Tag: Linux

September 18, 2024 – My Love/Hate With Linux

September 18, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The sun is on the horizon for Windows 10. The stated date support ends is October 14, 2025. I have stated that my strategy is to gain some familiarity with Linux. When that day comes, I will be making the switch, whether I like it or not. See my post yesterday on running machines without vendor support.

A lot of people would find Ubuntu relatively acceptable if they were willing to learn new programs like Thunderbird for email. Heck, it installs with Office Libre, a full office suite for free. I pay several hundred dollars a year to maintain Microsoft Office. Office Libre will read those files, again for free.

Unfortunately for me, I am not the standard user. I have to be interested in Software Defined Radio and TV tuner cards. This requires a lot more than the standard Facebook user. There are things that have to occur like blacklisting the Linux driver from the kernel using the ‘vi’ editor. Fortunately for me, this is the third time I have done this. It is starting to become familiar to me.

My third time started with me trying to figure out ‘Myth TV’. This is the Linux program used to watch and record programs with my latest TV tuner card I purchased this summer. Due to me struggling to get this card to work, I decided that I needed to test this card in an environment more familiar to me, Windows.

I rescued this computer from my wife’s mother’s estate. It had not been powered on for several years when I obtained it. I decided that I would install Ubuntu on a new SSD to allow me to access the old data if needed for estate purposes. But, it has been almost two years now and I have already searched for anything that I thought might be useful. I found nothing.

As a result, I thought that I would refresh Windows 10 for purposes of testing this tuner card. This is when I found out that yes, I have a knowledge gap with Linux, but the real problem with my dual operating system boot was the fault of UEFI. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface is what the acronym stands for. Because of how I partitioned the hard drive the last time I installed Ubuntu, I had to start of again.

UEFI is a BIOS replacement (don’t worry, I will explain). BIOS is the software that is embedded on a chip and loads up the basic required drivers like keyboard and hard disk. It was determined in the mid 2000s that BIOS had limitations for the new hardware coming online. Computers of my vintage have both a BIOS and UEFI making things even more confusing.

It is also true that UEFI is the reason I had to reload Ubuntu last time as well. I was trying to update the driver for UEFI when I bricked my first installation. I got into a spot where only Windows would load and I wanted to keep that data. If this were the old days of just BIOS, I would set my boot sequence once and that is the way the computer would load until I changed it.

It has taken me several weeks of fiddling around to really figure out how this works. When my computer reboots, I need to hit F12 until the UEFI menu comes up. From there, I pick how the computer is going to load. This means, that if I walk away on the reboot, it will load Windows, because this is how the BIOS is set to boot. So, if I actually want Ubuntu I need to hang around.

My silver lining is that my card works. You might recall that I had to fashion a mounting bracket. I also had to plunk down a license fee to Hauppauge for the Windows program but now I know that the tuner works. So, it is back to Ubuntu and MythTV. I have finally mastered the boot sequence so I can go back and forth if desired. I have my SDR installed again.

Things are looking up for me. I want to get this project finished so I can get back to radios. I still have only really turned on my scanner, I have some ideas about setting up a workstation for different radios in that space. There is always a million other things that I want to get to. The TV tuner is just the gateway to having the football game on while I reload or do something at my bench.

End Your Programming Routine: Let me state that I don’t hate Linux. I hate the fact that I am getting old and learning new technology is getting harder. Time is a more valuable commodity than aptitude. I don’t have days and days to fart around, I just want things to work. I find myself stumbling around until I get it, but it is hard to ‘learn’ in this fashion.

July 11, 2024 – Got Caught Again

July 11, 2024 /

Just like yesterday’s praise of internet shopping, today is my kryptonite. I have a penchant missing details or not getting what I expected. I recently purchased another PCIe tuner card that I was going to install in my Linux/Ubuntu machine. I don’t need it and I was toying with the idea taking the one out of my Windows machine as I mount my new ‘cheap tv’. But, I found one on eBay for $18.

When I looked at the description, it said for parts/not working. The seller description said, ‘untested’ but also said ‘looks great’. When the card arrived, I found that someone had snipped off the ends of the mounting bracket. I was expecting to gamble on whether the card worked or not, not if I could actually install the card.

If the card did not work, I would have nobody to blame, I gambled and I lost. It was stated for parts as well as untested. I went back a looked at the pictures. It was clear what I was looking at after I knew what I got. The thought never occurred to me that somebody would modify the mount. I never expected that I would need to scrutinize the photo with a seller provided description.

Giving my transaction rating, I was a little softer than I felt like. Because the modification was pictured and it was listed as for parts I didn’t do enough due diligence. I do feel slightly mislead however.

I was able to fabricate a mounting plate with careful measuring and drilling. Now I am on to thrashing with Ubuntu again. The literature claims that the driver is in the kernel so that eliminates the blacklisting problem that I encountered with my SDR. The program I chose to try out is called ‘MythTV’. This is a DVR program and requires me learning about MySQL and Linux. This is my next hill.

I have done a little research about eBay’s ‘for parts/not working’ disposition. Apparently, this means that there are no guarantees. Some people claim that people buy things, harvest parts and then resell the rest. You need to be very careful in these situations unless you are a true expert. Learn from me. By paying an extra $20, I could have gotten one with everything including remote control.

I don’t regret my lesson. I guess it just frustrates me when I get another thing that I wasn’t really expecting. I feel like this is one of those places that I really do learn by making every mistake in the book. I am sure it won’t be the last item I buy off of eBay.

End Your Programming Routine: All the way back to the Romans… Caveat emptor. Translated it means, buyer beware. No doubt that I could have done more due diligence. There is no way that I would have made the same mistake if I was looking at the card in person. I just need to keep learning the same lesson on buying on the internet.

May 15, 2024 – The Monster Is Growing

May 15, 2024 /

This is kind of a fun one for me. I have had some time lately where my wife is getting long visits with friends. As a result, I hide out in the basement working on my experiment with Linux and radios. I do have my Software Defined Radio working, it is just not quite dialed in.

I am monitoring the stations that say are Police/Fire but I have yet to hear anything. It is kind of like fishing. You don’t catch anything if you don’t try but just because you are fishing doesn’t mean that you are going to catch anything. I don’t know if my antenna is not good enough or the frequencies are wrong or the software doesn’t work as advertised.

Regardless, the bottom monitor was one that I had in my office. It stopped working reliably in December of last year. It would plug in and work for a day until the computer went to sleep and then it would stop working until I unplugged it for a day or so. I replaced the monitor and put it in the recycle pile.

But, since the monitor was in my way, I decided to test it a little further and plug it into my Linux computer. I had a bit of a working theory that there was something to do with the graphics card since the monitor seemed to work on one machine but not when I switched over to another computer with a KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switch. Low and behold, it worked all week. Then I decided to hook two monitors up and it worked another two weeks.

Rather than throwing a 27″ monitor away. I decided to go for it and order a dual monitor stand. In the picture you can see that the tower on the left is the computer I have been talking about. The tower on the right is my XP machine running Linux Mint (32-bit). You read that correctly, Windows XP. This is the machine that my wife insists still has pictures and data that she still wants. These two also have a KVM switch attached to them.

Given that the Linux Mint computer is almost twenty years old and running out of date hardware, it actually runs pretty well. In fact, it runs significantly better than when I try to boot into XP. That is a good 10 minute wait before everything gets going. As an example, I swapped out the wireless card with one that I replaced in my main computer around Christmas time (to add Bluetooth). Mint recognized the card and added a driver and XP did not. I don’t really care because both of them are wired as well. I use it mostly as a troubleshooting tool.

I learned though that the same KVM problem came back when I tried to use the 27″ monitor as the primary monitor by both systems. This means that the upper monitor is the one that works with both computers but I don’t see myself using the old Linux Mint machine much given that it is somewhat limited. I wouldn’t have done this anyway if I didn’t have two monitors in the first place.

Given that I am getting things real cozy in that spot, I started thinking about it would make a good place to put some radios as well. Lately, I have been scrolling through a lot of vintage CB base stations and different GMRS radios. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of that is in my future. I will have to modify shotgun hull storage area to do so. Given that reloads can’t be used in trap competition it is unlikely that I will be ever doing that.

End Your Programming Routine: My only real problem with this new setup is that it is cold. It is not a good place to sit for a long time even bundled up. That being said, it is kind of fun re-purposing old hardware and upgrading at the cost of pennies on the dollar compared to their technological heyday. If I have to keep something around, I might as well enjoy it.

February 20, 2024 – What the Heck is UEFI?

February 20, 2024 /

For the last couple of months, UEFI has been irritating me. I am going to get into what it is in a minute. A couple weeks ago I set off to fix the situation and then I really messed things up. So much so that I actually bought a new solid state hard drive (SSD) to start over. This was an attempt to make progress on my Software Defined Radio scanner project.

First let me define what UEFI means. This is an acronym for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. If you do not do what I do, then you may never see it. There is a selector screen before the operating system boots up. In my case, I can choose between starting Linux or Windows.

This is an old computer that was inherited. I wanted to keep it in case we needed some data from it, but I did not have the password to login to Windows. By running Linux, I can access anything on the hard drive. This is also part of my long running experiment with Linux which will eventually become my software defined radio police scanner.

For several months now, I have been getting notifications that my UEFI driver was out of date. It wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that it notifies me twice a day that it is out of date. At first, it was a problem for later, which became months. Then I set out trying to fix it.

It turns out that the UEFI driver has a Microsoft signature. I thought that maybe if I could add an account to Windows, I could run the driver update there. Once I selected boot to Windows, it was a one way street. After the Windows path was chosen, there was no going back to having the Linux option. So then I started changing settings in the BIOS. I messed the configuration up so that it wouldn’t boot Windows either.

I saw some options to go into ‘Safe Mode’ make a recovery disk and all of that. But, the truth is that this machine also has Windows 10 and is just slightly newer than my primary desktop. I highly suspected that it was not going to make the Windows 11 cutoff and I felt like all of that effort would be for little gain anyway.

I made the decision that I was going to start over. Solid State Hard drives are cheap. I paid $30 for a 512 GB drive. If you haven’t gone from disk based drives to and SSD, it it hard to explain how much better things work. I firmly believe that my Windows 7 computer runs better now than it did when I bought it in 2012. In fact, that computer runs better than my significantly more powerful laptop from 2018. I am going to be changing it to an SSD as well after I get a few other projects completed. But, let’s get back to the subject at hand.

I have started to become comfortable with Linux. I am not proficient by any means but I am convinced that Linux is in my future for the desktop that I do most of my writing on. Once support runs out for Windows 10, I will be converting that computer to Ubuntu. I am a light PC user anyway, browser based work, word processing and spreadsheets are the primary stuff I do. The more familiar I am with Linux, the easier the transition will be for me.

Its funny, the more connected our devices have become, the more isolated they are. In the old days, I would start a file at home, email it to myself and continue to work. Or even better, I put it on a thumb drive. I haven’t done anything like that in years because I can’t really share anything between environments anymore for security purposes. My biggest outstanding concern is that I have been using, saving and storing everything in Microsoft 365. This seems like a topic for another day however.

As it turns out, UEFI is important to me and without it working properly, I can do nothing. The good news is that I got my SSD today and I already have Ubuntu installed along with everything except the Software Defined Radio and SDR++. Starting from scratch, I got an updated UEFI driver and everything works like it was supposed to.

The computer geeks out that probably find this to be a little juvenile. I had no idea what this driver was supposed to do. Reading the release notes there were vulnerabilities to certain viruses. Hindsight being 20/20, Ubuntu recommends the risk as low and to not worry about it. There are some commands to ignore the device check that I read after the fact. I wish I would have read that before I messed up everything but in the end this is going to be better.

End Your Programming Routine: I have heard that the reason little kids learn so fast is that they have no fear. They just push keys and try things because they can. I have a streak like that with Linux, I don’t know what I don’t know and definitely what I am doing. That being said, be careful. I had no data or anything really on this computer so it was $30, a re-install and two hours for me and the end result is a better computer. I guess I am learning like a child but I will be more cautious in the future.

November 28, 2023 – Didn’t Even Know That This Was a Problem

November 28, 2023 /

I was pretty diligent when I went to add my new wireless card to my old Windows computer. I saw that it needed a USB connection to the motherboard to make the Bluetooth work. I checked it before I ordered it. I also educated myself as to all the different types of PCIe slots and if I had the right ones.

When I did the second one for the Linux machine, I wasn’t quite so diligent. I new that computer was newer and I knew that I hadn’t added any cards to it at this point, So, I went on the assumption that if I had all the space I needed on the old one, the newer one would be just fine. Well that wasn’t the case.

I did have three PCIe ports but all of my USB connections were taken. At first, I just disconnected the front ports to make sure that the wireless card was working, but it bothered me so I started looking. I discovered that there is a way to share these motherboard connections. See the video below.

Now, everything is right in the world. Since I was looking for this video to share here, I also discovered that there are devices that can add more motherboard ports if necessary. That is also good.

The one thing that wasn’t quite right was that my Linux computer already had an imbedded wireless card. I ran the right commands (I think) to check if that was the case. I got no return on validating a wireless card which is why I ordered it in the first place. However, when I installed the new card, it enabled the imbedded card. I had read that wireless driver installation can be tricky on Linux and I guess this is what I ultimately encountered.

Don’t get me wrong, I am glad that the plug and play worked. But, I kind of wish that I had known that there was already an imbedded wireless card. I don’t think it had Bluetooth capability which is what justified me keeping the card installed. I may have deprioritized it.

When I spoke about my network configuration a few weeks ago, I stated that everything that can be wired is wired. That is still true. I want wireless capability on my Linux machine as a test tool. I want to know if I can connect wired but not wirelessly or on Linux versus Windows versus iOS. Adding the additional Bluetooth connectivity seemed like an inexpensive luxury at $20.

Since I have been slow playing the Software Defined Radio scanner experiment, I heard somewhere that I needed two different radio receivers to make the thing work. The problem is that I am running out of USB connections outside of the computer. So, I have been looking at USB expansion cards. They do exist and they are pretty inexpensive. Believe it or not, they don’t require and USB connection to the motherboard, just a PCIe slot. So no worries there.

End Your Programming Routine: This is why I love techno junk. I would never spend $400 on a new, super duper graphics card but I would spend $20 for an enhancement. The fact that I can get 2nd or 3rd generation technology for a song makes a big difference on me wading deeper into the fray. Like I stated before, I have been out of the hardware game for a long time, it is nice to know that things work much smoother than they used to.

November 16, 2023 – So Many Updates

November 16, 2023 /

I believe this to be true, the more you look the more you see. Since my third foray into Linux, I have been more dedicated and paid more attention to how it behaves. Today is going to be for those who don’t know much or are considering Linux, pretty much like me. If you are an old hat (or Redhat) then nothing I am going to say is revolutionary.

Let’s start at the beginning. Linux is an open source operating system. For that reason, there are many distributions or flavors if you will. So, I have tried Ubuntu and Mint as my distributions. They both branch off of Linux called Debian but then further fork into their own distinct operating systems. Think of it this way, the distribution has a bunch or other programs wrapped on top of the operating system. These are things like word processing, spreadsheets, email programs are all part of the distribution.

Part of the reason that this is important is because when you go to look for programs to install or support, you need to know what type of distribution you have. Different distributions will have different programs and even syntax on how to do it. I think that the Ubuntu/Mint is the dominant distribution so fortunately you can usually find something that works. But, there are literally almost infinite possibilities. Talk about confusing for a newbie.

Open Source means exactly what it says. Anyone with the technical chops could create their own version or distribution of Linux. I don’t know exactly how you get involved in Ubuntu, but somebody has some passion for some element which drives change. These could be error fixes or enhancements or even new features.

I think that we are all used to update notifications in the software in our lives. Now that I have been using Ubuntu daily, I am noticing a high number of updates. I would estimate that there is one every three or four days. In some ways, this is the beauty of Linux. We the user have a chance to say yes we want them or no we do not. I myself being just a casual user and not having any real reason not to do them, just say yes. Since it is not my primary computer, it feels like I log in daily to see if I have any updates to run.

It seems like everything Linux does fine. But, I am seeing a problem with firmware updates. I have one that won’t take because Microsoft forces a signature of the hardrive and the motherboard (even though I am not even running Windows). The supposed risk is that someone could physically login and defeat my security. I am not too worried about that since it is at my home. My current strategy will be to ignore it but it does annoy me that the warning pops up as a to do.

One thing that I think is neat is that with each version, the home page background changes. The lobster has now become a minotaur (and a maze) since I updated to 23.10. I guess one other caveat, if you stop frequently updating, you can get out of sync. This happened to me when I ignored the computer for a few months and then I couldn’t perform the incremental updates. It wasn’t until a major revision that I got back in sync.

End Your Programming Routine: Having to do all these things is the beauty and the pain of Linux. I have a lot of control and a lot of responsibility. I want to say that I have been pretty impressed what you can get for free and pretty light weight in its footprint. It is pretty cool that it can be booted from a USB stick and is really a full featured computer. If your are willing to do the work of learning and research, it definitely works.

October 9, 2023 – How to Keep From Getting Old

October 9, 2023 /

I think that we all want to be comfortable. It’s OK to take advantage of the experience that we have hard earned. After all, why not benefit from the work we have done? It’s not OK to never learn anything again. I know, it is hard to step outside when it is cold and raining and do the hard work but it is necessary for us to continue to push boundaries and keep trying if we want to stay young.

April 27, 2022 – My Techno Junk is Multiplying

April 27, 2022 /

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about looking for the right deals. Well a couple of those came along last week. I am keeping a strong eye out for components to build my kids their very own hi-fi systems. There are a couple more things I am looking for as well to finish off my ultimate Techno Junk lab (my office).

A few weeks ago, we were moving my mother-in-law into our small house. She thought that her TV was too big. So we swapped a 40″ TV that we had for her 55″ (?) TV. Along with that, I re-wired the area. My wife has been using a Fire Stick instead of the X-Box 360 to stream for the last six months.

If anyone is still using a 360 for that purpose, then they will know that the support window is waning. Applications are starting to be discontinued. The forced obsolescence is another reason why I hate technology. That being said, I do like to do some racing every now and then. So, I took the X-Box down to my office.

The problem is really how to connect it to my current technology. I explored the idea of capture cards to run it through the computer. At some point, I am going to add a TV as a second monitor. But in the end, I decided that I had an open slot in my analog KVM switch. I just had to adapt the HDMI to VGA and get sound at the same time. I bought an adapter and it works pretty slick. I decided long ago the video games were a waste of life force and false achievement so the reality is that I will not use it much, but I can.

My Linux experiment kind of stalled. The reason was that I had no reason to have two computers right next to each other. The challenge with the Linux system is that it is 32 bit and using today’s software is kind of a project for each item you want to use. I thought that I might try moving it over to the loading bench where I might use it for electronic logging of load data, research or streaming while I was working.

My main setback was that I didn’t have another monitor for it since I was using the KVM originally. I have been on the lookout for a used 27″ monitor and I can shift everything down on my work setup. I struck gold on one at Goodwill for $15 last summer but haven’t found another deal like that. Well, I happened across a free 24″ monitor last week. I am not saying this is how it will stay as I still wanted a same size monitor, but really it works and the price is right.

I have had it setup for a couple of days and we will see how well it really works. I noticed streaming some music that it was sometimes choppy. I wonder if I am reaching the hardware limitations as I think there is only 2GB of RAM and the processor is from 2005. Since the computer was slated for recycling, so far there is no cost in trying out the setup.

Now that I have two turntables, I have stepped up my scanning for deals on receivers and speakers. My plan is to have a setup together by my son’s birthday in July. But, I guess I can’t control my cheapness mantra on the project. I scan Craigslist every couple of days as well as stop into second hand shops when convenient. These speakers I saw in town for $30.

The other thing I was thinking about was having a second set of speakers so that we can setup music for family events and not have to move everything. I really haven’t decided if these tower speakers I will use or I will swap out for the existing bookshelf speakers or even keep both. Ideally, I would find bookshelf speakers for my kid’s setup. Ultimately, it is going to depend on where my stereo system eventually lands.

End Your Programming Routine: I suppose that there are more harmful things in life then buying used junk. But, everybody needs some purpose in life. Mine seems to be collecting stuff that I don’t really need. That being said I guess I find it fun. It appeals to my thriftiness and sense of environmental conservation. If I can get something that should last my lifetime for 5-10% of its initial cost, it is preferable by a long way to simply purchasing new things.

August 9, 2021 – Linux Mint, Learning and Relearning Stuff

August 9, 2021 /

I don’t have a good grasp on where I am going this week for a lot of reasons that I am not going to get completely into here. A part of it was that was that I have been working late and getting up early (for my job). I also worked all day Saturday and a half day Sunday. And when I wasn’t working I was gone for various social commitments. That always sort of fogs up whatever I want to accomplish here.

A few weeks back, I mentioned that I was experimenting with Linux. I solved my problem with why Unbuntu wasn’t loading. That was because I downloaded a 64 bit version and I was trying to launch it on 32bit hardware. After very little research, I saw that Linux Mint was still a recommended 32bit version and so I downloaded that. Low and behold, it worked. I could launch Linux from a thumb drive on my old (2005) computer.

Part of the reason that I wanted to mess around with this machine and Linux was to see if keeping this currently working computer was worth the space it was taking. Twice, I have pulled this machine out of the Tecnho-Junk (recycling) pile. To carry this experiment a little further, I decided to do a small upgrade. I wanted to spend as little as possible but improve the 2GB of RAM and 7GB of remaining hard drive space to give it the best chance of evaluation. So, I spent $30 for 4GB of Ram and a 320 GB hard-drive. I figured the worst cast scenario is that I could use the hard drive in my other computer as a backup, so I only risked $10 for the RAM which I may not have needed anyway.

Through some research, I learned that the most RAM a 32bit system could utilize was 4GB. I also learned that the difference between XP Home and Professional was that Home was 32bit and Professional was 64bit. Therefore, the hardware that was put in the box when it was built was the limiting factor. Even though I had four slots for RAM, My machine was only utilizing 3GB. It seems like another limitation that I have is that I can’t utilize the max amount anyway.

Next I had to decide what to do with the new hard drive. I wanted the dual boot option to go into XP or Linux. Maybe it was the price or I was just ignorant it had been a long time since I ordered a hard drive. I ordered an IDE hard drive instead of an ATA hard drive. I had to scratch my head with Master/Slave jumpers and cable position conundrum (It has probably been 15 years since I dealt with that stuff).

People newer to this arena have no idea how much easier it is than it used to be. After getting the drive physically configured to work, the drive needs to be formatted so that it can get software installed. In XP, that required putting the operating system CD in. In my case, my disk was SP2 and my computer was running SP3 so of course the CD would not read and home edition didn’t have a built in ‘repair’ option on boot up. Fortunately, my XP was working so I was able to format the drive from XP.

Once the hard-drive was formatted, then I could install Linux from the USB drive. My first problem was trying to figure out how to partition the hard drive in Linux. It supposedly works in NTSB format but it wanted to use EXT4 format. I muddled my way through that and then I was on to installing Mint which went pretty smoothly.

After I got everything installed. There were about 20 operating system updates that I could run, which I did.

So… It works and it is not too slow. So far, what I have noticed is that things are slightly different than Windows. Not a lot, but enough that I don’t know what I am doing. For instance, HP doesn’t directly make any printer drivers and my printer is supposedly compatible. But I can’t (yet) figure out how to find the printer on the network and get it to print even though I have the IP address. It seems like the hardliners are into command based help which is all foreign to me as well so I get lost in all of the vocabulary

End Your Programming Routine: I have also noticed that some of the software I run like Myki password manager is 64 bit only. There may come some limitations with the age of the hardware that it might not make sense to keep this thing around eventually. But I am going to keep messing around with it for the heck of it for now

July 21, 2021 – Trying For the Second Time

July 21, 2021 /

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.