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#1 Re: Hardware & System Configuration » Lenovo Ideapad 100e F-Keys Work in Mint/Ubuntu but not Devuan/Debian » Yesterday 19:17:57

Thanks, A.

I finally had some time to look into the the kernel log and the only keyboard related stuff I found was

Ubuntu 22.04-1 (Linux version 5.15.0-43-generic)
[    0.740658] kernel: input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /devices/platform/i8042/serio0/input/input3
[   23.149199] systemd[1]: Starting Set the console keyboard layout...
[   25.390693] kernel: input: Ideapad extra buttons as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.0/PNP0C09:00/VPC2004:01/input/input8

Devuan 4 (Linux version 5.10.0-23-amd6)
[    2.366659] input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /devices/platform/i8042/serio0/input/input0
[    5.505134] input: Ideapad extra buttons as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.0/PNP0C09:00/VPC2004:01/input/input6

It's been a thousand years since I compiled my own kernel, so I can't say that I am in any way an expert, but looking at this output it would seem that both systems pick up the special keys at the kernel level. There must be some additional software configuration that makes them work.

OS: Devuan GNU/Linux 4 (chimaera) x86_64 
Host: 81CY Lenovo 100e 
Kernel: 5.10.0-23-amd64 
Uptime: 1 day, 1 hour, 35 mins 
Packages: 2066 (dpkg) 
Shell: bash 5.1.4 
Resolution: 1366x768 
DE: Xfce 4.16 
WM: Xfwm4 
WM Theme: Clearlooks-Phenix-Deepsea 
Theme: Clearlooks-Phenix-Deepsea [GTK2], Adwaita [GTK3] 
Icons: Deepsea [GTK2], Adwaita [GTK3] 
Terminal: xfce4-terminal 
Terminal Font: Monospace 14 
CPU: Intel Celeron N3450 (4) @ 2.200GHz 
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 500 
Memory: 947MiB / 3553MiB 

This is a stock installation of Devuan. "Launch Gnome services at startup" is checked in the "Sessions and Startup" window, something Ubuntu (Gnome) and Mint (Xfce) also do.

I'm not really sure where else to look or what to look for, as I don't recall having any keyboard related issues over the years. Hmm...

Seems the end point of Devuan's keyboard startup is loading /etc/console-setup/cached_UTF-8_del.kmap.gz. I'll have to boot Ubuntu again and compare the content of its keymap file. Seems reasonable the difference could be in there.

#2 Hardware & System Configuration » Lenovo Ideapad 100e F-Keys Work in Mint/Ubuntu but not Devuan/Debian » 2023-09-26 00:35:53

Tatwi
Replies: 3

This is one of those laptops where the function keys have special action assigned to them. The extended functions "just work" in the Ubuntu based distros, where as the same is not true when using the Debian and Devuan distros of the same version. I've tested with Debian Bullseye, Devuan Chimaera, and Mint/Ubuntu/PopOS based on Bullseye. As I say, all the Bullseye based Ubuntu distros "just work" (Win10 does as well).

I don't need to change the setting in the BIOS; I can live-boot or install a *buntu and the keys work as expected.

What is the mad science they're doing to Debian to make these keys work in Ubuntu???? smile

Ps. Loving Daedalus on my desktop. Thank you for all your hard work!

#3 Re: Off-topic » A warning from the godfather of AI » 2023-06-30 18:54:09

zapper wrote:

I find it hard to believe that it took some people till the 2010s to realize Bill Gates ideals were very problematic for people of the world and the planet's limate both as a whole.

To all detractors, yes, get rid of the richest top evil big tech corporations would be awesome.

Hint: Billionaire corporations need to vanish.

That only make a vacuum which will quickly be filled by similar opportunists, so history has shown us repeatedly. The only way to stop that cycle is to change "the system" such that exploiting others, getting away with theft, and committing self beneficial murder, etc. are no longer the easy road to becoming a wealthy, thus influential and "powerful" person. How can this be achieved? No idea. Sorry.

The original purpose of the monitary system made a lot of sense for it's time. Imagine travelling for months with a load of grain to trade iron, only to arrive and find that all the iron was sold already. If only they could give you something equally valuable that you could later trade for the iron you needed... money, it's handy! But, it's also a real big problem for humanity and this here ball of dirt in space.

#4 Re: Off-topic » Google to delete inactive accounts » 2023-06-30 18:28:51

zapper wrote:

@tawai I lost faith in Goggle on the mostly the same level, as early as 2014. What took you so long? wink

I've never been a Mac person, so when both the Blackberry and Windows phones took a dump, I went with Android. Prior to then, whenever that was, I had actually de-Googled. After re-Googling a little for the play store access, it just all piled on with the wife and kids using Chromebooks for school (and ChromeOS is kinda cool for what it is). My usage is still limit though. I really do only use gmail, drive, and Chrome/ChromeOS, though I use Chrome in an incognito window for everything other than gmail, drive, outlook, and spotify. I know incognito is not private, but it does prevent building a history in one's Google account.

Still, none of that speaks to why I heald faith for so long. Pragmatic optimism and the convenience of drive, I guess. That was, of course, before I learned that they have that really stupid culture that chases novelty and ignores the value of maintaining the quality of services; In my books, 800 days of 100% uptime for gmail is way more deserving of a raise than banging out yet another messaging app, etc. Google is broken, from the inside out, and it sucks almost as much as their search results.

#5 Re: Off-topic » Show your desktop (rebooted) » 2023-06-29 21:31:45

Daedalus, Xfce with Cameo-ALU-Dark-1.5.1 theme, Aguqlemon borders ( from old deb package xfwm4-themes_4.10.0-2), and Deepsea icons. Geany theme is Himbeere, with some syntax customizations I've been using for a decade... where'd the time go??!! smile

This is my fav way to GNU/Linux!

Xfcet

That said, having slept on it, ideally I would like a Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger theme. I love those scrollbars and the skeuomorphism! I may take a crack at making one.

#6 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » So what's the right way to install Steam and GOG in 2023? » 2023-06-27 11:25:37

thierrybo wrote:

On a Devaun/Debian stable i would say "go steam 'flatpak' from backports". I noticed that if you stayed on flatpak 1.10, some proton and therefore some games no longer work, while with the same proton, same games with flatpak 1.14  works.
It's the same with lutris & Heroic so the interest is quite major for gaming.

Using the installer included in the apt repos, Steam updated itself the latest version. It's been a good experience with the games I have tried: No Man's Sky, Bejeweled 3, DiRT Rally (Original), Ghostbuster's Remastered, and Black Mesa. Bejeweled needed Proton 8.0-2, but the rest worked with Experimental. Man I wish I had more Windows games on Steam!

The first distro I used was Slackware, back '98, but I switched to Debian (Libranet) in 2001, because apt is awesome! I've played with Slackware since and I love it in principle, but I really don't miss using it at all! For Windows games in Devuan, I wish it were as simple as "apt-get install stardew-valley", with a prompt to log into your purchasing platform for verification. Hmm...

I like "doing one thing" and for computing, traditional Debian excelled at being a single, coherent OS. Maybe that's caused by my C64 and DOS heritage, but it's what I like. In fairness, I did think Damn Small Linux, Salix, and Knoppix were cool, but not really as daily driver systems.

Anyway... We're here on this forum, using this OS, because Devuan is the continuation of that original Debian experience. Personally, I really don't want a bunch of frameworks, subsystems, managers, launchers, stores, installers, and containers mucking up the experience of my "personal computer". As I said in my first post, that type of Rube Goldberg machine is a big part of why I no longer want to use Windows. I'm not going to muck up the nice, clean, reliable, enjoyable Debian experience that Devuan delivers.

Having mostly ignored using Windows games on Linux over the years (apart from WoW and SWG), I don't know much about the subject. I do remember trying Lutris around 2013, but as I said, with a dual boot, it wasn't worth the trouble. However, in 2023 Lutris does seem to be the path of least resistance to play the games I have purchased on GOG and Epic, so I will give that a whirl next. If Lutris worked with Steam games without having to launch Steam, I guess that would be an ideal "one thing" for Windows games on Linux, but I am absolutely not into chain loading launchers to use programs. Type command or click icon, that's my speed, man! smile

TL:DR:
- Apt is awesome. Log live Apt and Devuan!
- Steam is awesome! Almost like Apt for Windows games.
- Still exploring options for non-Steam Windows games.

#7 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » So what's the right way to install Steam and GOG in 2023? » 2023-06-25 04:59:49

Managing Lutris "bottles", various Wine prefixes, and so amounts to a "web of nonsense".
Steams,

1. Install Steam.
2. Install game.
3. Play game.
3a. Pick different Proton versions from a drop down until the game works.

on the other hand, is not. smile

#8 Re: Off-topic » Google to delete inactive accounts » 2023-06-25 04:50:41

It really does seem that the only way to preserve a bit of your history online is to become just famous enough to qualify for a modest Wikipedia entry. "Golinux was an upstanding member of the GNU/Linux community in the early 21st Century. Here is a picture of him at Uber Nerdcon Extreme Linux Edition '29 talking to a group of doting fans". Beyond that our data is so much dust...

Google... See, I want to like them and be all happy about using their products, as I type this on my Lenovo Thinkpad C14 Gen 1 Chromebook, with my Pixel 6a snoozing on the bedside table, but they sure go out of their way to be unlikable and in so many ways! Seriously, I upgrade to the 6a from my old-as-dirt Samsung Galaxy 6 and i swear to Richard Stallman, the Google folks took every mundane task one can do in Android 9 and added at least 2 levels of futzing to them in Android 13. Swipe down and turn off WiFi with a tap? Nope, now you have open Connections and then tap the Wifi toggle, because that's so much better! Honestly, there are at least 7 of this exact problem with features one uses all the time... The usability of my phone has cratered from that high point of Galaxy 6 (itself I had to go back to twice, after giving my giving my children my Galaxy 8/10e/A53 at various times, because they broke theirs).

Anyway, I like using Gmail, Goggle Drive, ChromeOS, and (older versions of) Android, but I've lost all faith in Google's ability to not suck, let alone actually be good at anything.

As for our memories outlasting our lives, nothing beats good old books! There are plenty of nifty tools and services for turning our photos (and even spoken thoughts) into awesome hard or soft cover books. I did a garden memory book for the kids back in 2013 using HP's service and it has held up well (sitting on a shelf most of the time). If your book tells a story, who knows how it may captivate someone in the future.

#9 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » So what's the right way to install Steam and GOG in 2023? » 2023-06-25 04:12:35

GlennW wrote:

Hi, I have steam running ok.

I think it still needs 32bit libraries.

Enable multiarch:

dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt-get update

then install steam with...

apt install steam

that'll get you started.

Neat that the Steam installer is in the repos now. I guess the Nvidia proprietary drivers are too, but I am old so I had already installed them from the website, which necessitated installing libglvnd-dev, pkg-config, and Steam's dependancies to satisfy the driver's 32Bit compatibility.

Compared to the last time I tried it (a long time ago), No Man's Sky runs well enough to be playable. It ran smoother at higher settings in Windows, but it's still a bit better in Devuan with the i5-10400 than it was in Windows 10 with my FX-8320 (both using the same GTX 1660). I care more about consistent frame times than graphical settings and it's smooth at the 75Hz refresh rate of the monitor, so good enough. It's not like that time I tried playing it using my old AMD R9 270 2GB graphics card, which was still choppy in an 800x600 window at the lowest settings with FSR 2.0 performance mode enabled lol...

Steam has come a long way. Proton is great! I used to loathe Steam, because for 14 or so years our Internet was barely usable (rural wireless) and it would take hours sometimes to update Steam itself, let alone the single player game I was hoping to play. Offline play is why I bought a bunch of games on GOG back then, but we have fibre optic Internet now, so yeah, kinda wish I had purchased them on Steam. Ah well.

Any suggestions for GOG games? I'd rather not install a web of nonsense like Lutris, Winetricks, Protontricks, blah, blah... I'd just like to play the games, ya know? GOG Galaxy as straight forward as Steam/Proton? A boy can dream!

Incidentally, NMS and Bejeweled 3 both run more smoothly in Xfce than MATE. I tried JWM (with JWM Kit - so handy!) as well, but it seemed that both games played the same as they did when using Xfce. I'm actually fine with using Xfce, it was my main DE in the years between Gnome 2 and MATE post Mint 17.3. Thunar... I don't dislike it, but Caja is definitely more polished (and still usable in Xfce). Gotta say, Mousepad is the best basic GUI text editor, so Xfce wins some battles too!

#10 Desktop and Multimedia » So what's the right way to install Steam and GOG in 2023? » 2023-06-23 21:39:47

Tatwi
Replies: 7

TL:DR Answer:

dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt-get update
sudo apt install steam lutris libglvnd-dev pkg-config libopusfile0 libsdl2-net-2.0-0

Then use Steam to install your Steam games and Lutris to install your GOG games. You could use Lutris for both, but Lutris still needs to open Steam anyway, so you may as well use Steam directly. Interestingly, Lutris can add links into Steam for your GOG games automatically, so you can use a single interface/loader for your games.

The Epic game store would lock up after pressing log in. I didn't care enough to find out why, as I only own one game on it (Kena: Bridge of Spirits). If I fix it later, I'll post how it was done.

The games I own play well, either the same or close to how they played in Windows, using the default Steam or Lutris settings, except where noted below.

Steam Games:
No Man's Sky, Bejeweled 3 (Proton 8.0-2), DiRT Rally (Original), Ghostbuster's Remastered, Black Mesa

GOG Games (Windows):
Flatout 2, Grip, Lego Star Wars: Clone Wars, My Time at Portia, Potion Craft

GOG Games (Native Linux):
Spiritfarer, Stardew Valley, Terraria, Torchlight II

For reference, here are my specs:

Daedalus, Xfce, 1920x1200 resolution, Intel i5-10400, 2x8GB DDR4 RAM, Nvidia GTX1660 (not Ti/Super, Driver 535.54.03 manually installed), Kingston 1TB nvme SSD (root), Crucial MX500 250GB SSD (my previous SSD that I am now using as a sacraficial /tmp /var drive, with lots of over-provisioning).

Hope this helps! smile

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Original Post:
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First, thank you again for Devuan. I really appreciate being able to install MATE and carry on with Debian'ing like nothing ever changed! smile

I've dual booted Windows for two decades, because for playing games using Winders was "100% the performance with 0% the effort", but I am thoroughly exhausted by the Rube Goldberg machine that Windows and its associated services have become. Seriously, the last straw was when I signed up for the PC game pass, went to play a Star Wars game, found that my Xbox account was somehow linked to my kid's EA account, and spent an entire afternoon determining that there really isn't a way to contact anyone at Microsoft to fix the accounts. It's all just layers of circular references, even calling the support number (which I could only find via Google, of course) just tells you to go to their website... I'm out.

I am quite adept with GNU/Linux, I've even used it to play Windows games over the years, but it's always been janky and annoying, so I just dual booted the issue away. Not this time though! As such, I thought it would be wise to seek the knowledge of those who regularly use Steam and GOG in Devuan.

I'm using Daedalus (6.1.0-9-amd64) with Nvidia (535.54.03), MATE, and Xfce. SuperTuxKart runs awesome; all the normal Linux stuff is setup again (just did a fresh install of chimaera net-install no-gui dist-upgrade today). I'm down with flipping over to JWM or Fluxbox to game if need be.

So before I start eating up those precious TBW by flailing software willy nilly onto the o'l SSD, how are the kid's gaming on Linux these days? smile

#11 Re: Devuan » finit: new init system option for Devuan daedalus » 2023-01-21 17:19:21

That's neat and the diversity is impressive.

I will keep using System V Init, because it's old, and I'm old, and we know each other so well; Why bother messing with something else when what I already have/know works fine and there are plenty of other things I'd rather do (and need to do) with my time.

#12 Other Issues » Simple Apache with PHP media hosting for LAN? » 2023-01-21 17:05:28

Tatwi
Replies: 0

Forever ago I had used Single File PHP Gallery to host our family picture library from my Linux machine. It was (and still is) pretty great, but it doesn't handle video files and it's not great on mobile (Android browsers). So I was wondering if you folks had any suggestions for similar programs that will work better in those regards?

I don't want a dedicated NAS computer, in part because I don't want to be bothered managing it, but also because we don't happen to already own a suitable 24/7/365 low power PC and I don't want to buy one. The main reason though is that I know I won't live forever, so when I kick the bucket my wife and kids need to be able to actually use all our pictures and videos without my help. Truly, the best way for them is basically, "turn on Dad's computer, click the link he put on my phone" or "turn on Dad's computer, log into my account and click on the Family folder" or "plug the redundant back up external drive into my computer". We've tried both Windows and Linux shared network folders over the years and they're either unreliable or the end-users just don't "get it".

I was looking at Nova Gallery, but much like SFPG it doesn't handle videos and both of these tools require generating thumbnails inside the same dir as the original images, which is something I don't want. I'd rather symlink to the head media dir (on the hard drive) and store the thumbnails in /var/www/html/ (on the SSD where Devuan is installed).

If I can't find anything suitable, I will create something myself, but I'd rather not spend my time reinventing this wheel! smile

#13 Re: Devuan » Meet Chimaera's deepsea theme » 2022-10-14 15:39:36

Know what? I changed my mind, the blue isn't bad. I recently reinstalled and haven't been arsed to customize the grub and slim themes and... it's fine. Sometimes I can be too picky.

#14 Re: Installation » SuperTuxKart without Noto Fonts Packages Possible? » 2022-10-14 15:35:00

Huh. It's been two years since that bug report. I suppose it's not a priority for the maintainers.

#15 Installation » SuperTuxKart without Noto Fonts Packages Possible? » 2022-10-14 15:19:31

Tatwi
Replies: 2

Earlier I was looking for a nice font to use the sticky notes program in MATE, when I found that there were like fifty bazillion Noto fonts installed in a million different languages. So that was kind of annoying to scroll through.

Turns out they were installed along with SuperTuxKart. That's fine, things require things, I'm OK with that, but every font option in every language for everyone who uses the program? That seems like a configuration error. I suppose it would be fine if we didn't have to scroll through a huge list of things we will never use literally every time we access the fonts list on our system.

I tried an "apt install --no-install-recommends supertuxkart", but that will still pull down all of the following packages:

fonts-noto-color-emoji
fonts-noto-core
fonts-noto-extra
fonts-noto-ui-core
fonts-noto-ui-extra

Anyone know how to, at the very least, limit this to a single language (English)?

I suppose this is one area where using an AppImage would be beneficial.

#16 Re: Devuan Derivatives » An example of how Trinity Desktop Env (TDE) can look on Devuan ASCII » 2021-08-15 23:48:41

Wow that brings me back to when Slackware with KDE 3.5 was all new and shiny. I used that for quite a while. That was the same era as the Opera 12 browser. Such a good browser. It was also the only version of KDE I liked. For the longest time I preferred Xfce, but the screen tearing with Nvidia/compositing issue has become too much of a PIA to bother with given that Mate looks and works almost the same and has no such issues. KDE Plasma was OK I suppose, but I'd rather use Mate. The rest I have used, from JWM to Cinnamon, but really... all I actually want from a desktop environment is perfectly delivered with Mate. Newer does not mean better...

#17 Re: Off-topic » [SOLVED] Anyone with a 386 willing to satisfy a curiosity for me? » 2021-07-27 15:04:55

Oh you rock, steve_v! Thank you so much for taking the time to run those test. I sincerely appreciate it.

I added the results to the spreadsheet and I used it to make this comparison between real and virtual CPUs. I think it's kind of interesting, especially the math and logic related test that aren't potentially affected by a difference in graphics cards.
benches_real-vs-virtual-cpu.png

The virtual CPUs are faster than their real counterparts, so that's a good thing to know as it becomes harder to find functioning old hardware. Personally I have three old machines of the era that are just e-waste now, broken and dead for various reason despite my best efforts to revive them.

I just don't have the money to throw at a replacement, given the crazy prices for this stuff now. Back in 2003 I paid a whole $25 for my Deskpro 4000 desktop and something around $20 for my now-dead Compaq LTE/25 laptop (486SX 25MHz). My other two dead computers were free from the computer shop I worked at in 2005. Back then this stuff was worthless junk - my boss had a literal barn full of old computers and parts! Now though, you're looking at $500+ CAD for a verified working system that isn't beat to hell or otherwise abused. Heck, people want $150+ CAD for untested junk. It's kind of insane.

So yeah, I sincerely appreciate your time and effort! smile

#18 Re: Devuan » Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot » 2021-07-14 02:38:18

What bothers me is thus...

- I own a boxed copy of Windows 7.
- All of my desktop hardware has drivers for Windows 7.
- There's no problem running an old OS on a system that isn't on a network.
- I can install Windows 7 on my system without a problem.
- I can't install the GPU drivers, because they require updates that Microsoft no longer offers for download.

So, here I have a piece of software that I paid for which I can no longer use in its entirety, because the company who sold it to me removed access to some of its updates/patches/etc and no one else is authorized to provide those missing components.

Microsoft doesn't care what we want to do with our computers. They don't care that we paid for them and that they belong to us. They don't care if we have valid reasons to use older machines. In short,

Microsoft doesn't care.

For what it's worth, my lowly AMD FX-8320 based desktop is still a speedy super computer for me, from compiling with GCC in Linux to playing games in Windows 10. I can't justify spending the money to upgrade it just so it can do all the same stuff, but faster... and with Secure Boot / TPM.

It is a bummer that it will become harder to find hardware that doesn't come with all this new crud. Hard to say how much that will matter, but "very little" is my feeling, should this plateau of computing continue on through the 2030s (I mean really, other than "faster and with higher detail" and the smartphone form factor, fuck all has changed in computing since 2001).

#19 Re: Off-topic » [SOLVED] Anyone with a 386 willing to satisfy a curiosity for me? » 2021-07-14 02:09:08

zapper wrote:

Although if all else fails, try dosbox-x maybe? idk... sad

The idea here in this post is to get results using real hardware so there is an accurate baseline for performance characteristics.

I do have results from various emulators, but these results show that the emulators aren't entirely accurate (PCem Pentium 233MMX is 30% faster than my real Pentium 233MMX machine), so I'd like to get some accurate results from real hardware. Incidentally, DOSBox and DOSBox-X performance is identical when set to the same cycles, regardless of any core/cpu related setting available in DOSBox-x, so it's not worth the hassle of compiling/using DOSBox-x for this use case.

steve_v wrote:

No 386 unfortunately, the oldest operational machine I have is an IBM PC 330 100-DX4 (AKA 6571-W5L).
Intel 486 DX4-100, 256k L2 (WT), 48MB 70ns FPM RAM, CL-GD5430 video (via VLB-PCI bridge).
I have a DX2-66 CPU I could drop in it for some extra slowness, and I could probably try underclocking it, if the IBM CrippleBIOS(TM) will let me of course.

It's running the latest FreeDOS, which I'm not overly keen to uproot, and the drive is a) FAT32 formatted, and b) a complete bastard to get at, so if you want such a data point you'll have to point me at a source for this QBasic whatsit. I was a Pascal nerd back when, so I never had need or desire to go near it.

That's a nice machine! Technically my first PC was a hand-me-down 486DX4 100 clone that I used for a bit in 1998. Getting it running taught me how to remove a Master Boot Sector virus, shortly after learning what a boot sector was!

If you're able to down clock you 486 to 33MHz that would be great, but the results at 66MHz or 100MHz would be excellent as well, because I could compare them to my results from emulated systems (using PCem version 17). Also, from what I have seen through emulated system, a 486DX2/66 ends up being exactly twice as fast in the benchmark as a 486DX33, so halving the results on a real 486DX2/66 should be an accurate representation of a 486DX33.

As far as running the software goes, Qbasic is included in the DOS 6.22 boot disk available here,

https://www.allbootdisks.com/download/dos.html

So it's possible to you write that image to a floppy and boot your computer using it rather than FreeDOS. If you copy my BENCHES.BAS file onto the floppy disk, you can run it like so

qbasic /run benches.bas

The results can be saved to a text file, results.text. To exit Qbasic, press Alt to open the menu, then arrow down the File menu and select Exit.

Alternately, you could download QBasic 1.1 from qbasic.net here,

https://www.qbasic.net/en/qbasic-downlo … preter.htm

and add it to your FreeDOS installation, as it's 100% compatible with FreeDOS.

I sincerely appreciate your time and consideration! Please don't feel obligated to help, especially if it means futzing with your hardware to do so. My burning curiosity is not that important. smile

#20 Off-topic » [SOLVED] Anyone with a 386 willing to satisfy a curiosity for me? » 2021-07-13 01:07:15

Tatwi
Replies: 8

I've been puttering with QBasic 1.1 (comes with DOS 5+) over the last year and to make a long story short, I'm looking for someone to run the following program on a computer that has real 386DX 33MHz CPU, so that I can compare the results to how it runs in DOSBox.

The program is here,

https://github.com/Tatwi/QBasic/blob/ma … ENCHES.BAS

and the description is here,

https://github.com/Tatwi/QBasic/tree/master/BENCHES

Part of the long story is included in the description, if you're interested.

Other CPUs I'd like to get data for are,
- Intel 386DX 16MHz
- AMD 386 40MHz
- Intel 486SX 25MHz
- Intel 486DX 33MHz
- Any Cyrix/IBM CPU in this age/speed range.

Why?

OCD and I can't afford to buy an old PC just to answer this question, basically. But mostly OCD. smile

Thanks!

#21 Re: Off-topic » Today I Learned » 2021-07-01 01:42:22

TIL how to mount the disk image file I use as a hard drive in DOS with PCem. This is one of those things that I used to know at one point, but suffered from the o'l "use it or lose it" problem.

Beforehand: Run PCem, configure the machine, make a new hard drive image, run the machine, configure the drive in the BIOS, install DOS on it (using floppy disk images), exit PCem.

These commands must be run with root privilages (I use sudo).

# Attach the hard drive image file as a loopback device
losetup -f -P /home/rob/.pcem/disks/dos_622_62mb.img

# Verify the loopback device is the expected number and has the expected partition
losetup -l

# Mount the partition and open in the file explorer
mount /dev/loop0p1 /mnt
caja /mnt

Copy files to/from the DOS hard drive.

# Disconnect and unmount the hard drive image file
umount /dev/loop0p1
losetup -d /dev/loop0

# Verify loopback is cleared (shouldn't output anything)
losetup -l

It's still way less of a hassle to use DOSBox, as it uses files directly on your normal file system, but each emulator has its use cases.

#22 Re: Devuan » As Debian 11 moves closer to Devuan. Is there any reason to stay on De » 2021-06-26 17:54:06

There's something to be said about purpose built devices; I would prefer to use Devuan over Debian, because Devuan is supposed to work 100% fine with SystemV Init. I know I won't need to fight with the system just to get it work and that means a lot to me!

For me, it's not about "not using ____", it's about continuing to use that which "ain't broke and don't need fix'n"!

#23 Re: Devuan » Meet Chimaera's deepsea theme » 2021-06-26 17:37:32

As a person who prefers a blue/white desktop/icon theme, I like this new theme better than the red theme (which I didn't like at all), however this shade of blue is somehow offensive to my eyes. No idea why, which I know isn't helpful, sorry. I prefer the lighter blue further down. That said, I will 100% be replacing Slim and desktop theme anyway, so my preferences are moot.

Your effort is appreciated none the less!

#24 Re: Devuan » As an extensive user, GIMP 2.10.x is unusable. 2.8.x is great though! » 2020-12-23 15:58:13

GNUser wrote:

@contrast - The best place to share this AppImage with a larger community would be at https://www.appimagehub.com but unfortunately the requirements for submitting an AppImage there are too strict (the application needs to be compiled on a machine with very ancient glibc, for instance). It's just too much of a hassle.

Hopefully people who want an AppImage of gimp 2.8 will find this thread. I'll leave my tweaked, final version of the AppImage at this link indefinitely:
http://files.dantas.airpost.net/public/ … 4.AppImage

Cheers!

This is the version to use (it actually works), thank you!

I'm not sure why, but I had to extract the data files and link to them, as I did in a previous post, in order for the brushes, gradients, etc to show up. However, the "Filters" menu remains empty, even though GIMP knows to look for them in the /home/rob/bin/gimp/2.0/scripts directory. Is this the case for you as well? If not, any idea what I am doing wrong when running the appimage?

To run the appimage I set it as executable and double click it.

Anyway, thanks again GNUser.

#25 Re: Off-topic » Vivaldi: Best performing browser on Chromebook style laptop » 2020-10-20 13:43:05

Having a bunch of Chromebooks around for the family and the Lenovo 100e also being sold as a Chromebook, I wondered how the browsing experience would be in ChromeOS, using CloudReady by Neverware.

I am sad to report that hands down, ChromeOS provided the best browsing experience of all my testing in Linux and Windows.

- I didn't have to fix any screen tearing issues, because it "just worked".
- Scrolling was always smooth, unlike using Google Chrome in Windows or Linux, where scrolling a image heavy page, such as an Amazon listing, jumps up or down too far. In fairness, that happens in Windows on any browser, because bloated OS is bloated (10 Pro no less).
- Youtube and Netflix worked perfectly.
- Online docs also worked perfectly.

The crazy part is that my setup of Xfce on Devuan is super minimal and lean, yet there's just something about it that makes browsing in all but Vivaldi a little janky. Google Chrome really does not like the tear free solutions for Intel that work just fine for Vivaldi and Chromium, all of which are based on similar versions of Chrome. Heck even Firefox works better than Google Chrome when compositing is disabled. It don't make sense! smile

After the CloudReady experiment, I also tried Devuan ASCII and the browser experience was OK apart from poor battery life, even with a 4.19 kernel and tweaking. It's now setup with Beowulf and kernel 5.8, which works great apart from the janky browser performance, which Vivaldi minimizes.

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