Is anybody else using Linux?

[Shut Up Legs]

I just got my 10-port USB 3.0 hub working under Linux Mint. Linux wasn't recognising the hub when it was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the rear of the desktop PC, but it appears to work when plugged into a front port. I can live with that (for now).

 

[mybike]

I just got my 10-port USB 3.0 hub working under Linux Mint. Linux wasn't recognising the hub when it was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the rear of the desktop PC, but it appears to work when plugged into a front port. I can live with that (for now).

It never ceases to amaze me that however many USB ports I have it's always too few!

 

[PhilDawson8270]

What do you actually plug into them?!

 

[mybike]

What do you actually plug into them?!

I've had to have a look:

Mouse
Keyboard
Joystick
Headset
Camera
Bluetooth dongle

The latter two are rarely used so could come out.

 

[swee'pea99]

Discovered an unanticipated Linux bonus last night. Having bought an old Creative Zen Touch off fleabay - a great mp3 player, if a little long in the tooth - I was having all sorts of trouble trying to get it to talk to my laptop. Googling suggested anything later than WinXP SP2 won't play. There's all sorts of highly techy instructions out there about uninstalling updates, rolling back from Windows Media Player 11 to WMP10, and so on. Or, as I eventually discovered, you can simply fire up Lubuntu, plug it into the USB, and there it is: Creative Zen Touch. Double-click on it and it opens the folders. Do what you like. Just like that.

 

[steve50]

Discovered an unanticipated Linux bonus last night. Having bought an old Creative Zen Touch off fleabay - a great mp3 player, if a little long in the tooth - I was having all sorts of trouble trying to get it to talk to my laptop. Googling suggested anything later than WinXP SP2 won't play. There's all sorts of highly techy instructions out there about uninstalling updates, rolling back from Windows Media Player 11 to WMP10, and so on. Or, as I eventually discovered, you can simply fire up Lubuntu, plug it into the USB, and there it is: Creative Zen Touch. Double-click on it and it opens the folders. Do what you like. Just like that.

And that is why I like linux, when trying to recover data from a dead Pc and windows will not recognise the hd or otherwise refuses to let me recover any data, switch to linux , plug in hd that requires data recovery and there it is all ready and waiting to be recovered.

 

[Custom24]

Discovered an unanticipated Linux bonus last night. Having bought an old Creative Zen Touch off fleabay - a great mp3 player, if a little long in the tooth - I was having all sorts of trouble trying to get it to talk to my laptop. Googling suggested anything later than WinXP SP2 won't play. There's all sorts of highly techy instructions out there about uninstalling updates, rolling back from Windows Media Player 11 to WMP10, and so on. Or, as I eventually discovered, you can simply fire up Lubuntu, plug it into the USB, and there it is: Creative Zen Touch. Double-click on it and it opens the folders. Do what you like. Just like that.

Yeah, but try to use an iPhone with it.

Even so, I make do without windows

 

[Custom24]

Yeah, but try to use an iPhone with it.

Even so, I make do without windows

And yes I realise this is Apple's "fault", not Ubuntu

 

[Shut Up Legs]

Yeah, but try to use an iPhone with it.

Even so, I make do without windows

On a similar note: I used to have an iPod Classic, one of Apple's truly enduring devices, but unfortunately it eventually started being unreliable (after many years). I then started looking for alternatives, and one of my main buying considerations was: no proprietary software needed to update the music library on the portable player. I also knew that iPod support was pretty sketchy under Linux, so I needed an alternative that would work better with Linux.

I eventually found the iBasso (a Korean brand), on which you can update the music library (music files, and playlist files) simply by copying the files to the player using a file manager of some sort. This of course works equally well on Windows and Linux.

By the way, I like the Amarok music player that comes installed with Linux Mint. On Windows I was using Winamp, and the transition to Amarok was easy: importing my music files and playlists was no trouble at all.

 

[ColinJ]

The £3.99 1GB sodimm has finally arrived from Hong Kong!

I will fit it to the Lubuntu'd laptop and see (a) if the memory works reliably and (b) if it does, how much it improves performance - the laptop will go from 512 MB to 1.25 GB, with a small block reserved for onboard graphics.

I will be surprised and delighted if that memory DOES work properly. It seems unlikely given that it is about one sixth of the price of the memory available from reputable UK sources.

 

[Shut Up Legs]

I just ticked another item off my Linux Mint post-install checklist: getting it to recognise my internal 7.25TiB hard disk. It turns out you can get 32-bit Linux to recognise these new, larger disks, @dave r, provided the partition table on the disk is of type GPT, not the more traditional MBR. The only complication is that if you use a GPT partition table for your BOOT disk, then your BIOS must be specially configured for this (and reasonably up-to-date, so this rules out older BIOSes).

In my case, the internal 7.25TiB disk isn't the boot disk, so I just used the gparted tool to reformat the disk as a GPT disk, then split it into 2 roughly equal partitions, about 3.8TiB and 3.5TiB respectively. Then I updated the /etc/fstab file with entries for these 2 new partitions and their UUIDs, so they get auto-mounted on startup. I then did a reboot to check all was well, and all was well.

 

[Shut Up Legs]

Just did more fettling of the new Linux setup on my home desktop PC. My preferred email sound wouldn't play for Mozilla Thunderbird, as it was in WAV format, and support for this format didn't appear to be installed by default in Linux Mint 17.3. So I downloaded and installed WinFF and FF-MPEG, then converted it to OGG format. Now my old email sound is back.

 

[PhilDawson8270]

And yes I realise this is Apple's "fault", not Ubuntu

Hardly Apple's 'fault'.

There's no shortage of 3rd partyapplications available for Windows to communicate and data transfer with an iPhone or iPod. The issue is that nobody has developed anything for Linux to do it, as there's very little demand

 

[PhilDawson8270]

Just did more fettling of the new Linux setup on my home desktop PC. My preferred email sound wouldn't play for Mozilla Thunderbird, as it was in WAV format, and support for this format didn't appear to be installed by default in Linux Mint 17.3. So I downloaded and installed WinFF and FF-MPEG, then converted it to OGG format. Now my old email sound is back.

Unfortunately, as much as I dislike Windows. This thread is a good insight into why Linux is a long, long, way to becoming a viable option for most people.

 

[Custom24]

Unfortunately, as much as I dislike Windows. This thread is a good insight into why Linux is a long, long, way to becoming a viable option for most people.

Your loss