and mental calculation, he could, and would often work out equations far faster than those of us using a calculator.

Podcsting with Hacker Public Radio

This post is not strictly a Linux post, but as many of the contributors to the HPR community podcast site are from the Linux community I thought I would write about it here, and give them a bit of publicity.

HPR is a podcast community for those that want to have a go at podcasting but don't have the resources or skills to be able to go it alone from the start (although some of the regular contributors do also have their own independent podcasts). Setting up and managing a podcast site is quite a commitment if your not sure if you want to do more than the occasional show, and as it already has regular listeners you're sure to have someone listen to what you record.

HPR releases a new show every day Monday to Friday but these are all from shows made by the community members, and can be of any topic of interest to the contributors. As the title suggests many of the shows are technology related, but they don't have to be. Recent shows have covered, Repairing a Truck, brewing beer and recording a band. So for example if your into making Jam and want to share how to do this on a podcast you can.

So why have I suddenly decided to write about HPR. A few weeks ago one of the Volunteers who manage the Web site, posted a podcast explaining that there were only a few shows left in the queue for publication and if things didn't improve there was a danger that without any future content the site would have to close. This was the rallying cry I needed to get off my backside and record something for HPR.

It's not my first go at podcsting as I was a member of the fullcirclemagazine.org podcast for a few months and had also done a one off podcast with, Dan lynch (Linux outlaws), Pete Cannon (The Dick Turpin Road show) and Les Pounder (fullcircle podcast) called 'The Flying Handbag', which we recorded during Blackpool Barcamp a few years ago. But just me and a microphone talking about something I wanted to share with an audience was something I'd not done before.

The biggest fear I had was the perceived difficulty getting it in a format to broadcast but it's all taken care of by the community volunteers, all I had to do was record my show, (I chose to share about how I started to use Linux, as my first show) and then choose when I wanted it to be aired, follow the instructions on the upload page, and the rest is done for you.

So if you've ever been tempted to have a go at a podcast but didn't know how to go about it give it a go via the HPR podcast community

http://hackerpublicradio.org/index.php

Raspberry pi zero

Well a few weeks ago the Raspberry pi Foundation surprised the world by not only releasing a very small raspberry pi called the Pi Zero, but at a price point of £4 /$5 in the UK /USA. And if that wasn't enough they gave 10000 of them away free with the official magazine, MagPi. 

I was one of those lucky enough to get hold of a few copys of the magazine for me and my makerspace and thus the Pi Zero. As this board only has 1 micro USB port for peripherals and a Mini HDMI port for video out it was a couple of days before I could test it after getting hold of the converters. Once these arrived (cost about £3-4 for the pair on ebay) I was able to hook up the Zero to my lap dock. 

I loaded the Micro sd card with the latest Raspbian Jessie image, plugged it into the dock and away we went. The Pi Zero is factory clocked at 1GHz and has 512mb RAM so is on a par with the raspberry pi B+ and performance wise it compares well. 

However this tiny PC will for most folk not be used for day to day PC tasks it's size 65 x 30 x 5 mm, unpopulated 40 pin GPIO and 9 grams in weight, will mean that at this price most of these boards are destined to be used in embedded projects where the lack of connectivity will be a positive not a negative, as you are able to add only the nessesary conections for your project.

As it is fully compatible with the other Raspberry Pi's you can programme the card with a B+ or Pi2 and test out everything prior to putting the Zero in whatever project it will run. 

If your into programming and electronics and have been using previous Raspberry Pi Boards then at $5/£4 this is a must buy bit of kit, if you can get your hands on it. The original stock of both the magazine and those available through outlets such as  The Pi Hut, Pi Supply and Pimoroni all sold out within a day or so of release. With manufacturing beeing about 2000 units a day it will be a while before supply exceeds demand.

Linux Mint 17.1 and Old P4 Towers

Well thought I'd write about the New Linux Mint update and some old kit I've been getting ready to give away. A while ago a friend asked if I wanted all their old corporate P4 towers which they had recently replaced and I ended up with 12 HP Compaq P4 2 - 2.8gig towers with 512mb - 1Gig Ram and 40-80Gig HDD's.

I've put Mint 17.1 Mate on several of these PC's and after install they Run very well with 768mb DDR Ram and 1 with a P4(HT) 2.8Gig CPU and 512mb DDR2 Ram runs very smooth (I didn't have any compatible Ram to upgrade and not having realised it was a HT (Hyper Thread) CPU so had been surprised how quickly and smoothly the install went.

On the whole all these PC's are running well with such low resource and make capable homework PC's. They’re never going to be modern Gaming PC's or run the latest graphics effects that are available in Mint, but for word processing and office tasks they work well and surf the net without any problems. You can even watch U Tube videos at low resolution and thus it is possible to listen to streaming music and the like. 

The technology in theses PC's is now over 10 years old but with Linux Mint (other Linux Distributions are available) installed they are perfectly capable of having a few more years of use with a secure and modern OS on board. So if you have any old Computer hardware knocking around don't send it to the recycle centre install Linux and use it as a spare PC, set up a print/file server or donate it to a charity or just give it to a younger member of the family as a starter PC/homework Box.  

If you have any other ideas or stories of what you've done with an Older PC let me know via the comments.

Windows Live and missing .dll files

Windows is not normally a topic I cover here on this blog but I have a number of friends and family members that I offer PC support to. Today one of those friends from my church contacted me as she had a problem with her laptop that I recently installed Windows 7 onto for her.

The laptop was having problems with booting, sometimes it would and at others not but she was getting scary messages about something not being right with the PC when it did boot. My first inclination was possibly the HDD was on the way out.

Anyway I went round and found out the issue was with the DVD drive as a disc had been left in it for several months and it was set as the first boot device. Once this was removed the PC booted OK but to be on the safe side I ran a disc check. after completion of this no HDD errors and PC boots OK but when trying to access windows live mail it would not start and was giving an error message that the WLDCore.dll file was missing and windows live mail would need to be reinstalled to rectify the issue.

Problem being I couldn't access the software to back up contacts and email and was not sure if a reinstall would cause all this data to be lost (I suspect it would). A quick search of the internet relieved that this is not an uncommon problem, Windows Live must be quite a flaky application given the number of Help requests I found for the same error.

Luckily a member of the community had found a solution that did not involve re-instillation of windows live. This involved going into the windows live program files shared folder and copying the wldcore.dll and wldlog.dll files from there back into the respective Messenger, contacts and mail folders. This done I reopened Live mail and it started fine. While I was there I showed my friend how to back up mail and contacts just in case.

What bugs me is that given the number of Help posts I found with a similar problem some going back to 2011 Why have Microsoft not fixed the issue yet, if this had been an open source problem this bug would have been fixed ages ago. All Microsoft can offer is reinstall the programme to fix it (that was the official advice in the Microsoft solution centre), not stop the problem happening in the first place.

Lucky for me and others the Community came to the rescue with a simpler solution which did not involve the risk of data loss.

 This was the post that rescued my day:

Thank you to elliottme11 on the Microsoft community site for this solution and saving me a lot of grief in the process.

As for my own day to day computing needs I'll stick with LINUX it does not break its own applications when you do a disc scan.