More Life For The Little Inspiron

So, it was time to upgrade the OS on the mighty Dell Inspiron 1000.
Yes, the little laptop is still alive and kicking like a mean MF, thank you.
Even after all these years of abuse and more abuse, it just won't give up, what can I say?
The battery, no doubt about it, is nothing more than dead weight, but what a hell, the thing must have something like 12 years or so.
It was running an ancient release of Linux Mint, with MATE mind you... Don't even remember when I made that install.
Of course, switched to Linux Mint XFCE (32 bits doh!).

Stupid Old Hardware

Today I took about an hour to play with some old boxes that I still have lying around -more like hidden in closets- on the house, the all time beauty Quicksilver, the Powermac from halcyon (PPC) days and an ancient Celeron, or I don't know "what kind of crap CPU it has", but has 1 GB RAM, and a DVI NVIDIA video card, AKA: Zeus.

The idea was to see if they even boot, and if they do, try to test a lightweight Linux Mint XFCE (32 bits of course) on Zeus and Ubuntu Mate (PPC, of course) on the Quicksilver.

Zeus booted all-right to an Ubuntu 10.04, and the damned CD-ROM (remember those???) refused to work for quite a while, when it did, it was impossible to boot from it; go figure.
Gave it a try booting from a USB, but I had even less luck. With the Quicksilver I had no luck at all, impossible to make it boot from the CD-ROM, although, it did boot A Ok onto Tiger (remember that glorious OS?).

Total fail on this matter, but, ITOH, I don't know why I even bother, those boxes, specially Zeus, are a total a complete piece of crap, I should throw it to the garbage.
The Quicksilver is really beauty to look at, but both would make a terrible desktop experience nowadays.

Just Like Yesterday

Yesterday afternoon played a bit with Ubuntu MATE (16.04 of course) on my really, really old yet somehow trusty T43.
It comes with a built-in Global Menu implementation (go figure and yet, gloria aleluya for the initiative!!!) which works with most of the programs (Open Office doesn't, for instance).
This particular distro seems like a nice enough option for my ageing hulking beast, the PowerMac Dual Proc, the infamous QuickSilver.
Or perhaps, this is the answer to the eternal question: Reasons to get (or not) a PowerBook Nowadays

The current Linux Mint MATE desktop

MATE's actual look.
One of the stock Qiana wallpapers, with a customized (by me) version of CobiBird, and the über trendy Moka icon set.

Linux Mint 17: Stubborn locales

Even tho I've always set English as the only language on pretty much all of my boxes, I've noted that since the latest Ubuntu release (and it seems on its derivatives as well) the date on the Taskbar keeps appearing on Spanish.

To get an even language -English on this case- across the whole desktop, launch the Languages program, and click on "Apply System Wide".

MATE: Set global Emacs key bindings

This is by far (well maybe the cursor shape customization goes head to head with this...) that I have to setup no matter what on any box I get my hands on...
But, it seems like the new MATE version doesn't honour the way I've set this up on the previous Linux Mint LTS.
On Linux Mint 17, running MATE (duh!) I've used this:

gsettings set org.mate.interface gtk-key-theme "Emacs"

Mint-z Less Installation

A bit more on the Linux Mint upgrade on my Thinkpad T60p.
Don't know what the hell happened but I ended up with a Linux Mint (MATE 32 bits) installation without any theme except the default installed.
Missing was my favorite GTK one, Mint-Z...

I thought something went wrong during the installation, and maybe the theme got left behind (strange since everything else works A Ok...)
Anyways, booted onto the USB key I used to make the install, and lo and behold, same problem...
In the end, simply copied the Mint-Z from an Linux Mint 13, doesn't seem to be any problem.

Stilgar got its Mint

Been truly busy lately, but, not that busy to been unable to update to the newest Mint LTS release.
Just finished installing the MATE one, a 32 bits, on my trusty Thinkpad T60p, named Stilgar.
Will see how things go... With some luck this will be the OS on the lappie until 2019.

Kernel Crud Delete Mode for Stilgar

The never ending battle against old kernels goes on and on and on...
This time on my beloved T60p, Stilgar.

Somehow...

...this doesn't seem right...
Specially on a very, very old T60p.
But who am I to argue?

Not a nice backport

It was about a month and a half since I've backported both my MATE as well as my Cinnamon setup (on the T430).

Looking back, it doesn't seem like a such a good idea.

Both of the desktop environments have issues ever since, not big ones, but really, really annoying ones, specially on Cinnamon (Double Lock anyone?)

MATE too has its share of little bugs, the biggest one being not able to add Bookmarks (for remote servers) onto Nautlius, therefore forcing you to type the remote IP address or hostname, along with the username every single time you have to connect to a box on the LAN.

Kernel Crud Delete Mode for Stilgar

Another instance of the never ending battle in the cause for the deletion of old kernels.
Stilgar gets back a hundred plus MB for stuff.

Composite but not stupid

A little feature that comes really, really handy surfaced after the backporting/ updating of MATE the other day.
There is an option to enable the composite manager, and be able to, for instance, have my beloved drop shadow effect, but ITOH, to disable the dreadful creation of thumbnails when you circle thru windows with Alt + Tab, something that slowed the whole thing dramatically, to the point that, in the old GNOME 2, it became useless...
I was looking for an option to do this nearly five years ago...

• Metacity composite: can I disable thumbnails on Alt+Tab?

So, I guess, change -and new- is good!

Backporting To Paradise

Enabled the backports on my main MATE setup, in order to actually bumping up the MATE version.
So, after a huuuuge download and a reboot, things seem to be pretty, pretty good.
Will post later, after using it for a while.
The only thing I'm really, really missing it a nice Global Menu.

(Next) Distro Hopping, maybe

These last couple of days I've been watching a bit what's out there, and what are things looking ahead for the next Ubuntu LTS release, that will hit the streets towards the middle of April.
So far, sad to say, I think I'll stay with what I already have (Linux Munt 13 running Cinnamon & MATE).
Unity not only doesn't fixes its own implementation of Global Menu, but also it is doing everything it can to kill it for good.
On MATE, the Global Menu hack that surfaced about a year ago broke when MATE devels released a new version (besides, it was only for 64 bits, so that left many of my out of the game).
So far, if I have to pick a new distro to test, I have to go with Arch Linux, and that is only to be able to get the newest of the new GNOME 3 release running.

Kernel Crud Delete Mode ^2

Kernel crud deletion time, for both Usul and Stilgar.
I get a strange kinda pleasure deleting old kernels and re-gaining HDD space, even when, like this time, the HDD space is negligible.

Kernel Crud Delete Mode for Stilgar

Saturday is here, so its time to delete old kernels on Stilgar!
A measly amount, not even 400 MB, nothing compared to Usul's last cleansing.

Kernel Crud Delete Mode for Tango

It was that time of the month once again...

The current Linux Mint MATE desktop

A lovely one, really pleased with this one.

Kernel Crud Delete Mode

Time to delete a couple of old kernels from Stilgar.