Tony's Linux and Open Source Blog

Becoming a Linux Podcaster - mintCast

2019-02-13T13:25:00.001-08:00

In October last year I joined the podcast team of the mintCast podcast. This podcast is now over 10 years old and has released over 300 episodes in that time.

The work in putting a podcast out even on a bi-weekly schedule for that length of time is imminence and not surprisingly the podcast has had numerous hosts during its 10 years.

Towards the end of 2018 Rob and Isaac the then hosts decided it was time to hang up the microphone in favour
of other members of the community taking on the role, and as previously asked if there were any listeners of the show who might like to come on board.

Surprisingly several willing volunteers who were long time listeners came forward including myself, and in the end shake out we have ended up with a team of 6 regulars.

Myself (I can also be found on HPR) Bo (From Electric City Nerds), Tony W, Leo, Joe (Linux Lug Cast and The Linux Link tech Show ), and Moss.

We are having a blast meeting up over mumble every Saturday to plan the show and recording every other Sunday, and recently did a very special show with some additional special interviews of previous hosts to celebrate mintCasts' 300 shows (and counting).

The latest show can be downloaded here:

https://mintcast.org/2019/02/12/mintcast-302-new-users-start-here/

We discuss starting the process of installing Linux Mint for the first timer to Linux and the next show will be about the software available in Linux and what a new user might use to replace equivalents they use in Windows.

If you haven't listened to the show check us out, and I hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoy making it.

Nokia 6 phone - first thoughts

2017-10-07T02:51:00.000-07:00

I decided that I needed to update my Android device a couple of weeks ago. After a little research I decided on the Nokia 6 phone. Before you say, 'but this is a Linux Blog' for those of you that might not be technical, Android is based on the Linux Kernel so I think its a valid topic.

This is a mid range phone with the following specifications:

5.5-inch 1080p screen
Snapdragon 430 chip set

CPU - Octa-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A53
GPU - Adreno 505
3GB of RAM
Dual 4G SIM capable (All UK networks)
32Gig internal storage + expansion with SD card up to 128Gig
16MP and 8MP cameras
Fingerprint scanner
3.5mm Headphone Jac
All metal Aluminium case

Price at purchase, network unlocked £200

The phone came with Android 7.1 and as soon as it was connected to the Internet it updated to 7.1.1 so has the latest September security patches.

The first issue encountered was that this phone uses a nano Sim card for the phone network and my old One Plus used the bigger micro Sim, so I had to get a new Sim card sent to me which took 24 hours. In the mean time I was installing some of the applications that I have on the phone and checking that all my contacts had transferred to the new phone, which despite a backup of same some had not migrated, but that’s a Google issue not the phone.

When the SIM arrived I put it and a 16Gig micro SD card into the SIM slot, the cards were recognized and after configuring the SD card as additional storage I was able to set my pod catcher and camera to save files to the SD card rather than internal storage thus leaving internal storage for apps and Android updates.

First thing I noticed over my previous One Plus1 is how snappy everything is the CPU upgrade was definitely and improvement over my old phone. Another thing is the fact that Nokia has decided to keep the 3.5mm headphone Jac which for me is essential as I listen to music and audio recordings at some time on the phone most days. A lot has also been said about the 3000mAh battery not being up to all day use and the slowness of recharging it if needed. For my use profile I find the battery more than adequate, I surf, use social media, take occasional snaps, watch the odd You Tube video and listen to pod-casts/music, Oh and make the odd phone call.

After a 14 hour day I have still got 50-60% of battery left. Granted the other night I got down to 40% it did take all night to recharge to 98% with a 2.5A charger, with the official 2A charger it does seem to be a little faster, but yes if your a heavy user you will need to carry your charger or a portable battery for emergency top ups.

So would I recommend the Nokia6 to someone in the market for a phablet, the short answer is yes, if you need the larger screen but can't afford the high end larger screen phones this is a very good mid range option, if you need to use the dual SIM capability it might be worth spending the extra £40 and getting the 64Gig version to give extra room for updates and plenty of space for Applications as you will not be able to use the expansion capacity as the second SIM uses the space where the Micro SD card goes.

After the first 2 weeks or so my first impressions are this is a good phone and well worth the £200 price point.

Running Raspbian Pixel on a P4 Tower PC

2017-08-20T06:23:00.001-07:00

Well I’m back again, as I said in the post I did about Raspbian x86 on the Lenovo x61s I was interested to see how the OS would perform on what I now class as very old hardware in the form of a Pentium 4 tower.

We have a spare tower at the Makerspace which gets used to test low resource operating systems to see if they live up to there name, so on Saturday (yesterday as I write this,
but a few weeks ago by the time this show goes out) I put the x86 Raspbian image on to this tower to see how it would perform.

Tower specification are: Pentium 4 2.8Gig CPU, 2Gig DDR Ram and a 40Gig HDD, which in its day was a very useful bit of kit, but technology has moved on and most people wouldn’t consider it any use as a working PC today.

First problem I encountered was the DVD drive was duff and I didn’t have the image on a flash drive, luckily I did have my trusty USB DVD in the bag so I hooked that up booted into the boot menu and set the disc off loading the OS. I wont go into this again as I ran through the install process last time, HPR 2362, but the install went well and I was left with a new install of Pixel on the tower.

I went through the new install process and was left with an up to date and password secure PC, I then rebooted to check what the resource use was at first boot, which I was amazed was a consistent 66mb of RAM, and about 1% CPU use.

Using the Chromium web browser pushes up RAM usage over a 100 but it was smooth and easily coped with navigating to resource hungry sites such as You Tube and the BBC. So first test passed.

I next opened a Word document in LibreOffice, this took about 10seconds to load but once open was perfectly usable with no lag, so should provide a good office capable PC.

So you can use the Web, Write documents, it has an email client or you can use web mail. And it’s not painfully slow, this PC would now make a very usable homework/first computer for any child, or a computer for an older member of the family that just needs to keep in touch with family and friends without breaking the bank. In fact you could probably pick up a working tower off the likes of Freecycle/Freegle for £0 and you may even get a small 17”/19” TFT monitor from the same place.

Yes it’s not as energy efficient as the latest kit but as I said last time the cost of a new PC/laptop can buy a lot of additional electricity in the time you may run it before it finally expires.

Blackpool Linux User Group Update - We are now a Makerspace as well.

2017-08-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

I had forgotten that I had made a post about our LUG in 2012 until I was reviewing my stats on site visits, and someone had viewed this post. Things have changed considerably since that post so here is an update.

These are the new details of what is now a Makerspace and LUG in Blackpool UK

About

Blackpool Makerspace + LUG

The Basement, Crossways Hotel, 64 Tyldesley Road, Blackpool. FY1 5DF

Blackpool Makerspace was founded by members of Blackpool Linux User Group, and was previously known as MakerspaceFY1.
Combined meetings of the LUG and Makerspace take place every Saturday at 10 am, unless otherwise stated on the mailing list.

https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/blackpool

Because the Makerspace combined with the Blackpool Linux User group, the primary method of contacting each other is still the LUG mailing list until further notice.

Mailing List
Subscribe here:- https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/blackpool/
post to:- blackpool@mailman.lug.org.uk
Twitter @makerspacefy1 https://twitter.com/MakerspaceFY1

If you are based in the North West of UK and want to pay us a visit please do everyone is welcome we just ask that Minors are accompanied by an adult for the safety of all concerned.

Distro Review - Raspbian Pixle x86

2017-08-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

This post is about putting the new Raspbian image onto one of the Lenovo x61s laptops that I have previously talked about.

These laptops do not have a DVD drive so normally I would create a boot flash drive using USB image writer in Linux Mint, but I had received a DVD of Raspbian with the MagPi magazine so I connected a portable USB DVD drive that I have and used the disc to install to the laptop.

On booting to the DVD drive you get several options including a live session with persistence (this allows the saving of data and system changes to a flash drive during the session if wanted), but the option I chose was to install to hard drive.

This gives a simplified Debian installer and for new users with no previous experience of installing Linux it recommends one of the options at each stage. The only issue I had was at the stage it asks where to install Grub it dose not automatically highlight the main drive (Sda) a small gripe but for a newcomer it could confuse.

That said the install went flawlessly and upon first boot I was left with the PIXEL desktop with the task bar at the top of the screen and a short cut for the recycle bin. The boot time on this laptop with a Core2Duo 4Gig Ram and 120Gig SSD was about 30 seconds which is good also it was only using 87mb of the available RAM on start up, this shows the credentials of an OS built to run on the original 256mb Pi.

First job is to navigate to Raspberry config from the menu bar by going to:

Open Menu > Preferences > Raspberry Pi Configuration.

From here you have a number of options but the important one is to change the default password from raspberry to something a little more secure.

After this I connected the Laptop to my WiFi network which is flawless on the x61s as it is an Intel WiFi card, I cant comment on other cards here.

The next task that I did was to run the terminal commands 'sudo apt update' & 'sudo apt upgrade'. This will result in an updated system with all the security fixes installed and any package upgrades that are available.

The one thing I was not happy about is that Raspbian allows 'sudo' access for terminal commands without requesting a password by default, this can be fixed if you feel this is a major issue depending on what you are using the device for.

https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/7133/how-to-change-user-pi-sudo-permissions-how-to-add-other-accounts-with-different

After completing the upgrade I decided to add the 'Synaptic' package manager to the install as this makes finding software a little easier if you not sure exactly what your looking for. This is as simple as 'sudo apt install synaptic' in the terminal and once installed you'll find a link to it under preferences in the menu.

One thing that I found that did not work out of the box was Audio, I had to install some Alsa packages and audacity to collect the needed dependencies for the audio to work. So I installed Alsa player, Alsa mixer GUI and Audacity and after this and a reboot miraculously audio now worked.

Also there was not battery monitor installed so I installed Batmon so that I could check the battery status of the laptop.

On the whole given that Raspbian has been built to be compatible with all iterations of the Raspberry Pi board the software installed by default while minimal includes all the basics for web use - Chromium, email - Claws and office work - Open Office suit, along side all the Pi favourites such as Scratch (including Scratch 2) and Python programming tools.

Would I use Raspbian x86 as a daily driver, with a few tweaks, I might, particularly on an older PC/Laptop. I need to try it on an old Atom Net Book to see if it will work well on a really low specified system but a Pentium 4 with a couple of gig of RAM should work reasonably well as a development and homework PC for a school student so could extend the life of an old machine you may have kicking around. But a cor2Duo is definitely a goer, even with a basic 1Gig of Ram it should work quite well and 2Gig or better no issues at all.

MX Linux

2017-05-14T02:39:00.001-07:00

MX Linux OS

These are the show notes about MX Linux that I did along side a podcast I have posted on the HPR (Hacker Public Radio) http://hackerpublicradio.org/calendar.php to be released on Friday 19^th May 2017.

I’ve recently done shows on current Linux distro’s that are suitable for older hardware but with a modern look and feel and fully featured with the latest software available.

As you have probably gathered by now if you have listened to my other shows I am a big fan of older Lenovo Laptops. My main Lenovo is an X230i i3 with a 2.5G cpu and 8Gig of Ram and a 120Gig SSD,
it did have Mint 17.3 running on it and after running Mint 18 / 18.1 for several months on my desktop PC I decided to upgrade to 18.1 on the X230i.

I completed the install and on first boot after install the boot time had risen from about 40s to over 2 minutes, I suspected a problem with the install so did it again with the same result. I couldn’t find any issues reported on the net so resorted to installing Linux Lite which is based on Ubuntu 16.04 as is Mint 18. The problem persisted after this install despite getting near 40s boots on the Lenovo X61s with an SSD and the same Distro.

I did another web search but could not find any other reports of this issue with the X230i so put a post on the Facebook community Distro hoppers. The response I got back from one member was to try MX16.

MX Linux is a joint venture from the antiX and former MEPIS communities and is based on the latest Debian Stable “Jessie” with the XFCE desk top environment.

I duly downloaded it and installed it in a Virtual PC using virtual box to see what it looked and felt like. The install is fairly user friendly although if you’ve never had experience of Linux and installed other Distributions a new user may be a bit unsure when asked about the MBR and where to put it, other than that a fairly straightforward install.

On install there is a fairly good selection of the software you would need including a full install of LibreOffice, FireFox, Thunderbird, GIMP and synaptic package manager for adding further software from the repositories. MX have also included the ability to simply install codecs and additional drivers and a software installation system for popular Apps from the MX Welcome that comes up at boot or if disabled can be started form the menu.

Also I installed it on a virtual 8Gig HDD and GParted reports use of 4.64Gig after install and updates, by default it only installs a 1G swap despite 2Gig allocated Ram in the VM.

I liked the look of MX and decided to give it a go on the X230i, install went smoothly and lo and behold boot was back to around 40s on first boot after install. So I’ve updated the install, installed my packages I use that are not there by default such as Audacity, Scratch and a couple of other things I use. I’ve also put it on the X61s I use and again working faultlessly, so I’m happy again. Since I installed MX I found out from a member of my Makerspace/LUG that he had experience the same problem with Ubuntu 16.04 based distroes and crippled SSD Boot times.

I like MX so much when it come to time to reinstall my Desk Top PC, which is about the only PC I use that is not constantly changing OS, I think I will be putting MX on it. This is a big deal for me as I’ve been a loyal Mint user for over 5 years but MX is working so well on the Laptops at the moment it would be good to have the same OS on the Desktop PC as well.

Will MX stop my Distro Hopping, NO, I like trying out new things thats why I have several Laptops kicking around so I have spare hardware to try out new Linux stuff, but it is good to have something stable around when you need it, hence sticking with Mint for so long on the Desktop.

https://mxlinux.org/

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

http://www.mepis.org/

Used Laptop Lenovo X61s

2017-03-11T14:30:00.000-08:00

I currently record podcasts for Hacker Public Radio a daily community podcast. I recently did a show to be released in the RSS feed on 28th April Ep2280 about using the Lenovo X61s Laptop as a cheap second laptop or child's homework PC.

This is an edited version of the show notes from that episode.

Laptop was bought at auction and cost:

Cost £36 including auction fees
OS Free (any Linux will work well) finally used Linux lite
Upgrade to 120Gig SSD £40 of ebay
New 77wh Battery £16
Total outlay £92

If you have to buy one then get an OS free one and don't pay more than £40-100 depending if it has an SSD and state of the battery.

Hello HPR, a few episodes ago I talked of using the Lenovo X61s with Watt OS and said I would report back after a possible upgrade to the laptop with and SSD replacement for the hard drive.

Well I duly ordered and received a Drevo 120 Gig SSD from eBay. These are about £40 each so make a cheap upgrade to an older laptops spinning disc and you can get a 60Gig one for less than £30 if you don't need the storage see review here:

http://www.enostech.com/drevo-x1-240gb-ssd-review/

After installing the PC with WattOS while it did everything you would need of an OS and was absolutely fine on the X61s I was a bit disillusioned with the amount of configuration needed to get all the software I needed working, definitely not New user friendly.

Looking at other lite Linux distributions I came upon Linux Lite:

https://www.linuxliteos.com/

I decided that this might be a better choice as it says it is aimed at new users, and being based on Ubuntu was a familiar beast. ISO was downloaded and duly installed on the X61s and as soon as all the updates were completed I looked at the installed software and it was more comprehensive but not at the expense of still being lightweight.

At first Boot which takes about 40 seconds, it takes about 300mb of ram and even with the word processor and Firefox in use Ram usage was only about 700mb. Audacity after install worked out of the box, which it hadn't with WattOS and I've already recorded and uploaded another show for HPR using the X61s and all went flawlessly. With the new SSD I am getting close to 5 hours of use from the 8 cell 63W battery installed on the PC.

While I recognize the X61s being over 10 years old is not going to meet the needs of a power user, its fully capable of being an everyday laptop for basic office tasks, some light audio editing, and even photo editing in GIMP. I was able to edit and process a 10mb .jpg image without any issues and exporting the final 12Mb image took seconds.

I was fairly happy with the X61s performance with the 80Gig spinner it came with, but the addition of an SSD has both improved performance and battery life to the extent that I would happily take it on the road as my only PC. Actually for the porpoise of writing this review I've lived with it as my main PC for almost 2 weeks and have not really missed its big brother the X230i i3 laptop I also have. In fact I was going to record a show using that and found that as it has a composite Audio jack, and as my head set requires separate mic and headphone sockets I wasn't able to, so one up to the X61s there.

Conclusion, if you have a couple of kids and you're looking for a laptop for them to do homework, watch Utube, and surf the web (parental controls enabled) then I would look no further. And if they get broken by said kids you've not lost a bundle of dosh.

After writing this I realized I needed a replacement NON OEM battery for one of the X61s I have with a totally dead battery (that is something you have to factor in to buying stuff from auction) Cost me £16 inc delivery on eBay and its a 77Wh one.

This adds about an Hour to the battery life compared with the 63Wh So don't be afraid to pick up one with a duff battery if cheaper as a replacement is not expensive and with the SSD give a working days life to the PC, and even with New SSD and Battery the X61s only set me back £92.

If your lucky you may find one really cheap on eBay, Happy shopping!!!

New Toys - The story of my PC hardware journey in last 20 years

2016-08-17T03:18:00.000-07:00

This Blog post comprises the Show Notes from a recent Hacker Public Radio Show I did, hpr2097 which I thought might interest my readers.

I was a latecomer to the world of personal computing having been at school in the Late 60’s and early 70’s when we hadn’t even got calculators, if you were lucky to be able to work out the intricacy of it you may have had use of a slide rule. Even after calculators started to be more widely used I had a lecturer at college while studying marine engineering, that was so good with his slide rule and mental calculation, he could, and would often work out equations far faster than those of us using a calculator.

I first came across an IBM clone PC back at college in 1987 while studying a control systems course this was a Intel 286 PC which the college ran CAD/CAM software on and we used it to learn how to create engineering drawings electronically. This would be the last time I used a computer until the early 1990’s when by then I had changed career and become a Registered Nurse. I was working in a residential nursing home and we had access to a Windows 3.xx PC which I would use to create templates of the clinical paperwork we used for record keeping.

Around this time I met my then wife to be and she needed a PC for the University Course she was on so we obtained a used Intel 386 PC from a Friend and upgraded the Ram from 1Mb to 4Mb which cost nearly half the price we paid for the PC £120, which in 1993 was a good chunk of cash. It was a time when there was a world shortage of Ram and offices were getting burgled just for the memory in the office PC’s.

While we had this PC in the house It didn’t much interest me at the time, this was pre internet days for the average user, we weren’t on line at work and the Word processing software was Dos based and I hated using it, so would do the odd things I needed to at work during my break.

Move forward 5 years and Windows 95 had taken over the world and there was this wonderful new OS called Windows 98 starting to appear in the shops. In September 1998 I went back to do a Nursing Degree in my specialist area of practice and found that we were required to submit all our course work in word processed format, no long hand written assignments this time around. So I decided that I would invest in a new home PC.

There were a couple of Big Box PC retailers in the UK at the time that advertised heavily in the press and on TV and I chose to go to one of these and bought a PC with the following specs:

Pentium 2 350 CPU, 128Mb Ram, 6Gig HDD, 56k modem and a DVD Rom. It also came bundled with a Scanner, Inkjet printer and software including MS Office for small Business. All for the grand total of £1400 which at the time was about a month’s take home pay so I had to pay for it with the flexible friend (my Credit Card for those of you too young to remember the ad’s)

I also signed up for an AOL account to access the internet over the 56k modem, dog slow now but at the time was the only affordable way us mere mortals could afford home internet access. I remember it could take a minute or 2 to render my Bank’s web site when I started online banking in 2001 and that was using compression software to reduce the bandwidth.

I used that PC to write all my college work and with the help of a couple of friends started to tinker with the PC, getting a 120 ZIP drive for it, and later adding a CD RW drive for storing documents and Photos that I’d scanned and later taken with my first digital Camera.

By 2002 the PC was starting to get a bit long in the tooth and I decided it was time for an upgrade and I had a PC built for me by a local shop with P4 2.5Ghz CPU 40Gig HDD and 512Mb Ram (later upgraded to 2Gig) and a CD RW drive again later upgraded to DVD RW drive. This PC cost me half of what I paid for the P2 four years previously and was to be the last PC I bought new, all the PC’s including laptops I’ve owned since this PC have been second hand. Some given by family or friends, some built from parts off Freecycle/Freegle, and lately PC’s I’ve bought at a local computer auction in the north west of the UK.

The title of this podcast is “New Toys” and so to the juicy bit, my Desktop for the last 6 years has been a Lenovo ThinkCentre 7373 Core 2 Duo PC with a 2.6Ghz CPU, 250Gig SSD, an upgrade from the 160Gig HDD it came with and 12Gig Ram also upgraded from the 4Gig it came with and requiring a bios flash to get the MB to support 16Gig. This rig has served me well but lately I have found it starting to feel its age and taking a long time to do things I now do regularly such as video and photo editing, Audio editing and virtual PC’s in virtualBox. So I decided it was time I looked around for an upgrade. As usual I was not in the market for a new PC, I could afford one but I don’t like splashing the cash unnecessarily. As luck would have it the monthly Auction catalogue included a HP Compaq Elite 8300 i7 Micro Tower. I checked out the specs and liked what I read. So Monday 1st of August I took a trip to the auction and as luck would have it I became the proud owner of said PC for the princely sum of £184.80, hammer price of £165 plus commission.

The full spec of the PC is: i7 3.4Ghz CPU (22nm architecture) 4 cores and 8 threads, 8Gig Ram Supports 32Gig 500Gig HDD, DVD RW drive and a card reader. Also came with a Win7 pro CoA but no installed OS.

So It took me 10 minutes to install Linux Mint 18 and another 30 to complete the updates and install my software over and above the base install. It boots in just over a minute which is only slightly slower than the old PC with an SSD so I guess it will boot mega fast with an SSD upgrade which is on the cards after I return from Holiday as may an upgrade to the Ram, I’ve already used some Ram from the old PC to increase to 12Gig but I need some matching 8Gig Ram to go to 16 or higher.

Well that charts my PC hardware journey over the last 20 odd years it’s amazing to think that one of the Raspberry Pi 3’s I own has more processing power than most of the hardware I’ve had up to the Core 2 Duo in 2010.

Podcsting with Hacker Public Radio

2016-05-10T16:03:00.001-07:00

This post is not strictly a Linux post, but as many of the contributors to the HPR community podcast site are from the Linux community I thought I would write about it here, and give them a bit of publicity.

HPR is a podcast community for those that want to have a go at podcasting but don't have the resources or skills to be able to go it alone from the start (although some of the regular contributors do also have their own independent podcasts). Setting up and managing a podcast site is quite a commitment if your not sure if you want to do more than the occasional show, and as it already has regular listeners you're sure to have someone listen to what you record.

HPR releases a new show every day Monday to Friday but these are all from shows made by the community members, and can be of any topic of interest to the contributors. As the title suggests many of the shows are technology related, but they don't have to be. Recent shows have covered, Repairing a Truck, brewing beer and recording a band. So for example if your into making Jam and want to share how to do this on a podcast you can.

So why have I suddenly decided to write about HPR. A few weeks ago one of the Volunteers who manage the Web site, posted a podcast explaining that there were only a few shows left in the queue for publication and if things didn't improve there was a danger that without any future content the site would have to close. This was the rallying cry I needed to get off my backside and record something for HPR.

It's not my first go at podcsting as I was a member of the fullcirclemagazine.org podcast for a few months and had also done a one off podcast with, Dan lynch (Linux outlaws), Pete Cannon (The Dick Turpin Road show) and Les Pounder (fullcircle podcast) called 'The Flying Handbag', which we recorded during Blackpool Barcamp a few years ago. But just me and a microphone talking about something I wanted to share with an audience was something I'd not done before.

The biggest fear I had was the perceived difficulty getting it in a format to broadcast but it's all taken care of by the community volunteers, all I had to do was record my show, (I chose to share about how I started to use Linux, as my first show) and then choose when I wanted it to be aired, follow the instructions on the upload page, and the rest is done for you.

So if you've ever been tempted to have a go at a podcast but didn't know how to go about it give it a go via the HPR podcast community

http://hackerpublicradio.org/index.php

Raspberry pi zero

2015-12-23T03:49:00.000-08:00

Well a few weeks ago the Raspberry pi Foundation surprised the world by not only releasing a very small raspberry pi called the Pi Zero, but at a price point of £4 /$5 in the UK /USA. And if that wasn't enough they gave 10000 of them away free with the official magazine, MagPi.

I was one of those lucky enough to get hold of a few copys of the magazine for me and my makerspace and thus the Pi Zero. As this board only has 1 micro USB port for peripherals and a Mini HDMI port for video out it was a couple of days before I could test it after getting hold of the converters. Once these arrived (cost about £3-4 for the pair on ebay) I was able to hook up the Zero to my lap dock.

I loaded the Micro sd card with the latest Raspbian Jessie image, plugged it into the dock and away we went. The Pi Zero is factory clocked at 1GHz and has 512mb RAM so is on a par with the raspberry pi B+ and performance wise it compares well.

However this tiny PC will for most folk not be used for day to day PC tasks it's size 65 x 30 x 5 mm, unpopulated 40 pin GPIO and 9 grams in weight, will mean that at this price most of these boards are destined to be used in embedded projects where the lack of connectivity will be a positive not a negative, as you are able to add only the nessesary conections for your project.

As it is fully compatible with the other Raspberry Pi's you can programme the card with a B+ or Pi2 and test out everything prior to putting the Zero in whatever project it will run.

If your into programming and electronics and have been using previous Raspberry Pi Boards then at $5/£4 this is a must buy bit of kit, if you can get your hands on it. The original stock of both the magazine and those available through outlets such as The Pi Hut, Pi Supply and Pimoroni all sold out within a day or so of release. With manufacturing beeing about 2000 units a day it will be a while before supply exceeds demand.

Linux Mint 17.1 and Old P4 Towers

2015-01-20T15:01:00.000-08:00

Well thought I'd write about the New Linux Mint update and some old kit I've been getting ready to give away. A while ago a friend asked if I wanted all their old corporate P4 towers which they had recently replaced and I ended up with 12 HP Compaq P4 2 - 2.8gig towers with 512mb - 1Gig Ram and 40-80Gig HDD's.

I've put Mint 17.1 Mate on several of these PC's and after install they Run very well with 768mb DDR Ram and 1 with a P4(HT) 2.8Gig CPU and 512mb DDR2 Ram runs very smooth (I didn't have any compatible Ram to upgrade and not having realised it was a HT (Hyper Thread) CPU so had been surprised how quickly and smoothly the install went.

On the whole all these PC's are running well with such low resource and make capable homework PC's. They’re never going to be modern Gaming PC's or run the latest graphics effects that are available in Mint, but for word processing and office tasks they work well and surf the net without any problems. You can even watch U Tube videos at low resolution and thus it is possible to listen to streaming music and the like.

The technology in theses PC's is now over 10 years old but with Linux Mint (other Linux Distributions are available) installed they are perfectly capable of having a few more years of use with a secure and modern OS on board. So if you have any old Computer hardware knocking around don't send it to the recycle centre install Linux and use it as a spare PC, set up a print/file server or donate it to a charity or just give it to a younger member of the family as a starter PC/homework Box.

If you have any other ideas or stories of what you've done with an Older PC let me know via the comments.

Windows Live and missing .dll files

2014-07-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

Windows is not normally a topic I cover here on this blog but I have a number of friends and family members that I offer PC support to. Today one of those friends from my church contacted me as she had a problem with her laptop that I recently installed Windows 7 onto for her.

The laptop was having problems with booting, sometimes it would and at others not but she was getting scary messages about something not being right with the PC when it did boot. My first inclination was possibly the HDD was on the way out.

Anyway I went round and found out the issue was with the DVD drive as a disc had been left in it for several months and it was set as the first boot device. Once this was removed the PC booted OK but to be on the safe side I ran a disc check. after completion of this no HDD errors and PC boots OK but when trying to access windows live mail it would not start and was giving an error message that the WLDCore.dll file was missing and windows live mail would need to be reinstalled to rectify the issue.

Problem being I couldn't access the software to back up contacts and email and was not sure if a reinstall would cause all this data to be lost (I suspect it would). A quick search of the internet relieved that this is not an uncommon problem, Windows Live must be quite a flaky application given the number of Help requests I found for the same error.

Luckily a member of the community had found a solution that did not involve re-instillation of windows live. This involved going into the windows live program files shared folder and copying the wldcore.dll and wldlog.dll files from there back into the respective Messenger, contacts and mail folders. This done I reopened Live mail and it started fine. While I was there I showed my friend how to back up mail and contacts just in case.

What bugs me is that given the number of Help posts I found with a similar problem some going back to 2011 Why have Microsoft not fixed the issue yet, if this had been an open source problem this bug would have been fixed ages ago. All Microsoft can offer is reinstall the programme to fix it (that was the official advice in the Microsoft solution centre), not stop the problem happening in the first place.

Lucky for me and others the Community came to the rescue with a simpler solution which did not involve the risk of data loss.

This was the post that rescued my day:

Thank you to elliottme11 on the Microsoft community site for this solution and saving me a lot of grief in the process.

As for my own day to day computing needs I'll stick with LINUX it does not break its own applications when you do a disc scan.

Ubuntu 14.04

2014-05-05T03:43:00.000-07:00

At the Blackpool LUG / Maker space last Saturday we decided install Ubuntu 14.04 on different specification hardware, the recommended minimum specification can be found here: http://aq.be/047dcb

As expected with the minimum specification the unity desktop would not install but more surprisingly neither would the the Lubuntu re-spin which is recommended for older hardware. Also a system with the minimum recommended to run Unity installed it ran dog slow but in hindsight this was probably due to the graphics card not being up to specification to run the more resource heavy DTE.

On a Dual core laptop the install was flawless and so was the user experience after install (if you like the Unity DTE that is, I'm not a fan but that is personal preference). One niggle was that despite ticking the box to download updates during the install and being connected to the internet this was not done, and updates were required post install.

Having done this at the LUG I decided to see what 14.04 would feel like on my old ACER Aspire ONE net-book circa 2008 Specification:

CPU, Atom 1.6Gig single core with hyper threding
HDD, 8Gig SSD
RAM 1.5Gig
Graphics - Intel GMA 950

The instillation went OK and took about 35 minutes to complete I then took out the swap partition, on such a small SSD this was eating up much needed space and also older SSD's are less robust with write cycles and constant writing on the swap can lead to problems with the drive.

Again the system said it needed to install updates despite my ticking the said box on install (minor niggle) on first booting up the system is using about 206mb RAM and about 9% of CPU capacity, it opened a new LibreOffice document in 5 seconds which while not lightning fast is very workable.

I then opened Fire Fox and navigated to UTube to test a video. as you would expect running at higher resolutions were problematic due to the limited Graphics of the Net-Book but I was able to run a music video at 144p in full screen which while not fantastic was viewable so no problem there.

Other things online such as e-mail and documents are a little slow but I put that down to the hardware and not Ubuntu. Would I recommend 14.04 to users, I suppose if you are already using previous versions of Ubuntu with or without unity then you'll have no problems with 14.04 and if you're installing it on hardware less than 5 years old with a 1.5Gig processor or better, 2Gig of RAM and fairly decent graphics then your not going to have any issues and you'll have a modern OS supported for the next 5 years.

For a new user who has been running windows XP and needs to move to a new OS but is reluctant to pay for a windows Upgrade then I would recommend installing Mint 17 LTS Mate, when it comes out at the end of the month. It will be a more familiar Desktop feel for windows users and as Mate is less resource intensive it will probably work better on older hardware. One point for new users of Linux while there is loads of support on the internet you can't beat having someone who's been there and done that as a new user themselves. My advice is look up your local Linux User Group (LUG) and get some face to face support.

I'll install Mint 17 on the Net-book when it comes out and do a write up to compare the experience.

OggCamp Part 2

2013-11-07T08:35:00.000-08:00

Well the Sunday of OggCamp started a little later as Myself and Olly did not have to be at the venue until 9.30 so we could have a bit of a lay in till 8am. We stopped off at the fast food place for coffee and a bite to eat again, then back up the hill to the venue. This was a little harder as we were both carrying our weekend cases as we couldn't leave them in the hotel. Brownlow Hill is quite steep when you have to lug a case up it :-(

Anyway arrived at the venue and after dumping the said case in the crew room (storage locker under the stairs) I was allocated the registration desk for the morning. I always enjoy doing registration as you get to meet loads of people as they arrive. Some you may know but often new faces, including some new to Barcamp events.

Just before lunch I managed to skive of for a talk given by Mark one of the UUPC presenters and one of the organisers of the event. He was talking about the history of OggCamp and what was involved in organising community events like this. The most interesting thing about his talk was that he said that while the event had been started by the 2 podcast teams there was now ongoing discussion as to how it could be passed on to the community to be more involved in the organisation of the event. Mark invited anyone who was interested in getting more involved to contact the team. This invite extends to anyone wanting to help in any way, such as being part of the crew right through to being part of the main organisation group. Mark also called for ideas on what to do for future events and it was suggested by one person that there should be a young persons track (junior OggCamp) and this was greeted with some enthusiasm as it was felt it would be good have something happening to attract younger attendees to the event.

After Lunch (which was again Pizza and as quickly devoured as the previous day) I was part of the Full Circle podcast Live show along with my co-hosts Les, Olly and Freaky Clown. you can listen to this recording via the website when it gets released soon. Suffice to say we had a good time after we managed to finally get the audio recording equipment set up and negotiated genial heckling from our friend Pete Cannon of Dick Turpin fame.

Then came one of my favorite parts of the week, despite it meaning the event was coming to an end. The live Raffle Cast, it’s always good fun to see Popey running up and down the stairs in the main lecture theater, throwing prizes at all and sundry and getting out of puff in the process. Then sadly it was all over for another year, I helped with a bit of the clearing up but had to miss the after OggCamp drinks and food as I had a train to catch back to Blackpool as I was back at work the next day.

If you have never been to a BarCamp type event have a look on the internet, there are several around the country during the year, Blackpool and Canterbury to name just 2 and of course OggCamp. There is also a thriving community running other events on similar lines such as the Raspberry Pi events (Raspberry Jam's) Python, open hardware and hack days. If you have an interest there is probably a community event that will meet your needs. Also don’t forget your local user groups and hack spaces, its often only a few people meeting over a common interest but it is a case of use it or lose it, if the interest and attendance is not there, these groups go as quickly as they were formed.

Well that's it for now, Happy Geeking and maybe I'll see you at an event sometime, if you see me and you've read this come and say hi.

OggCamp13 - Part 1

2013-10-23T03:07:00.001-07:00

Well what can I say, last weekend I spent 2 days with the wonderful community which is OggCamp.

This was my third time at the event and again I was a member of the infamous crew ably controlled by the more infamous Les Pounder a member of my LUG and the one originally responsible for my involvement back in 2011.

The weekend started with arriving in Liverpool at 7pm Friday evening for the pre OggCamp party at Leaf a bar and cafe in Bold street and just around the corner from my hotel for the weekend. It was a great evening, friendships re visited with members of the community I only get to see in the flesh once or twice a year at events like this, and new friendship made. I retired back to the hotel about 10pm as the Crew call for the morning was 8.15 with a long weekend ahead.

Saturday dawned too early but we (I was sharing with my fellow Full Circle podcast and Blackpool LUG member Olly) got up and headed out for a quick breakfast in a local fast food joint, then a walk up to JMU's art and design centre on Brownlow Hill about 15 minutes walk. After the crew call the first order of business after getting our crew 'T' shirts was taking 250 goody bags up to the main corridor for handing out to attendees as they registered.

Then the doors opened and the usual Melli ensued. Within the space of an hour over 200 people entered the building all looking to find out what talks were scheduled and when they were on, which is not easy as only the main track of talks was pre scheduled all the other three talk tracks were open for attendees to schedule any talks they may want to give (this is why barcamps are often referred to as un-conference's). There was also a glitch in the talk scheduling monitors and apart from the projected screen in the main reception the other monitors did not work, so those not able to access the Internet on a mobile device had problems knowing what talks were offered or where they were. There seems to be a problem with this on an annual basis but we survived.

My highlights of the Saturday were:

The speed that 60+ pizza's were polished off by the attendees

Freeky Clown's (also a co-host on the Full Circle podcast ) talk about his robbing banks and why we should all be worried, for those who don't know him he is a penetration tester of both data and physical system security and gets paid to breach the security of buildings and data systems to identify weaknesses in these systems. Hi talk gave us all a scare about how secure (or not) our data is in the modern world.

The live recording of the TDTRS podcast which is always entertaining if not suitable for the young or those with a sensitive nature, the main topic for the recording was do we need more design specialist to get involved in the open source community. You can access a recording of the show from the TDTRS web site.

My Final highlight of the Saturday was the regular live recording of the organisers podcast. The event was started by the UUPC and Linux outlaws and they do a joint live show at the event each year, this year sadly Fab the co-host of Linux Outlaws was not able to be at the event so the Crew Chief Les Pounder and another Full Circle podcast co-host was press ganged into service. We were entertained by the judging of the swag bag decorating competition. Luckily the audience had good taste and the winners were two younger attenders at the event.

There was also an interactive discussion about the demise or not of Ubuntu, it was interesting that most of the audience run Linux of some sort and about 75% indicated they had run Ubuntu at some time. However when asked if they were current users only about 10-15% indicated yes with the rest almost overwhelmingly stating they now run Mint (as I currently do). I wanted to point out that without Ubuntu many of us would not be using Linux at all and that Mint's success is owed in large part to the work that Ubuntu has done, and continues to do, to make Linux a user friendly OS. However I did not get the chance to make that observation due to shortage of time.

After the live show the days events were over but the day itself was not, there was to be food and drink at a local venue for us to continue to party (for some into the small hours), I'll tell you about Sunday next time.

The Linux community

2013-01-17T13:45:00.003-08:00

It's been a little while since I posted on this blog as I've been quite busy and as they say life has got in the way.

Anyway I've been reviewing my use of Linux and my support of the community surrounding the Linux operating system. I have been a full time home user of Linux for the last 3 years and used it for a couple of years before that specifically to rescue older PC hardware to save it from the electronic graveyard.

Over the last few years my Distribution of choice has been Linux Mint and I have installed it on a number of my own PC's in various forms, netbooks, laptops and my main desktop PC. I have also used it to rescue hardware for friends replacing a virus infested windows installs on a number of occasions for several people, some of these have come back for seconds, (and we're not talking uber geeks here) so Linux Mint is getting something right.

At Blackpool LUG last week we were talking of the community distributions and the popularity of Mint and the amount of financial support it receives from it's community and I realised the value I place on my use of a fantastic operating system but make absolutely no contribution back. Now I'm not a coder so can not help with development of the OS but I am in a position to support those that do, so I have made a small donation to the projects funds, and intend to do this at least once a year.

Now I know that not all users of Linux have loads of cash to splash about, but if you consider the cost that putting that other OS onto your PC, and given that many Linux users also build their own PC's or rescue older hardware this could amount to a considerable amount of cash over time. Making a small donation of say the price of a drink or a cinema ticket (in the UK this would be £2-7) once or twice a year or a little more if you can afford it, is still very good value for money and you will be helping the developers of you favourite flavour of Linux to continue to develop and improve the software.

We need to remember that Free in the open source sense is the freedom to use the software in the way we want to, but it still needs to be developed and developers have got to eat and pay their bills as well. If we don't support these projects there is a danger that software freedom will die, as the people with the skills to write the code will move towards the closed source propriety world to earn a living, and we will all be the poorer if that happens.

Raspberry Pi

2012-06-05T13:42:00.000-07:00

What is it? well to save a lot of waffle from me you can find out more from:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

But to cut a long story short, the Pi is a small PC with an integrated CPU/GPU and 256mb Ram, 2xUSB, Ethernet port and HDMI output and a micro USB power input port. Currently what is available is a development board without a case but future builds will be in some form of case. All of this comes at the grand Price of £30 here in the UK. The idea is to provide a cheap PC that can be hooked up to a TV (reminiscent of the 80's PC's, Commodore, Sinclair ZX and the BBC micro to name 3), it is hoped that this will enable children to have access to a PC to develop their skills in hardware and software hacking.

Well I finally got my hands on one. The first thing to do was to install the OS onto a 4GB SD card which I purchased from a local store.

I chose to install the Debian Arm image which can be found here:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

Having got the .img file it was time to write this to the SD card.

Having put the SD card into a reader attached to your Linux PC, you need to use the following command to install the image to the card:

sudo dd if=/home/tony/Downloads/debian6-19-04-2012/debian6-19-04-2012.img of=/dev/sd*

replacing (home/tony), with. (home/'your user name')

also you may need to change to directory from /Downloads to where you saved the file to if not in your downloads directory. Also the last part of the command dev/sd* you will need to replace the sd* with sd(and the letter denoting your SD card),

you can find the drive letter using the df -H command and you will get an output something like below:

tony@tony-ThinkCentre-M58 ~/Desktop $ df -H
Filesystem             Size   Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              154G    83G    64G 57% /
none                   4.1G   717k   4.1G   1% /dev
none                   4.1G   1.2M   4.1G   1% /dev/shm
none                   4.1G   418k   4.1G   1% /var/run
none                   4.1G      0   4.1G   0% /var/lock
/dev/sdc1              501G   334G   167G 67% /media/My Passport
/dev/sdb1              248G   168G    68G 72% /media/6f25f153-eccf-47dc-8ee5-7b70c4882145

Look for a dev/sd* that corresponds to the size of your card, If you not sure run the command with the card out of the reader, then connect it and try again, the new entry in the output will be your SD card.

tony@tony-ThinkCentre-M58 ~/Desktop $ df -H
Filesystem             Size   Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              154G    83G    64G 57% /
none                   4.1G   750k   4.1G   1% /dev
none                   4.1G   1.3M   4.1G   1% /dev/shm
none                   4.1G   418k   4.1G   1% /var/run
none                   4.1G      0   4.1G   0% /var/lock
/dev/sdc1              501G   334G   167G 67% /media/My Passport
/dev/sdb1              248G   168G    68G 72% /media/6f25f153-eccf-47dc-8ee5-7b70c4882145
/dev/sdf2              7.7G   1.3G   6.0G 18% /media/18c27e44-ad29-4264-9506-c93bb7083f47
/dev/sdf1               43M    29M    15M 68% /media/95F5-0D7A

in this case the /dev/sdf, don't put the number at the end as this is just the partition and the card will be reformatted during the write process.

After pressing return and inserting your password, go and make a coffee as it'll be about 20 minutes to write the image to the disc.

I'll go into what to do next, in my next post.

For a picture of the pi go to: http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs

Installing Linux on an old laptop for a Friend - Update

2012-04-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

As I said in the previous post it is possible to put Linux on some quite old hardware. At the same time as asking if I would install Linux on his laptop my friend gave me an old IBM T20 not quite as shiny as the one in this picture.

I had a spare 128mb PC100 Ram module, so I was able to upgrade to 256mb Ram, having booted up the PC into the installed Windows ME to check all was working, which it was, I decided to install Mint 9 and check out if they were telling the truth.

Well I can report they were. While it was a little slow with the live disc I have successfully installed Mint and as I write this the PC is ticking away installing 2 years worth of updates. Boot up time is nothing to write home about taking 3-4 minutes and once up and running the CPU (a P3 700) runs at about 45% capacity, and at idle the system is using between 110-120mb Ram which is about 40 - 47% of the available system Ram. Changing to a Linux distro based on one of the less resource hungry Desktop Environments such as LXDE would definitely give some improvement, as would an upgrade to the Max 512mb Ram the PC supports.

However for a free laptop despite it not being in good physical order as the case is cracked, there's a key missing off the key board, and the memory module bay cover is missing (it is 12 years old) I feel I got a bit of a bargain. The keyboard is not a problem as I have some spare keys which I can fit, and the actual key mechanism is working. I can pick up a memory cover off e-bay for £2-3 and I have a larger hard drive in the spares box if I decide to install it. I'm not sure if it's worth the cost of buying a couple of 256mb Ram modules of e-bay as it could cost me £30 with the postage and the PC's not worth much more than that.

I'll probably leave it how it is, and use it to demo the fact that you can still use older hardware with Linux and have an up to date OS at the same time.

Installing Linux on an old laptop for a Friend

2012-04-20T03:19:00.001-07:00

I'm sat here with a friends laptop which he asked me to put Linux Mint onto as I have previously rescued another laptop for him and he has found it very easy to use.

Given the transition to Gnome 3 and the controversy over the new interface I was in a quandary about what version of mint to install for him. The other laptop has Mint 9 installed and as he gets on with this I have decided to install this on the other laptop, Why?

Given that Mint 12 is based on Ubuntu 11.10 and security update support runs out in April 2013 it is not worth the hassle of having to teach him a new desktop interface at this time when he is comfortable with Gnome 2.30.

Mint 9 being based on Ubuntu 10.04 is a LTS (long term support) so will also get security updates until April 2013 so no problems there, he is familiar with the layout and how it works. It is as stable as the proverbial Rock. The hardware is quite low spec by modern standards (1.6Gig CPU with 512mb Ram, 64mb used for graphics) so an older less resource hungry OS fits the bill nicely. OK some of the software is not the latest (it still runs Open Office) but as his main use is for e-mail and internet browsing this is not a major issue.

Given that over 40% of Microsoft Windows users are still running XP (much to the annoyance of Microsoft) and older software on it, it proves (to me anyway) that those wanting to sell us the latest and greatest are not always selling (or giving, in the case of FLOSS) something we necessary need or want, and we could quite happily continue to use the software and as a result, the hardware we bought only a couple of years ago.

In my case I haven’t bought any NEW computer equipment for over 7 years, quite happily using second hand PC's and laptops either given to me or bought off those people/organisations, who always see the need for the latest and greatest they can afford. It's perfectly possible to get Linux running on old pentium 3 hardware with a CPU running at 700mhz and 512mb of ram, OK it will not be lightning fast but it will run and enable you to do the basics. If you look at the specification for Mint 9 on the web then it is possible to run it with:

x86 processor
192 MB of system memory (RAM)
3 GB of disk space for installation
Graphics card capable of 800×600 resolution
CD-ROM drive or USB port

While this might be the minimum (and I have run old pentium 2 systems back in the *buntu 7.04 days using Xubuntu with the XFCE desktop) with similar specs and it has worked. These days I don’t think I would look at anything less than a P3 preferably with a 600+ CPU and 512mb Ram, just to make it a viable system for regular use. Saying that if you were to use one of the very low resource systems such as Puppy, Tiny Core or Slitaz and you are only using the system for web browsing and e-mail, then using lower hardware specifications is possible.

So if you have some older PC hardware that is not able to run the latest Windows OS, (and given that Windows 8 will move to secure boot shortly, so unless you upgrade your hardware to support this you'll not be running Windows 8) you might like to consider putting the Linux distribution of your choice on it and extending its life by a few more years. Even if the hard ware died after a few months you've lost nothing as the OS will not have cost you a penny.

Making the transistion from Windows to Linux Part 3

2012-02-25T07:25:00.003-08:00

First apologies it's been a few weeks since the last post but as I said in the last post today I want to cover image editing in Linux.

The first Programme I want to cover is a programme for editing and converting RAW files (digital negatives) from a camera.

The programme I tend to use most as it has a simple and easy to grasp interface is RawTherapee which can be installed via your package manager on most Debian based Linux distributions.

RawTherapee has all the tools you will need to adjust the exposure, contrast, hue/saturation white balance etc. You can then export the image into a format that can be read by digital photo frames or other image editors. RawTherapee can also manage batch conversion if all you want to do is a few simple tweaks to a full set of images and then convert to another file format.

There are other RAW management solutions and I've tried a few but I always seem to fall back to RawTherapee due to its ease of use.

The next programme I use is the GIMP (The GNU Image Manipulation Programme) if you already have images in a non RAW format such as .jpg or .png this programme is powerful image manipulation software on the lines of Photo shop or Paint shop pro which are available for Windows and Mac.

It can do simple cropping of images or at the other end of the scale can use multiple layers for advanced manipulation of images.

This is an image of a Lilly that I took a few years ago and has been processed in the GIMP to remove all the colour then using layers and masks I have re coloured some parts.

So if your a budding photographer and are worried that if you change from a Windows or Mac environment you will not have the tools you need to process your digital images fear not, as you can see this is possible in the Linux world as well. These are just an example of some of the software available for photo editing in Linux there are even paid for applications available that might better meet the needs of professionals in the field, but the free (as in beer) OS solutions have always met my needs.

As with other Linux software its good to try out the different programs for doing specific tasks as you may find other software better meets your particular needs or you find it more simple to use. Again much of this software is available for the Windows and Mac environment so you can try it out if you do not have a Linux PC at the moment.

Making the transistion from Windows to Linux Part 2

2012-02-03T07:39:00.003-08:00

In my last post we looked at Web browsers and Office applications that are used in Linux and can replace those propriety packages such as Internet Explorer and MS Office. Today I'll covet Audio and Video play back.

The next most common task that people do on a PC is listen to their music collection and watch Video which you may have taken yourself or if your using a PC to stream Video to a TV you may wish to watch your DVD collection on.

First I must give a warning, In some areas of the world such as the USA and Japan some of the codecs required to play mp3 and pre recorded DVD videos are patented/copyright software and in theory it is against the Law in those territories to install software that lets you play these formats without buying a licence. Due to this, and some philosophical reasons, some Linux distributions do not include the necessary codecs to play back these propriety formats. If you are unsure about how to install the necessary codecs to play all your media formats, it is best to stick to a newcomer friendly distribution such as Mint, as these will be installed by default.

If your a little more confident and willing to do a bit of research, it is not that difficult to install the necessary codecs to get mp3 and DVD movies to play on most Linux installs.

Lets get down to what you can use in Linux, remember that if you want to try before you buy, most Open source software has a version available for Windows so you don't have to have a Linux install to give it a go.

Lets look at Music and other Audio play back. There are many media packages for playing back Audio in Linux but 2 of the most popular are 'Rhythmbox' and 'Banshee'. Rhythmbox is purely for Audio play back and will work with your CD Rom to play your CD collection on the PC and Audio codecs such as mp3 files. It will also link to internet radio and RSS feeds of podcasts you may listen to on a regular basis.

You can also rip music from CD's to the hard drive on your PC to back up your music collection, but again in some territories this may not be legal.

The other Media player you may want to try is Banshee, as well as being able to play all your mp3 and CD's, it can play Video files. The big advantage over Rhythmbox is the link with the Amazon Mp3 store for buying and downloading music and other audio files directly to the PC in a similar way that I tunes does.

While Banshee can play Video files I prefer to use VLC as my video application. VLC can play all video formats and gives very good playback and access to the menus of commercial DVD films you may want to play. VLC can also play all your audio files so if you want one media player for all applications, VLC can be a good option.

There are a number of other applications in Linux that can play either Audio and video and some as with VLC and Banshee can play both. As with Linux and open source in general as they are free to use you can try out any number of them until you find the one that works best for your needs.

In the next Blog I'll look at a couple of applications for editing image files from your digital camera. I know I don't have a massive readership just yet but those of you out there reading this if you have any questions or would like me to cover a particular topic please make a comment ant let me know.

Making the transistion from Windows to Linux

2012-01-30T12:44:00.001-08:00

For those of you reading this blog who have not yet made the transition from the world of Windows (or Mac OS) to Linux yet, I thought It was time I got down to some practical articles about making the move, and particularly what software I use in Linux that replaces common Windows/Mac applications.

Lets be realistic, these days the most common use for a PC in most households is surfing the internet and social media. Have no fear on this score, Linux has versions of all the main Web browsers, Firefox, Opera and Chrome, it is even possible to get Internet Explorer working in Linux through WINE, but that is for another day.

The screen shot shows Firefox running in my install of Mint 11. In all the new user friendly distributions of Linux, Surfing the internet, watching 'U Tube' video, and accessing your web mail, and social media sites is a simple as it is in Windows. In some distributions you may need to add the flash plug-in the first time you try and run a video but this only takes a few minutes and your up and running. With Mint you will not even have to do that.

OK so we can access the internet, lets look at the next most common use for a home PC, opening documents such as those produced in Microsoft Office. Letters Spreadsheets and Power Point presentations. Bring on LibreOffice.

This is a fully functional (and powerful) Office application suit. It includes applications for producing, Word, Spreadsheet and presentation documents, it can also open and save to the Microsoft Office equivalent formats including the later versions such as .docx, .xlsx and .pptx. It also can open documents from other more obscure office applications such as those created in Microsoft Works as I recently found out when I was sent a document created with this package. As well as word documents the other common format that is often sent or downloaded is those in Portable Document Format (pdf) fear not Linux has several tools that can view these documents, and LibreOffice can even create pdf documents for you to send to others without the worry they will change it in any way.

So we have software in Linux that can do some common tasks that you may already be doing in Windows. The difference is that LibreOffice will not cost you the £100+ that MS Office will cost you. If you want to give it a go there is a Windows version, you can download it here:

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

In the next Blog I'll look at Music and Video play back in Linux.

Blackpool Linux Use Group - Todays meeting

2012-01-28T09:48:00.000-08:00

Well as usual Saturday morning was filled with geeky goodness in the form of the regular Blackpool LUG. This morning we did quite a bit.

I helped my fellow member configure Hangout video conferencing in Google+ as he wanted to make sure it was all in working order in preparation for an interview he will be having in cyberspace on Monday evening,

Good luck to you Les.

Les also provided us with some goodies in the form of some new stickers to adorn our various bits of tec, these are of the new LUG 'Special Projects Group' logo that has been designed for us, and also the #geekupthetower Logo for the Blackpool Geekup group.

My self and Arron were fooling around making Ascii Art using figlet to then paste into the new RIC chat room we have running.

Simon a new member of the group was testing out his battery on his Aser Aspire One Net Book to see if it was duff or worse the charger circuit had failed, as it turned out it was the Battery, while not cheap to replace, a far simpler fix than the alternative. Simon also put the new Beta of Ubuntu 12.04 onto the Acer and was having 'fun' trying to get to grips with the UNITY interface.

I've said it here before, I feel these type of desk top environments are very well suited to touch screen devices, but PC's that use a keyboard and mouse not so good. (Me, an old stick in the mud, Never!!!)

Finally as you can see from the pictures I was shown how to put images into a Blog post.

How lucky I am to use Linux

2012-01-15T13:34:00.000-08:00

As this post is supposed to be about Linux this will not be a long Blog but I just wanted to let my readers know how lucky I feel to have discovered Linux when I did. Occasionally I do a little freelance computer work repairing family and friends PC's (to say I'm freelance generally means 'free') as they know I have some knowledge and can fix simple hardware issues and reinstall Windows if needed.

Well last week a work mate asked if I would look at a laptop with Windows XP installed on it that was full of viruses, the task being to rescue the data and do a reinstall of Windows. Once I had my hands on the PC I booted it up with a Live image of Linux Mint 11 just to make sure all the hardware was working, which it was, and while in Linux I copied all the data that needed to be saved onto an external Hard drive.

That's when the fun started, I reinstalled Windows but it has taken me 2 days to find all the necessary drivers, partially as Toshiba have not put the correct LAN driver on the download site and having installed windows XP SP3 before I activated the sound driver, I found that this would not work with SP3 installed unless the driver has been installed with the SP2 instillation which is what the PC came with originally. This resulted in having to do the reinstall twice. At least the second time around I had all the divers so was able to do the whole job in about 4-5 hours, including copying the data back to the PC after virus checking it in both Linux and with MS security essentials.

If I had been doing a fresh install of Linux Mint on the same PC I would have had a fully installed and updated machine in less than 2 Hours.

Hence my gratitude to having found Linux

Linux Mint 12 cont

2011-12-11T02:26:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I posted here that I had downloaded Mint 12 into Virtual box and was going to see how the new interface worked now they have moved to Gnome 3.2. Unfortunately due to issues with VB and the new Gnome interface I was not able to get it fully working as it should so was not in a position to really make any comments.

However Yesterday I installed the Distribution release onto a Toshiba R500 dual core laptop I have as one of my portable solutions. I'll not go through the install process there are a number of good videos on U tube showing this, one is to be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ULPs8R6Wl0

I like the the mint interpretation of the Gnome 3.x desktop but I still have some issues in that I do not seem to be able to create desktop or panel short cut icons to lunch an application, I have to go to the menu to find it. if this is not in the favourites bar then this can take a moment or 2 before your able to launch the application. Aesthetically this leads to a very clean desktop environment but productively it does nothing to speed up my work flow and it's my desk top and panel if I want to populate them with launch icons the system should allow this.

However Mint have provided a solution in the form of the MATE desk top environment which is a fork of Gnome 2.6. If you log out of Gnome 3 you can choose to use the MATE option before logging in again. Booting into MATE and your back in the world of Gnome 2.6.x as you know and love it. 'Warning' the Mint developers do say this is still work in progress, MATE is not yet fully stable and not all the functionality is working yet, but if this comes off then there is a solution for those of us who are happy with the Gnome 2.6 interface without having to jump ship to one of the other desck top solutions, such as XFCE or LXDE.

As for Mint 12 generally, desk top environment apart, this seems like another solid release, with all the usual tweaks having been made to Ubuntu 11.10 to make it a very friendly Distribution for those new to Linux. All the codecs needed for music and video playback including Flash and propriety DVD playback are included so if you just want to brows the internet, do social media and play your music and videos this is the Linux distribution for you.

If your a more experienced Linux user and have a more demanding work flow then you may find that Gnome 3 is not your preferred choice and until MATE is more stable you may want to stick with Mint 11 or try another Debian based distribution that better meets your needs.

For the time being I'm sticking with Mint 11 Gnome edition, as there is nothing dramatic in the new release that I need to upgrade for and I'll wait and see how the development of MATE progresses in the coming months.