Older laptops, linux, usability

Yes this is from April 2020

Exhibit 1
IBM Thinkpad A21m
Pentium III 750Mhz

512 MB RAM

ATI rage mobility
1024x768 display

Exhibit 2
Dell Inspiron 8500

Mobile Pentium 4 2.6 Ghz/1.2Ghz 

512 MB RAM

nvidia geforce4 4200

1920x1200 display

The surprise (to someone who started linux by juggling slackware floppies and CDs) is that all recent distros I tried at least came up to X. But they were generally slow because of lack of hardware rendering. Wifi was not always straightforward with b43 support.

Previously installed older distros (Debian 3.1, 5) on (1) laptop was not very usable - SSL . Windows XP after more than a decade of accumulation was very slow.

After many trials (included kernel recompiles which took overnight) with Debian 10, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Mint, Antix, Arch, and other distros, I converged on just doing what was done before - follow previous directions. Maybe I'll yet try to backport learnings to a newer distro.

Exhibit (2) turned out to be easier to get going than Exhibit (1) .

wifi with b43 turned out to be easier than hardware rendering

(2) Mint 13 with nvidia drivers
Tux racer works great

3.2.0-23-generic
xorg-server 2:1.11.4-0ubuntu10.17

(1) Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" with compiled mach64.ko and drm.ko
Tux racer not great. But good usability otherwise.
Firefox / SSL problem still exists. I dug out CDRW because this won't start from USB directly. And 2/4  discs didn't boot completely.

The linksys wifi card (WPC600N) only seemed to work well with ndiswrapper.

References:
http://www.bakarasse.de/pages/en/linux/3d-with-ati-mach64/ubuntu-hardy.php?lang=EN
    precompiled .ko were hard to download
    Using source from here, I was able to compile the modules. They sometimes loaded when using startx or X -config from console, but hard hang when starting X from boot.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21945

    I used ab582f64fd54565f66eba866972f0fe2c313f000 from https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/drm.git
    This worked for me.

    I tried changing IRQs from 11 to see if that had a dependence (Bios-config-PCI). It mostly made things worse.

    Adding agp_mode 2, made things go haywire.

2.6.24-32-386
X.Org X Server 1.4.0.90

Write to me if you want to look at xorg.conf or /var/log/Xorg.0.log

USB DACs and devices not found : windows

Establish on a different computer that the device is ok

http://support.microsoft.com/mats/Windows_USB_diagnostics

Problem found on:SMSL Sanskrit (not 6th anniversary) after using prior USB DACsThis had a SA9027 . Also not always happy with HTC One M7 - OTG

Environment variables
devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices = 1

Also 
Click View tab and select Show hidden devices

osx 10.6 full screen on virtual box

/Extra/com.apple.Boot.plist

Kernel Flags
"Graphics Mode"="1680x1050x32"

Recursively md5 checksum a folder

find * -iname '*' -exec md5sum '{}' \; > ~/output.txt

Change to md5 for osx

PS2 Guitar hero world tour drums on linux

The drums are treated like a joystick and buttons are translated to keyboard strokes.

This works on Debian squeeze
Install joy2key
Install hydrogen (program to convert keystrokes to drums)

make .joy2key in your home folder


START hydrogen
-thresh 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
-X
-buttons q w d c s x a z

Plugin USB receiver. Press LED until it blinks
Press PS key on drums (install batteries). It should select one of four controller settings, 1 LED on drums is lit solid.

Start hydrogen

joy2key -dev /dev/input/js0 -config hydrogen

Select hydrogen window to direct keyboard events from drums

Use correct joystick setting (js0 here)

Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64
joy2key Version: 1.6.3
Hydrogen Drum Machine 0.9.4
(All default installs)

Also worked with a slight change on Debian 8 Jessie (2016/11)

.joy2keyrc instead of .joy2key (per initial error message)

Linux cdreams04b 3.16.0-4-amd64
joy2key Version: 1.6.3
Hydrogen Drum Machine 0.9.6.1
(All default installs)

7Z to split, merge files

7Zip fun

copy dont compress, make 10k files
7z a a.7z ./out.a -mx=0 -v10k

make the full file, input first in series
7z x a.7z.001

Android 4.x pictures snafus

One way on a Mac:
enable MTP on phone
Use android file transfer

On linux:
enable MTP on phone
install mtp-tools
mtpfs to mount to a folder


May need USB debugging enabled