I am not way into this, it is just that I am interested in exploring. What does that mean? It means that I am trying out Linux again. The first time I tried it was probably four years ago and I thought that it was OK, I just didn’t put much effort into it.

Why would you try Linux you ask? Well there are a couple of reasons but first I will start series of seemingly unrelated stories. My son has a penchant for collecting junk. He is a bit of a rube when it comes to not being able to see through people’s motivations. I will give a couple of examples.

About four years ago, my son and a friend decided to build a go-cart. Unbeknownst to me, their tactic was to go around the neighborhood and ask for free parts to create said go cart. One smart neighbor (I wish that I knew who it was) gave him a free tire for the project. Not four and not a wheel, but a tire. Needless to say, I paid the eight dollars to dispose of it two years later

Now the second tire story. My son was building a costume for Halloween. He went to the local tire store to obtain some tires with the premise that he was going to cut them into pieces and assemble some sort of tire suit. Now, I don’t know if you have ever tried to cut a tire, but it is pretty difficult. Again, the store gladly gave him two tires (of which they had already collected the disposal fee) and then they got paid again when I got rid of them for the second time.

And the third story which is getting closer to where I want to go. Just two weeks ago my son and the same friend found a ‘free’ TV on the side of the road. He was convinced that not only was this a better TV than the one that we already had, but that this was somehow the score of the year. Once he found out that it doesn’t work I now have another disposal issue.

I think that I made my case for when a relative gave my son a free laptop, I was not very happy about it. One reason it was free was that the operating system was locked due to a forgotten password. It was also Vista vintage hardware and I didn’t have the OEM software to re-install the operating system and address the lockout. This was my first foray into Linux.

I installed Unbuntu and to be honest, it worked alright. We used it to display karaoke on the TV s couple of times. The operating system was definitely foreign to me and I didn’t spend much time using it, only to do what I wanted to do which was access the internet and display lyrics on the TV. That computer ended up getting recycled with a large techno junk effort that I made about a year and a half ago because we didn’t need it. We had other, better laptops to replace it.

So, why do I want to fool around with Linux again? Well, I have an old XP computer that was in the recycle pile earlier this year. For some reason, it wasn’t booting and I didn’t know if it was the hard drive or a RAM fault or what. A few months ago, I thought that I would try to copy the data so that I could dispose of it and I found that it was working. I put the computer back together and low and behold XP was alive again.

The reason it is still around is that my wife is convinced that there are pictures and other data that we would want to access again. I have copied the entire hard drive so I am confident that I have everything. But nevertheless, it is sometimes nice to have an old device that has a functioning serial port or LPT port. My point to this is that I am not convinced that I want to blow away my existing hard drive to install Linux since there is not enough no partition the existing drive.

About two months ago, I spent $5 on a TV tuner card. The driver was not supported in Windows 10 and I no longer have a Windows 7 computer. I downloaded and installed the XP driver and the hardware works. However the card only handles analog signals so I don’t have a way to validate that it works.

Unbuntu is supposed to be bootable from a USB drive. I think that I tried that before, but it is not working for me at the moment. The last tech note I read was that I need to redo the USB conversion to eliminate the problem so that is my next step.

I haven’t fully decided whether I want to buy another hard drive or just to try it again. While XP does run and it seems to be fine, it is limited and not recommended to be on internet. I downloaded the last version of Firefox which is about a year out of date now. If you haven’t tried it, technology eventually stops working because the software is no longer supported. Or said another way, old technology stops communicating with new technology. It is a fine word processor or jukebox though.

End Your Programming Routine: You could say what I am trying to do is be cheap or a junk collector myself. I prefer to think of it as a thought experiment about determining whether there is life left in an old computer. I do also believe that the tactic of running Linux is a valid strategy to access data on a machine that is locked out or otherwise inaccessible. I will report more on this experiment as I get some time to get it actually working.