Tech Nerd Ramblings

[thecatumbrella]

Imgur. I use it and never get any spam.

I'll try it out!

There is a way to upload it to gallery here:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/how-to-upload-videos-to-the-gallery.1631126/

Thank you! I started playing around with this last night, but didn't love how it looked on the page. I'm going to try again with this guide.

You guys are awesome!

 

[notabitail]

Well ok, I'm going to ramble for a short time.

I wanted to install Linux on one of my old laptops. I usually put Linux Mint or Ubuntu Unity on these things.

It turns out neither wanted to load right on this laptop. At all. They didn't want to use the device's internal display, instead wanting me to plug it in to an external.

I installed it, and then tried to get graphics drivers. The problem is that these are all NVIDIA cards, and they don't mix well with Linux AT ALL. Even worse, the drivers for these, the Nvidia 340 drivers, aren't packaged for Ubuntu 24.04 anymore. I tried some drivers someone had packaged for 24.04, but they didn't work.

Pretty much, these old laptops can't run the latest Ubuntu LTS.

I intended to try to try an older version, but it turns out in my infinite wisdom I didn't copy all of my piles of (real) Linux ISOs over to my NAS. Good thing it's got a gigabit connection, otherwise it'd take forever. I had to dig up my old laptop, plug the thing into my network, and copy over all of my garbage.

TL;DR: Linux isn't the universal panacea for all PCs, doesn't work with NVIDIA hardware well, and I forgot to back up files to a NAS.

 

[notabitail]

Since this lacks an nvidia chip, this computer can run Linux.

It wasn't doing the graphical glitching earlier. I get the feeling the GNOME system monitor caused that. YouTube at 360p with h264ify, vorapis v3, and ublock origin was smooth. And it was all on the Intel-grated graphics. I'm impressed.

Unity has held up very well on older PCs. It was designed for hardware that wasn't the latest and greatest and it seems to still be that way. 1GB RAM idle and barely any CPU usage.

This PC has 3GB of RAM and a Prescott 3GHz Pentium 4. If I were stuck with this I could probably make it work out well enough for me.

By the way, this is Ubuntu Unity 24.04. Not some outdated OS. Fully modern OS running on what is essentially garbage hardware with little to upgrade (only a PCIe 1x slot). Linux may not like NVIDIA chips, but it sure does love hardware like this.

 

[azurbanclucker]

TL;DR: Linux isn't the universal panacea for all PCs, doesn't work with NVIDIA hardware well, and I forgot to back up files to a NAS.

It's never been that. Hardware compatibility has long been an issue with all distros, and modern kernels hate old hardware. It will run on a lot more diverse hardware than other operating systems will, but it's not a magic bullet. If you want to run old hardware, pick something that's still on a sysV based kernel. That's the unfortunate reality of trying to adapt older gear in a world where support doesn't exist and even your best effort is outdated.