Choosing a Linux desktop

Tue, 2016-12-06 22:18

radiorahim radiorahim's picture

Yes I like that place. Some years ago I had a couple of used "early vintage" P4's that I had picked up cheap with no hard drives. No big deal because I had my own spare drives. But, I needed some little plastic "rails" that were particular to that model of PC so that I could hold the hard drive in place. Found them at Above All Electronics.

They used to be right across the street from Honest Ed's but now they've moved a little closer to Christie St. on the south side. Shop is smaller but still lots of old electronic and computer "junque".

My netbook is running "Lubuntu"...basically Ubuntu with the lighter weight LXDE desktop. I prefer Lubuntu on computers with only 1 or 2 GB RAM. Mind you I once installed it on an i5 class laptop and it's really fast.

Tue, 2016-12-06 22:26

#103

radiorahim radiorahim's picture

BTW, I am having a problem of late with Radiotray on Ubuntu 16.04 based distros whenever I try to play a Windows Media "mms" URL.

Windows Media mms URL's work fine on Radiotray using the older 14.04 based distros.

Must be some issue with gstreamer that I haven't figured out yet. It's not a huge issue because most radio stations stream in either mp3 or aac format (a few in ogg vorbis).

However on the positive side, I seem to be able to now stream rtmp URL's in 16.04. So, "lose" one thing, but gain another.

Wed, 2016-12-07 20:00

#104

ygtbk

Off-topic, but at one point Knoppix, booting from CD-ROM, was one of the better choices for trying to bring a dead Windows box to life (or at least do the autopsy). Is that still true?

Fri, 2016-12-09 19:17

#105

radiorahim radiorahim's picture

Knoppix is still a useful tool. I have used it recently (although mainly because I had a disk out of a magzine handy). These days there are plenty of live GNU/Linux distros available for various types of repairs and fixes.

Fri, 2016-12-09 20:14

#106

6079_Smith_W

knoppix and kill bill slax had been my two favourite discs for that purpose for years (not windows, which I think I haven't used in 15 years, but repartitioning, formatting, checking boxes and general tinkering).

Since I noticed recent fedora discs come with gparted I have started using it as well.

Sat, 2016-12-10 14:12

#107

radiorahim radiorahim's picture

The smartmontools are quite useful to give you advance warning of a hard drive that's on death's doorstep.

Choosing a Linux desktop

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