Running Raspbian Pixel on a P4 Tower PC

Well I’m back again, as I said in the post I did about Raspbian x86 on the Lenovo x61s I was interested to see how the OS would perform on what I now class as very old hardware in the form of a Pentium 4 tower.

We have a spare tower at the Makerspace which gets used to test low resource operating systems to see if they live up to there name, so on Saturday (yesterday as I write this,

Blackpool Linux User Group Update - We are now a Makerspace as well.

I had forgotten that I had made a post about our LUG in 2012 until I was reviewing my stats on site visits, and someone had viewed this post. Things have changed considerably since that post so here is an update.

These are the new details of what is now a Makerspace and LUG in Blackpool UK

About

Blackpool Makerspace + LUG

The Basement, Crossways Hotel, 64 Tyldesley Road, Blackpool. FY1 5DF

Blackpool Makerspace was founded by members of Blackpool Linux User Group, and was previously known as MakerspaceFY1.
Combined meetings of the LUG and Makerspace take place every Saturday at 10 am, unless otherwise stated on the mailing list.  

https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/blackpool

Distro Review - Raspbian Pixle x86

This post is about putting the new Raspbian image onto one of the Lenovo x61s laptops that I have previously talked about.

These laptops do not have a DVD drive so normally I would create a boot flash drive using USB image writer in Linux Mint, but I had received a DVD of Raspbian with the MagPi magazine so I connected a portable USB DVD drive that I have and used the disc to install to the laptop.

On booting to the DVD drive you get several options including a live session with persistence (this allows the saving of data and system changes to a flash drive during the session if wanted), but the option I chose was to install to hard drive.

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