Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am reviewing my first impressions of PopOS and compiling another short story I have about data recovery. Let’s get started!
Derpy’s Re-refurbishment
One thing I’ve learned while poking into Manjaro is that if sometimes a “Linux” program really just means it’s packaged for Debian or Ubuntu and other branches are expected to be tech savvy enough to bend compilers to their will. For that reason, I am re-refurbishing Derpy Chips with PopOS, an Ubuntu-based distro made with both privacy and Linux beginners in mind.
When the tale of Derpy Chips was last laid to rest, I had slated it for a new cooling system, as well as a new hard disk and RAM. The later two are trivial for anyone who isn’t afraid of the inside of a computer case. When the parts arrived, they basically went straight in.
The water cooling system, on the other hand, is a lot more involved. I waited until my father was available to do that with him, and I’m glad I did. We unmounted the radiator and the thing looked as if it had ten years worth of dust preventing any and all airflow! And the fans weren’t even blowing the correct direction. After applying a generous amount of vacuum cleaner and toothbrush, we put the radiator and fans back on correctly, but the old, gummed up case fan was on the brittle side. It’s now secured with a length of wire so it won’t spin off-balance.
The cooling system is now working fine. We figure that problem is solved now, but we have a spare just in case.
PopOS
I had a few bumps installing PopOS, but those were all on me. I have a new favorite USB drive to install Linux from, mainly because it’s USB 3. I forgot to umount everything before writing the install image to it, and things seemed to hang for an unreasonable amount of time. Otherwise, it was the smoothest Linux installation I’ve ever done.
I went into this knowing I’d probably be switching out the desktop environment. While the PopOS branding emphasizes the polish they’ve put into tweaking GNOME 3 to boost productivity, I am very particular about my desktop computers looking and feeling like desktop computers and not phones or tablets. Perhaps one day, I’ll get around to using it, but not at this time.
Minor complaint, but for seemingly no reason, CTRL+ALT+t doesn’t bring up the terminal. I have absolutely no idea why not, as that is the number one most important key combination in Linux — far more important than the Windows “Three Finger Salute” used in bringing up Task Manager.
X Drive
Well, It seems I just got a dinosaur of a network storage device working when it dies not two weeks later without fanfare. I spent a short while applying my knowledge from researching NFS to make it properly accessible. I went through and taught myself how to connect special to an SMB drive. I even made a link to it from the desktop. It worked. Now it won’t even acknowledge itself as an internal system.
Along the way, I was imagining a hidden clock in the drive. If the clock reaches zero, the drive stops working. The goal then is to get in, get the data, and hope there’s enough time. I posted for help, and Discord user Ghostrunner0808 walked me through the basics of single-use rsync. It uses the same syntax as cp, the copy program I was otherwise going to use. It can also start again where it left off, in case operations are interrupted.
I set up a little sandbox directory and experimented. While I wasn’t able to get all my root level hidden files to copy, I was able to get everything else. I also looked through all the help prompt and was settling on using the flags: -rtUv. r for recursive, t and U for times last accessed/updated, and v for verbose so I know it’s still doing something.
One of the network shares is meant for general access for all family members. Permissions were such that it made the perfect place to dump X Drive. I copied and modified an appropriate line from a working /etc/fstab to mount it on boot.
The whole reason I had conceived of this idea was because X Drive is little more than a regular hard disk in a plastic case and a special case to hold it on end. The plastic case was getting in the way of the SATA cable from connecting. We forcefully removed it, only to find someone showing how we could have done it without damaging the snaps.
DO NOT TRY THE FOLLOWING AT HOME. One trick I was thinking about trying was triple bagging the disk and sticking it in either the fridge or freezer. Some people have reported saving a failing drive this way, but further research found this is only effective when the read head is sticking to the platter; I could feel the platter spinning inside the case.
This one is above me. I need some form of professional help.
Sad to end on a bum note, but two out of three isn’t bad, though I will add that PopOS has only two downloads: one for systems with NVIDIA cards, and one for all other systems. I downloaded the NVIDIA one, thinking Derpy’s card was such, but I was wrong. Good thing the installation process is super easy.
Final Question
What priorities do you value in an operating system?