Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am finishing this project one way or another ™. Let’s get started!
I’m told that when I encounter a problem and a short, easy solution, I tend to keep tunneling on through the mountain until I break out the other side.
Project history: I spent two weeks generating four weeks worth of content, and now I’m back after two weeks of working on other stuff, and I’m ready to make it work. Somehow.
I came back to Micro Core and tarballed my progress and took another look at those Oracle Java install scripts. The more user-friendly looking one looked to be only for Java 7, and I need Java 8+. The other one wasn’t too hard to get working. I got the .tze and some kind of file with legal in the name. Both went in tce/optional, and… nothing. No successful install, no error messages, just nothing. I reached out to my Micro Core contact, but he was busy with other things, so I decided to change directions entirely.
I will say that in my experience with Micro Core, I mined up a lot of valuable knowledge, but it is time to be water and flow around the mountain.
Enter MineOS.
MineOS is toted as so easy, you can have a proper server for yourself on old hardware, even if you don’t know what you’re looking at when facing anything past what you learned by Kindergarten. I’m sure this will work.
I took my target machine into Third Workshop — mostly so I could have a spot to work without the normal household chatter. I also discussed what should be feasible in terms of my next big project. Before I left, I grabbed a nice, Minecraft grass green DVD to burn, as the MineOS site didn’t mention it working with anything else when dealing with physical hardware.
And my problems began. I left my tablet at home when I sometimes pace around the room with it while continuing to research. When I got there and had everything set up, I put the DVD into my laptop drive and spent several minutes trying to figure out how I was going to burn the MineOS ISO. My go-to tool I thought was installed appearently never made it onto my laptop, and my virus scanner was suspicious when I tried downloading a tool to help with the procedure.
I turned to my target machine. As a dual booted system, I can work on one hard drive while keeping the other safe. I booted it to Ubuntu and looked up a Linux tutorial on how to burn a *bootable* disk, as it turns out that not all disk burners can do that. A short tutorial mentioned a tool called Brasero I could use. It should start automatically when trying to burn anything.
A quick search told me Brasero was not installed, so I had my computer apt-get update. Twelve minutes later, it said there were a number of errors. The repositories must have been having issues or something. For some reason, I tried updating again, to similar results. I moved to my laptop and started writing this blog post, introducing the subject. Might as well use the time I have. When that was done, I told it to install Brasero, and the installer spat back an error, saying it was already installed.
I used a microfiber cloth to clean the DVD, as it looked like years on the spindle weren’t exactly the best for it. I burned it and it booted nicely to an option to install or run a live CD. I told it to install, and was given a command line error code I hardly recognized. The thing didn’t even act like it had the CD drive mounted after boot. That or it didn’t want to give it’s boot media up.
A new external hard drive came to my rescue. I moved the files that came with it into a folder on my laptop labeled as bloatware and used a utility I did have on my laptop already to write the installer to my device. It seemed to work just as poorly.
After I got home, I went to continue working on it, and I forgot to move the keyboard and mouse back to the active tower. As a result, I ended up booting correctly to the setup screen. It was only at this point that I recognized the installer as a fancy terminal program that only looks like it’s in something resembling a window. The clue was from a few strange-looking characters on the ASCII table that looked like some sort of boarder.
I wend back and forth over the machine, formatting and reformatting its poor, old 60 GB SSD. I had trouble with GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader) not installing, so I had a stint of trying to tie into the one on the Ubuntu drive, but it took reformatting while both drives were connected before it accepted the install, but at that, it said it was unclean or something. I figured I could just go on ahead, as the installer wasn’t very imaginative if you did anything other than what it wanted to do.
During the first-boot config, I entered passwords for both the root and mc users. I ran into trouble with getting the network set up, and that’s about where I am now.
I know I didn’t finish like I said I would. It’s been way too long since I started this project that was supposed to take just two weeks. I’ve learned a ton, but right now, a lot of it feels like it’s going to waste.
Final Question: What are you looking forward to giving for Christmas?