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Message started by Oldfeller on 08/11/12 at 22:56:57

Title: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by Oldfeller on 08/11/12 at 22:56:57

I have bragged that Linux is boring and it just works, that you don't have to scan and defrag and antivirus update and do the every Tuesday Microsoft invasion of your machine and etc. etc. ad nausium.

It just works.

Now we try a new experiment.

My white box distro is Linux Mint 9.0 which has just gone over the 3 year support cliff and it is now obsolete and unsupported by the auto update features of the distro.

How long will it take before this fully set up and tweeked to make me happy simple old distro quits working?

Microsoft would quit on you within a month or two, requiring something or another that caused it to stop working completely (along with your obligatory upgrade to Windows 8 notice popping up on your screen).

I betcha Linux doesn't do that, that the stuff I have just keeps on chunking right along since all the drivers support my hardware jest fine and all my hardware is old and hasn't been updated by anybody for 5-6 years now.

The fact I am not getting updates makes me MORE stable, not less.

Unless I buy something new, I bet I have to do NOTHING to keep using the old white box and the obsolete Mint 9.0 distro .... for years and years and years.

The response speed will always stay this fast, nothing will slow down and get all boggy on me (my antique white box is still faster than my wife's most modern MS machine and that is with good defrag maintenance on a 2 ghz dual core win 7 laptop).

This state of nirvana will last & last until/unless I want some new hardware that isn't supported on the old distro (and then I bet I could find them new drivers, I betcha, along with a helpful single string of linux root command line code that would go out and get it and tuck it all safely in place).

:D

Now that my friends is Linux lazy !!!

You get it the way you like it, you get to keep it forever.

Fer free, no less.

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by youzguyz on 08/12/12 at 03:45:21

If it works, does what you want it to do, supports your hardware, and don't need to add any fancy new applications (or changes to ones you have that you would like to see), you are golden.
Buy new box and it comes with new wind blows. What happens with new wind blows is that it no longer supports older apps, so you have to buy new apps, then you have to buy new hardware to get the performance back, and the cycle repeats.

Me??? I use OS/2 Warp at work. Does what I need, does it fast, and has been doing it for many years. Golden.

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by rfw2003 on 08/12/12 at 08:15:49

long time ago I had a machine that was running Fedora 1 on it for years after they stopped support for it. Linux just plain works is all there is to it. Even if you do end up changing some hardware all you might have to do is compile your own drivers for it from source.

R.F.

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by Oldfeller on 08/12/12 at 08:27:14

Naw, I'd just google "install new hardware XXX on Mint 9.0 Isadora" and 20 hits will show up with 6 different ways to do it and there will be three people who wrote fully automated short scripts to go get it from the repository and tuck it all in place on my old white box machine.

(copy and paste that line of code into my command line and whammo -- she goes and gets it and puts it in place herself inside of 10 seconds, that sweet sweet little Isadora).

=================

Also new and shocking is the total "no need for new faster hardware" -- I haven't gotten used to that yet
(I still oggle at new hardware all the time).

But I don't buy any. Reality is that the old hardware moves so fast I don't even want to go get any faster.

All I have to do to be totally content is use a modern machine with IE 8 or 9 on it -- then I go home all happy again.

It takes real talent for MicroChoke to bogggg down a 4 core 64 bit 3.4 gigahertz processor equipped with 6 gig of systems memory --- but IE 9 can sure do it fer ya.

I'm proud of them -- drive that next upgrade boys, drive it !!!

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by Boule’tard on 08/12/12 at 08:33:22

Websites not sticking to W3C standards and getting too fancy with their HTML is what messes with my rig, more than anything. They can't just friggin write something that is readable in HTML by your browser and in English by you. NoOOoooOOooo they have to keep breaking it with Script-y Flash-y AJAX-y bullshit that requires a current browser and 5 plugins. WTF does Facebook have to do with Eastwood ZDDP booster, anyway? Answer: Eastwood wants to be as plugged into as many sources of customers as possible, so they mucked up their site. Now I have to update Firefox and all the extensions to make it work. Which in Linux requires that you update a bunch of dependencies, which then would not work with the kernel, which would have to be updated too, breaking several other programs on the computer, so they'd need updating, etc..

So just to browse a site and figure out the stupid ZDDP puzzle, I need to update my whole computer. My Linux is too lazy for that.

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by Oldfeller on 08/12/12 at 08:38:23

Hey, go get you a mini browser like Chrome, install it and only use it to go look at the totally craptastic sites like Eastwood.

Eastwood doesn't say webwise what's in it or how to use it -- somebody is gonna have to email them and then catch a buttload of attachments back in the return email that have all this good info in them.

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by rfw2003 on 08/12/12 at 08:42:37

2A273D242D3C293A2C480 wrote:

Haven't tried to install it on my nix boxes yet but avg anti-virus has a plugin now for the main browsers called Do Not Track that blocks all that crap. I use FF myself on all my boxen.

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by Boule’tard on 08/12/12 at 10:04:08

0221292B282121283F4D0 wrote:

Eastwood doesn't say webwise what's in it or how to use it -- somebody is gonna have to email them and then catch a buttload of attachments back in the return email that have all this good info in them.

I called and left a message on their techical support line. They are closed right now but if they get back to me next week with the pertinent info about their product, they are still in the running. I did also ask about any additional friction modifiers that might be in there.

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by Serowbot on 08/12/12 at 10:21:49

I'm using Mint 11 on my netbook.... I'm not that in love with it,.. but I couldn't get XP to install from a flash drive...
It is pretty reliable,.. but slower to boot than my hotrodded XP was...
File navigation sucks... some things want a single click (and give an error popup if you double),.. some things want a double, but won't really work unless you triple click...
... and I really wish they'd name things what they are,.. instead of some silly animal...
I tried Puppy first,.. that super sucked...
All in all,.. I'd rather have my XP back... :-?...

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by rfw2003 on 08/12/12 at 10:28:52

It's been awhile since I messed with Mint, but there is a setting for the file browser that allows you to change it from single click to dbl click and vice versa. Right now I've just got a few servers running in the house on Nix atm but will so be back to dual booting my new laptop and my main workhorse which is an 8 core running at 4ghz and 16gb of ram.

R.F.

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by Oldfeller on 08/12/12 at 11:00:21

Puppy set my mind open, I didn't stay with it because it was a little kludgy to use, but indeed it was blazing fast to do things. Puppy did set my mind up for Mint 9.0 which WASN'T kludgy and wasn't slow and 9.0 greatly resembled XP once you put a blue green background up it actually looked and acted quite a bit like XP, enough so it wasn't hard to use at all.

My wife walks up to my white box and gets around fine, bitches sometimes that my office is set up strange and why don't I put up the modern style Office menu system? (it's Open Office) But she opens and does stuff whenever her laptop is out of service again for virus this and upgrade that ..... when she gets to school the files will open with a convert notice, which she does.

Heck, she does whatever a worm or a trojan tells her to do every single time. MicroChoke has trained her to say "yes" when prompted.

;D

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by Oldfeller on 08/12/12 at 11:32:31

Serowbot, my laptop is an ancient XP small 13.2" screen HP unit that was given to Grandma so she could get e-mail. She never used it much and as the years went by it got sooooo slow that nobody even wanted to use it to go on line with, so it got replaced and the corpse came home to me to "do something with it".

I needed a laptop at work for when I was stuck in the guard shack at the front of the University doing Welcome Center duty, so I took it and started renovating.

First, I used the hidden drive D to put back the original software, then spent a month throwing away crapware and letting MS update the XP up through the service pack chain. Installed a free virus checker, installed a better defragger, installed Firefox and Office 97 (all the Office you will ever really need). Bought a long ear (USB wifi booster antenna) that can scoop up a wifi connect a quarter mile away. Got some external powered speakers so I could hear a streamed movie with the AC running full blast.

Then I stumbled upon a net source selling 2 each 2 meg sticks of old pulled systems memory from returned rental units -- 4 megs of systems memory that was so modern my system could barely use it -- all for $27 with free shipping. It worked so well I went and replaced the battery with an 12 cell extended jobbie for $34 so I have 6-8 hours of battery run time on a single charge.

I have an really really old XP laptop that zips right along now. It is the one I carry on vacations and motorcycle trips, it is abused and neglected but it always works. When my wife messes all 3 of hers up, I lend her my old reliable XP laptop and then I threaten to convert all her machines to Linux if she doesn't start saying NO to worms and trojans and fake virus alerts that look just like her antivirus is talking to her.

She knows I won't do it because her work has her so firmly locked into MS products. But she appreciates my old XP laptop when she needs to use it.

:D

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by clearush on 08/17/12 at 20:10:44

I use http://peppermintos.com/ on my older slower 512mb memory ThinkPad and it runs fine till I hit swapspace memory usage from only having the 512mb of memory. Much less kludgy than a full blown app installed Linux distro.

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by Oldfeller on 08/17/12 at 22:43:44

I downloaded the iso and will burn a lookie see CD.

I really don't like Chrome all that much, prefer firefox. Would use Chrome in preference over MS Explorer Whatever
Boy, MS E sure is sllllllooooowww to load a page, ain't it?

I'm gonna be flexible until my monitor dies or until somebody comes up with a A15 dual core stick PC with Mali 624 graphics for say $89 with 2.x gigahertz speed and 8 core graphics and 2 gigs of systems memory

(ie twice the specs on all components of my old white box pc) ;)

Until then, I'll suffer along with what I got .... and be right happy with it !!

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by Oldfeller on 08/17/12 at 23:20:48

Four minutes to download the 64 bit ISO, 6 minutes to burn it, 6 minutes to load from the CD but once it was up it was fast and easy enough to use.

This post is made using Chrome (default setting looks a whole lot like a Google page, don't it?)

It is quick enough, so I'll leave the image up and running until I notice something I don't like.

=============

Ya gotta love Linux, you can take it for a test drive for 5 miles or 50,000 miles, its all the same to Linux.

You do realize that since the sleep button works, all I do is suspend Linux and wake it back up when I want to go use it again.

This means a CD or a thumb drive ISO image works fine for most everything and that there isn't REALLY a strong case for installing the software if you have enough systems memory to load everything "virtual" anyway. And my measly 1.5 gig is apparently enough to do this trick just dandy with Peppermint.

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by rfw2003 on 08/18/12 at 00:24:40

Any of you every have much luck with Gentoo, or Arch linux?? I've been able to get both installed on various boxes but only as a command line environment, never could get any of the Desktop environments to compile and install properly with those 2. Always wanted to really try a full install of either of them since they are mostly compiled on install for your specific hardware.

R.F.

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by Oldfeller on 08/18/12 at 02:03:54

Boule is your Arch man, I think.

I don't want to understand Linux (I once understood DOS well enough to do all necessary items but came to learn that all that DOS learning effort expended was a huge waste of time as it went away in 4-6 years and I knew a completely obsolete PC OS language that I never used any more).

I find lots of people understand Linux so well they have fixed every issue on Mint 9.0 so completely there aren't any needs to be met, really. I can count the number of times I have ever had to resort to the Linux command line interface EVER on one hand (and that was stuff researched and copied and pasted from a forum).

LINUX LAZY is my style now, jest a crusin' along on old dead hardware using me an obsolete outdated Linux distro and a having me a grand old time doing it .....

fer free, Bill, fer tee totally freeeeee .........

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by rfw2003 on 08/18/12 at 09:24:31

66454D4F4C45454C5B290 wrote:

Alot of the stuff I do in linux is command line. I run servers alot plus do alot of hobby coding, so command line is a norm for me. I also do alot of Android stuff and that is all in text editors and command line so thats where I'm used to, but I still like my Desktop environments. One of the biggest reasons I've been trying todo Gentoo or Arch is because they can be compiled to run much more efficiently on your specific machine/hardware setup.

I guess one of these day's I'm gonna have to start picking Boule's brain about Arch to see if I can get it up and going right on the machine I'm wanting it on. There just isn't anything out there, outta the box pre-compiled that I've found yet that takes full advantage of the AMD FX 8 core processors. I recompile all the stuff that I can in distro's that work but still I think with one that start out as having to compile it all, will end up in a much more efficient running Distro that will enable me to use my processor to it's capabilities.

R.F.

Title: Re: Getting lazy with Linux
Post by Oldfeller on 08/19/12 at 04:06:22

OK, I know its a hobby wish -- but what in the world can you DO with the extra speed? Your Peppermint is a quick like a bunny distro already, will you be able to see or feel or taste the "faster"?

An 8 core AMD FX chipset -- and here I am with an early Athlon 64 bit chip (one thereof) jest cooking along in fine fettle.

I can see your 8 cores all lined up on the porch in their rocking chairs, all leaned back and silent. A command comes, and first one speaks, then the next, then the next 2 split a sentence, then the buffer charges up and lets fly with the final 4 cores each spitting one syllable/cycle worth of the same word/calculation. Then they all rock once and go silent again as they wait to do something.

Issue becomes its all done so durn fast that your video buffer has to stop the data blast from the fast assed data bus and string the information back into proper order and then slowly put it out as properly paced video at the correct frame rate.

Here is your quandry --

MicroChoke needs all that Intel can put together for processor count, bus speeds, and all the separate component quickness that the video suppliers and everybody can offer. MicroChoke is built expecting them separate components, busses and buffers and the code is so bloated and fat that Explorer 9 can choke down all 8 cores to "slow" even now.

...... on the other hand,

Linux code is tiny compared to MicroBloat, the average item can generally execute in a single clock cycle on a 32 bit chip. Indeed it was what, 5-6 years before any of the 64 bit distros showed ANY sort of speed advantage over a 32 bit distro of the same brand/type. For the first 2-3 years the longer file names in the 64 bit distros actually slowed things down a little bit so the 64 bit distro was a bit slower than the 32 bit distro (and yes, the code was optimized for 32 bit instructions, what Linux coder doesn't optimize his code for the current crop of CPUs).

Run this logic forward into the ARM age. Right now ARM processors use 32 bit instruction sets, soon to ramp up to 64 bit file names so it can struggle to run MicroBloat's new fat slow 64 bit ARM code.

Android and Linux are still tiny and most 32 bit instructions will still execute just fine in a single clock cycle on a single cpu system on a chip. Arm processors are very fast in line executers as the processor(s) and the buss and the internal systems memory and the bus are all trace lines on the same piece of silicone.

For $7 today you can buy a single core chip that will out spec my old white Hewlett Packard box that is sitting by my feet. Both systems will "multi-thread" but only by inline execution that is coordinated by the bus.

Next year or so, that $7 chip will be a parallel processing dual core A-15 or perhaps a 4-8 core A-9 with a lot of shared internal memory on the bus. The internal video processor is already a quad core Mali 400 today, but it will be an 8-12 core Mali 624 by then -- all burned at 22 nanometer on the same piece of silicone the size of your little fingernail.

The entire computer functionally is on that one piece of silicone. Your power supply will be a cell phone charger at 7-10 watts of power draw. And that will be overkill on reserve watt capacity as the chips won't draw steady but 1-2 watts with ramp up to 5 watts with all cores running at full blast.

And when the heck will this ever happen in Linux? If Linaro keeps up their good work, Android and Linux will be sitting there spitting tiny 32 bit instructions at 2-3 gigahertz using NATIVE hard float drivers that suit the new ARM chip exactly -- that are part of the Linux base code (not a durn driver really of any sort -- the system itself, not an add-on).

========

Have you noticed the new class of Linux PC watches? You talk to them, not type on them. Siri has grandkids now that will organize your day's activities from your wrist and tell you how to turn the car to get there.

Have you seen the Bluetooth projector glasses that track your eyeballs to move the cursor on the visible only to you screen?

We have some CRAZY stuff coming up in the next 5 years !!!

They will be passing laws against "computing while driving" ....