Good Morning from my Robotics Lab. This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am going over how I set up a tower for my father as a Christmas gift. Let’s get started.
Seeing as I am scheduling this post for Christmas day, I can safely wright without spoilers. Remember that old PC I turned into a MineCraft server? Well I got another one and gave it the RAM from the now parted computer. To keep up appearances, I have the parted computer sitting where it has been for a while now, beside my main tower. The new machine is hiding behind a pile of clutter.
I installed the RAM before I even booted the new tower up, using my secondary monitor and a VGA cable. It detected the new RAM, and offered to do a hardware check. I figured, “Why not?” and went for it. The thing came back with a complaint of too much RAM. I tried booting to Windows, and it worked, so that’s a problem I figure I can address later.
I decided to try the Cinnamon desktop environment. I went to the stack of blank CD’s and grabbed one. The top had some stuff on it, but I didn’t think much of it; I was just testing a burn program. I burned the latest version of Linux Mint to it and washed the disk to get rid of the dirt on top… and on the bottom. The bottom of a burned CD is a little discolored when you look at it. The dirt on the bottom masked bubbles of unwritten portions of the disk, rendering it useless to me.
OK, so I try to use another disk… Linux Mint is 300 MB too big to fit on a normal CD: I had just ruined a burnable DVD… the only such DVD I had at my disposal, and it’s the first one I reached for. The LightScribe disks I have had sitting here are regular CD’s. I ended up redoing my Mint USB stick.
I charged in with enough confidence when installing the OS. I must have taken a detour when starting to install, because I ended up at a partition option screen. I backed out of there, and soon enough, I had a new Linux Mint machine. Sure, a bunch of the specific software looked different from Ubuntu MATE, but I used my skills to install Chrome, WINE (ironically named WINE Is Not an Emulator), and a few other goodies my father is likely to want, including a Glass Eye program that doesn’t natively support Linux. I had to get a .DLL file and stick it directly into the program file folder, since WINE was asking for it. Strange thing was that it was unwilling to just work when placed among other .DLL files for WINE.
On a whim, I tried installing SimCoaster, a game I enjoyed when I was younger, but only got 99% completion before my save corrupted (twice). It installed, but put up a front of ambivalence when I tried running it. The program made as if to start, but something didn’t work and it stopped without any error message or other explanation. I let it go for now before searching into the problem led to my plans being discovered. While I was setting the machine up, I grabbed my usual desktop and hid the icons and “start” bar. When I was done messing around with it, I assembled a custom wallpaper similar to the one I made for the Ubuntu machine.
This week, I decided I like to write my posts as I work. It might be a little more dramatic at times, but I should remember what is going on better. Final Question: Have you ever wrestled with WINE and won?