General Computer Thread

[Santaman]

My Linux progression is a bit strange.

Started with Redhat in 2003(?), the machine I had dedicated to Linux was a pest though and the thing would just never run right (Compaq Deskpro Pentium II 400) used Windows on it for a bit because I needed it for something, 2004-5 ish Suse 10 or 11 think it was 10 and I managed to update it to 11, by then the Compaq was getting reaaaallly old and slow, so I installed Win2K on it and then got my hands on a Pentium 4 machine, tried Slackware on it which eventually went belly up, then Zenwalk, wasn't zen at all then Kate OS.. Kate is a b#tch! and then IIRC Kubuntu, that one ran fine, got my hands on a IBM Netfinity 1100 server machine and that one just murders any OS , Win2K runs on it and Xubuntu 6.06LTS nothing else and I mean absolutely nothing else, it even murdered Puppy Linux..
After that Xu and Kubuntu until that first big scandal hit with stuff that should have been opt in instead of opt out..
That was it for Linux for a bit but after XP was discontinued I needed a new OS for my old laptop, 7 was meh-sluggish and I never tried 8.1 on that machine, and that was when I found Mint so that laptop started with Linux Mint Maya (13.x) it was fast enough until 17.x

So around 2014/5 I had one big ass main-does-everything machine a AMD FX 8350 which is not really known for being frugal with electricity so I put together a small linux machine an Athlon 5350 APU machine with Mint 15(IIRC) on it to start, after a while I just migrated all my non gaming stuff to it so it became my main desktop machine and the FX pure for gaming, in 2020 that old APU was getting too slow to run 18.x and I then built a new main machine and some backup/test machines so in 2020 I built a Pentium Gold 6400 machine which ran as main machine until 2024 it is now a backup and test machine it runs Mint 22.3.
So a not even that long ago I build my current main machine which is a AMD Ryzen 3 4300G which is also running 22.3, I also have a Ryzen 2200G which run Manjaro XFCE, two Huidun H50 mini PC's that run Mint and a whole bunch of other machines which run Debian, Bodhi Linux, Manjaro and other distros.

 

[StarTrek1701]

I never thought I'd say this but I think gigabit speeds are getting choked hard.
Everyone is watching Netflix/Hulu/Youtube in 4K.
I might need to update to 2Gig speed soon.

 

[XCV330]

I experimented with RH 5 in the late 90s. A copy of it came with a book about Linux. Total pain in the ass to get early GRUB sorted and get X running but it still showed promise. At the time I'd been hoping for a good alternative to Windows and Mac. Minix was interesting but it was severely hampered (the reason Linux went on his own, really, and got us where we are now), GNU was never going to happen as its own thing. Os/2 Warp had lost the war. BeOS was too expensive to play with on my budget.

I was a Novell guy but it wasn't clear how that was going to end up. Anyway, I finally did use Mandrake a couple of years later as a backup DNS server when I needed one more DNS server and my employer wouldn't spring for another NT license. It did its job. a few years later I tried using Mepis full time as a linux distro but it just didn't do what I needed it to do. Went a few years after that with Mint, but in the end I started using some DAW software that just required windows. I'd like to come back to Linux on the desktop again some day when it can handle the software I'm using.

 

[Santaman]

I remember Novell fondly...

 

[StarTrek1701]

WTF is going on today??

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[Owain Taggart]

No issues here. Didn't experience anything of the sort yesterday.

 

[Marc]

WTF is going on today??

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DNS
even when it's not it's DNS.

 

[Santaman]

Didn't notice anything strange..

I've got a Medion PC MT6 computer, it's one of the infamous machines that was sold at the Aldi supermarkets, it's from 2002/3/4 so really old, mine is not totally original, I had three of these and none of them was complete and this one is built from parts from all three of them and some parts are from the heap of old stuff, the powersuply is a more modern BeQuiet! part, the memory is 2GB which is more than what it came with and the graphics card is a Geforce 6200 which is from 2004 so still in the ballpark for this machine, the HDD is a Maxtor 250GB IDE model and there's a DVD and a DVD R/RW drive, both also IDE not SATA.
The CPU is a Pentium 4 2.66Ghz so the main bus is 133Mhz the frontside bus is 533Mhz, the chipset is the SiS 648 chipset, the machine also came with a modem and a TV card.
The machine's mainboard is a MD 5000 made by MSI, it's high quality and so is the casing, it is made from very thick metal, connectivity wise it makes most modern machines look foolish, 6 USB, firewire front and rear, audio front and rear also the output for the TV card and there's a MIDI/Joystick port.

The OS is of course Windows XP, I replaced the PSU so I needed to have the machine run for a bit (two afternoons) I use the unofficial Service Pack 4 which contains all updated to XP including those for the longer supported versions so it has extra drivers for ExFAT and so on.

Download Windows XP Service Pack 4 Unofficial - MajorGeeks

Windows XP Service Pack 4 Unofficial is a cumulative update rollup for Windows XP (x86) English as well as security enhancements not addressed by Microsoft....

www.majorgeeks.com

So two afternoons with this machine, of course I kept it offline but I installed portable apps, copied music to it, and so on, pretty much what you do with a computer, also ran some tests on the hardware and the conclusion is that it is kinda business like usual, yeah a few niggles and things you have forgotten about XP's peculiarities but still usuable.

 

[Random_Spock]

WTF is going on today??

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Ran into some issues on Twitter.

 

[Marc]

Didn't notice anything strange..

posted in another part of the board that won't be named also mentioned problems with youtube but didn't seem to be any part - they were in different parts of the U.S.

 

[Candleicious Ghost]

I wish I hadn't gone back to a traditional pc case. I had actually less cleaning when I had everything in an open case. Maybe once every couple of months but today had to get new fans anyway as the ones I had were sounding weird, but yikes the amount of dust bunnies in the fans and in the cpu cooler. It was the perfect time also to clean that anyway and do a repaste. Put it all back together and all working. Lots quieter with the new fans in place but I really wish I had kept the old open plan case.