Author: Shadow8472

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Family Photo Chest Part 6: Beginning the Catalogue

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am coming back with my monthly photo chest project. Let’s get started!

There’s a reason this project is being given the slow milking treatment. It’s a monumental task, and I don’t even have all the hardware necessary for the full project. While it would be fun to build a small machine from scratch, I need to keep scale in mind. This isn’t some arbitrary task I have infinite focus for decades on.

At present, I am looking into Network Attached Storage (NAS) to host the files. NAS can come in a small variety of few forms, but all the ones I’ve looked at appear to be small computers with lots of hard drive space. On the lower end, you have monolithic units where you can store stuff, while something a little more sophisticated will have anywhere between 2, 4, 8, or even more bays you can plug individual hard drives into. Some come ready to use with drives preinstalled, while others expect you to use your own drives. Often, you will find they have some sort of special software to manage the NAS system as a whole.

Admittedly, I am still specing out the system with my father. We are leaning in the direction of getting four 8TB drives specially designed for NAS applications, specifically from Western Digital’s red line.

The NAS controller is still a bigger unknown. We’ve had one for years, but I’ve always found their controller software a bit annoying to deal with, so I’ve only bothered getting it to work about five times — ever. However, I suspect knowing a bit more about its underlying structure will make it easier to deal with in the future. At the same time, I still want something I can connect to on whatever terms I deem fit. One lowball priced bay was quickly blacklisted over this consideration.

In other news, the photo trunk has been unloaded and we have started building an extensive catalogue of what we have, starting with school photos.

But before the real work could begin, a couple decades can really do a number on the smell in a confined space. It was so bad, I had to use a box fan to pull air out of the chest into the room and another fan to exchange the air room with outside. Needless to say, when my mother needed the room for drying face masks, the procedure was put to a halt. It took a couple days, but it’s down to bearable levels.

The bottom of the trunk felt a lot better organized than the top tray. There were two handbags and a cardboard box we could pull out. The rest was mostly almost empty albums and framed photos. One of the handbags contained a lot of school pictures (mostly) in their original envelopes, so we decided to begin there.

Using my freshly untethered laptop, my father set up a spreadsheet. To help speed up measuring pictures, he laid down some tape and marked off the inches. For my part, I already had a lot of the school pictures sorted into a bucket, and we’ve been going through that bucket, documenting everything we have. The plan is to work on it a little each day.

Final Question: How would you go about bringing order to near chaos?

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Loss

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am working on upgrading ButtonMash to a decently sized hard drive. Let’s get started!

I am humbled to know that Creepers_n_Cream has been a well-loved server. I’m actually impressed at how well God has blessed my efforts given I put it together on a budget of nothing but what I had laying around. We’ve had somewhere between twenty and thirty unique accounts stop by, and we have about ten regulars in our community.

With abundant use comes abundant taxation on the hardware. Even though the RAM situation has been stable since I implemented G1GC not all the bottlenecks are fully addressed yet. The CPU gets pegged if more than a couple people are on at a time, and 60 gigabytes of hard drive space only goes so far when you aren’t deleting old weekly backups.

A few weeks ago, I woke up to the server crashing royally. It had finally finished topping off the tiny hard drive I gave it to start with. My family discussed it, and we eventually ordered a one terabyte solid state drive to install.

The first step is to get the operating system installed. Unsure where my original MineOS installation media went, I located a thumb drive and it mounted as sdd. It had a bunch of old Minecraft servers I could offload.

With the drive void of contents, I pulled up a tutorial on burning .iso disk images to thumb drives from the command line in Linux. As soon as I saw the dd command, I remembered a warning that it might as well stand for “disk destroyer.” Its actual name is Data Duplicator. Aside from working in the command line, there was nothing new about this situation.

Following the tutorial, I wrote a vFAT file system to sdb. Oops, I spelled it “sufo” instead of “sudo.” Correcting my typo, I tried again…

…

…

sdb…

…

…

I used the lsblk (list block) command to bring up all partitions of any disks connected to the drive. I felt the color drain from my face as I inspected the table.

I had heard the warnings. I had double checked. Years worth of memories –gone– in only a minute. This is why you always isolate potentially destructive work by using a computer you can easily rebuild; always minimize the chance of damages with an air gap! Always!

I had goofed. At least I hear this is the mistake you only ever make once. In the fallout, I checked around for a backup, and I found something from last December. It doesn’t have much, but at this point, I just have to trust my past self that I got the stuff that’s most important. As luck would have it, of my three most important personal drives, that was the only one I actually have any sort of backup for, and it’s the only one that wasn’t still in daily use.

I continued with putting MineOS on the terabyte SSD. I used my main tower, but its external Wi-Fi card didn’t register, so I put the project down for now while I focus on recovering my hard drive.

As of writing, I still don’t fully understand the damage, but I’ll try explaining it as best I can. Most of the data is still there. All that really happened was that I shredded the hard drive’s internal map and laid out a fresh one, marking everything ready for redevelopment. If I can somehow survey the abandoned data, I should be able to rebuild the original map.

Fortunately, there are recovery tools I can try. The one I’m trying to work with right now is called TestDisk. I believe it should be able to achieve a full recovery, if used correctly.

But that’s the thing. I don’t know how to use it correctly. I’m terrified that I’ve only got one shot, and if I miss, it’s possible the failed recovery process will cause farther damage, and I won’t be able to try again.

I’m hardly the first person to nuke a hard drive by accident. There are other options around, but I’m still scared that I won’t get a second chance once I try any one of them. The best case for me would be if I found someone else who had written a vFAT filesystem over an NTFS filesystem and replacing two visible partitions, but the creation of such a tutorial would be pointless, as there are way more possible combinations to the point that there isn’t enough demand to justify the supply.

I need to put this project down for a while. I’ve reached out to the Third Workshop, but with the pandemic on, “after school” STEM programs are online only. Otherwise, I have a couple topics I can develop for the next couple weeks. I really want my drive back.

Final Question: What was the biggest computer blunder you’ve ever made?

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I’ve Got No Strings

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I carried out a very special and long-awaited project. Let’s get started!

For the one or possibly two people who have read almost everything I’ve ever posted, you will know that I had my laptop’s power port break on me roughly a year and a half ago, give or take (I have a vague memory from that time involving a Christmas tree, it’s been more than a year, and likely less than two).

My father and I stripped my laptop down and got it functional again, though when we tried installing it, the cord was extra long and something at the hardware level refused to charge the battery. Ever since then, the BIOS has been beeping at me every boot that the power adapter cannot be determined.

Several months ago, we decided to take another swing at repairing the laptop correctly this time. I pulled out the broken power port and we were able to grab the part number off it. Looking online, we found a match and bought it.

That part took quite a lot longer than it should have. The package had a hand written label that matched the part number, but when I opened the package, yes it was a power port, and the length looked to be about right, but the connector had seven pins to my laptop’s five. We took a closer look at the company who sold us the part and found they were operating out of China when their name heavily implied they were American distributor. My father asked for his money back, but has yet to receive a reply from these suspected small-scale fraudsters.

After another, much shorter round of waiting, we got a genuine part from a real supplier with a real part label this time. The only difference I spotted were different colors on the wires leading up to the pins, though they were effectively a palette swap from the original.

We grabbed a PDF of the service manual for my tablet and my father printed out the top-level instructions detailing the order of our specific tear down job. I got impatient to start, so I started pulling screws.

I did most of the work myself this time. When we got to the power jack, I used the original as a guide to find the proper routing the cord is supposed to take. I took the opportunity to dust off some hard-to-reach places while they were more exposed than not.

During reassembly, I tried to only tighten screws as tight as they needed to be, in case of any additional work in the near future. The most nerve wracking part was while replacing the screen; I kept catching and more than once did I hear what sounded like something breaking. I also spotted where one of the status LED’s was mostly gone from a tiny circuit on the front. Just the tiniest bit of red could be seen where it should have been, but not on any of the other lights.

Final assembly felt like it took the longest. Not only did I forget to connect the keyboard electronically the first go around, but I had already put the top plate on when I remembered I still had four screws to replace below the keyboard. At one point, I accidentally dropped a screw through a broken screw hole. With a little shaking the “loose conductor” fell right out.

Once everything was tightened back up, I put the battery in and connected everything. Moment of truth. The BIOS didn’t complain. Debian said it was charging, but it was stuck at 0.0% for a while. I swapped batteries and booted to Windows, and everything seemed to indicate things were going well.

It was back in Debian when I saw it. Net battery gain on the smaller battery from 51% to 54%. Prayers answered. We explored the idea that the larger battery might have been damaged from being discharged for so long, but I eventually got a similar confirmed charge point on it.

It was only a small formality to unplug my running laptop and use a little of that fresh battery power.

Repairing your own electronics gives you a much better understanding of how everything works. Even if you aren’t interested in what happens within each circuit board, it still lets you diagnose it better in the future.

Final Question: Have you ever repaired any of your own electronics? If not, have you ever looked inside anything just to look?

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3D Printing Against the Pandemic

Good morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am joining the fight to the best of my ability using my 3D printer. Let’s get started!

The CCP Corona Virus has been spreading around the world for months now. Medical supplies have run short, and hoarders reduce availability further. Across the world, people on the front lines are turning to improvised equipment to mitigate the chances of transmission. And when the CDC says that even a bandanna over the face can help, you know it’s serious.

As part of the effort, companies have been bolstering the medical field with products they can adjust their assembly lines to produce. But even with the increased production rate, the demand still greatly exceeds the supply, and will continue to do so as long as an abnormally spike of people are being treated.

Enter: everyday people. With a major percentage of the population stuck at home, people have been seeking out places where they can join the fight. The Folding@Home project has mustered over an exaflop of computing power from donated CPU and GPU time. Seamstresses, such as my mother, have been sewing masks, and 3D printer communities are printing parts that hospitals need.

Good intentions are nice and all, but amateur craftsmen need to realize that quality is an important factor. That is where online communities come in. My mother connected with a local group who is making masks for hospitals. Even though she is giving her masks directly to family, friends, and church members instead of the group, she has learned to make a mask that should be almost as good as the gold standard N-95 masks.

And that brings it up to now, where I just joined a similar group where I can learn what works and what doesn’t work. For me, I need to get my print quality back up, as I discovered when I went to print a number of bias tape folders for the above-mentioned group.

I can’t just use the slicer I had going before because of my recent transition to Debian on that computer, and vanilla Cura doesn’t come with all the settings pre-tuned for my model.

After I finish tuning my printer in, I’d like to look into building face shield parts to compliment my mother’s work, but I’ll see what is needed most when I get there. I’ve already run half an experiment involving layer height and printing temperature. A group should be able to help me calibrate my machine faster.

Final Question: What can you do to help in this fight?

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Family Photo Chest Part 5: Opening the Vault

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I started organizing the chestful of pictures. Let’s get started!

But first, I have a new area in the house to call my lab — for now at least. We have a spare bedroom we call our art room and it has been recently made available for use. I’m working off the same folding table as before, but with the extra space –and the ability to close off the area from our four legged friends– there was enough room for my father and me to move the old sea chest from our garage to the art room.

The goal in this phase of this branch of the project is to get a general census of what we have so we know how much storage to buy. Color photos take three times the space as their Black and White or Sepia counterparts, and many pictures have their original negatives stored in there as well. The general guidelines I received was to sort everything into large, medium, and small piles, with separate piles for color images.

We opened the chest and started pulling out various prints. I about have no words for the level of entropy I found. Collections of photos were haphazardly strewn about inside, while other prints were floating free in the photo paper soup. As I excavated, I found where at least a few photo envelopes had lost at least partial containment while in at least one case, a small photo of a motorcycle frame found its way inside a package of my father’s school photos. If it were any more organized, sorting would have been trivial. If it were not at all organized, I could be a lot more mechanical. As it stands, I am choosing to preserve obvious collections and incorporate them into my eventual file system.

Not all collections are bound the same. The most secure collection is a cardboard box stuffed full of envelopes. I all but left that one alone, moving it into a plastic bin along with several other obvious sets. I also had a special place in that bin for less organized sets of photos, such as one series that only had a rubber band. Several loose sets of pictures were obviously taken together, especially if they were together in a stack. Those ended up in yet another folder.

I still ended up with a few surprises. I had to make a pile for non-picture documents and envelopes with their contents lost to the soup. A lot of old mail ended up in there. I even found a lock of hair, presumably from someone’s first haircut. There must be no fewer than four or five languages represented in there.

Eventually, I ended up taking a bunch of sandwich bags and stuffing the loose groups in. I actually found a small picture within a minute while writing this post — in part because of this very tactic.

I owe a big thank you to my father for sorting out ambiguous sets. A lot of the memories in the trunk are his or are from people I never overlapped with. I can see this project taking quite a while. Hopefully, things can get moving sooner rather than later.

Final Question: How do you bring order to semi-chaos?

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Linux Deep Dive Part 4: 3D Printer Workflow Online

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am printing myself a bookmark as a “Hello Again, World” project. Let’s get started!

I have a Monoprice Maker Select Plus 3D printer. It’s a rebrand of a product made by Wanhao. For those keeping score, I am running Debian 10 (Buster) on my laptop, and I’m migrating different tasks over to Linux that I can.

My problem: My printer shipped with a version of the Cura slicer specifically tailored to work with it — on Windows. By default, the version of Cura I found on the Debian 10 repositories does not come packaged with presets for my printer or its original branding. Furthermore, the software has had several more years of development since the kiddie pool fork of the software I was used to playing with.

Since last week, I’ve realized that as far as someone at my skill level is concerned, all the specializations are are just a few numbers a sufficiently resourceful individual, such as myself, can look up, punch in, and fine tune as necessary. With the right numbers, I can see where a printer can safely print multiple small jobs on the same bed without waiting on the head to move to each one every layer.

A slicer is only any good if I’m going to print something, so I modeled up a bookmark in Blender. That interface is a new sight for my eyes to behold. I eeked out something for a first prototype using my fragmented knowledge from when I last put printing away.

Over in Cura, I used a slider to set 100% infill; I don’t want this thing breaking on me. I told it to go with structural support and saved it to my SD card. I really like this version of Cura over the dinosaur animal cracker I used to work with.

I went through about half a thing of canned air on my printer and leveled it with an assortment of junk mail and a bubble level. Fortunately I didn’t need to reapply grease. I did have to reassemble my MacGyvered filament holder atop the printer. Somehow, I found the same piece of PVC pipe from before in another part of the house, but I used a rag instead of a strip of cardboard to secure it.

When material started getting laid down, I noticed another old problem. Filament wasn’t quite sticking at the very beginning of extrusion. As the printer continued laying down material around where my bookmark was soon to take shape, I recognized it as a brim. The malformed plastic was relatively isolated, and the print continued without further incident.

Lacking my proper spatula, I peeled the fresh bookmark off the buildplate by the deformity from the beginning, but I quickly learned how easily freshly printed plastic can deform. It twisted and left a minor, permanent warp if one were to look closely enough. Next time, I will let it cool.

The brim was a lot harder to get everything. Between the prototype being too thick for a hardback and me not liking the pointy bits I designed into the sides, I took the design back to Blender, where I had to refresh my memory again on proper modeling methodologies and that’s were I stand now.

Final Question: How frequent do you come across a 3D printer operator using Linux?

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Linux Deep Dive Part 3: Stability

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am just going over the stuff I did this week. Spoiler alert: it’s more of a mix and mash. Let’s get started.

My idea while writing last week’s post was it. I believe my laptop wasn’t booting reliably because GRUB was configured incorrectly. The BIOS went fine and selected the external drive to load from (or the GRUB disk). The bootloader, GRUB, loaded correctly, gave me the option of operating systems to boot, but when it went to load Debian, some of the time the drives respond out of order: when GRUB went to the drive presently known as sda, the internal, Windows drive, and expected to load Debian, it panicked and dropped into BusyBox.

I diagnosed the problem by looking directly at the grub configuration files and sorted out any instances of “sda.” There were a few. After fielding some questions about the suspect config lines, I regenerated the config file after reverting the only change I had previously made without regenerating. When it was done, I scanned for the parts where “sda” had previously shown up, and there was the correct UUID I was looking for.

I wish I had found someone identifying this problem. Ironically, I came within inches of mysteriously solving this issue none the wiser when I tried regenerating the GRUB files to give the drives a full minute to load instead of five seconds. I can see where I might have spent just as long trying to reproduce the bug an failing. I wouldn’t have it any other way than how it happened. I can live with this.

With stability issues out of the way, I have other things to move over. Remember when I used to do 3D printing? Well, I want to make a bookmark, and I want to do it from Linux. I popped my SD card into my laptop, and found the copy of the Cura slicer that originally came with my printer — it’s a .exe file. Linux doesn’t do .exe files.

Side note: I’ve been using aptitude instead of apt-get. They both do the same job, but aptitude tries to put a nicer face on it, like not changing half its name for searching instead of installing.

After teaching myself how to search the apt repository like I did back on MicroCore, I used aptitude search cura and installed the package pertaining to g-code generation. I looked in my program menu and found “Ultimaker Cura.” OK, I suppose this is the generic. I already knew the version I was on before was a fork of some other parent program. Lacking another explanation, Ulitmaker Cura seems to be it.

The first time I opened this newer version of Cura, I was bombarded with a prompt to add my printer. I didn’t see my printer, so I ended up picking a wrong one and continuing from there. And that is where I’m stuck.

I poked around in the menus and did some research, and found the latest version of Cura is on at least version 4.0, but the on in the Debian repositories is 3.3.1. I am starting to get the feeling that this is what they meant when Debian software is chosen for proven stability. I may go around the repository on this one.

Diagnostic procedures involved a bunch of research and plugging in with a USB B connector. I hooked my printer up and told Linux to list my USB devices. I isolated an entry called “QinHeng Electronics HL-340 USB-Serial adapter.” I’m not exactly sure what is going on here, but it looks like my printer is electronically connected to something inside that then talks to the computer outside. Oh, and the menu still works off just USB power.

I am open to using other slicers. The main goal is to demonstrate a workflow, and I don’t have that right now. I also tried Slic3r Prusa and it had even fewer options, but it had a list of questions for configuring other printers.

Looking around, there is a lot more to the world of slicers than the narrow sliver I was looking at before. The IIIP branded Cura is great for someone who is just wants to 3D print or doesn’t want to move away, but there is a whole world to explore out there with different optimizations and features to play with — all locked away behind a learning curve that starts with getting my printer back online.

There are plenty of 3D printing videos out there. Every one I clicked on while trying to get things working on Linux was using Windows. Maybe there was one, but I don’t know. I’m going to have to tackle OS/slicer and slicer/printer issues separately from now on.

Unrelated: I have been getting a lot of use out of my Steam controller. It turns out to be very useful as a mouse on my Widows machine when I want to sit back without a hard surface in easy reach.

Final Question: What was one challenge you faced that left you feeling good for going through it?

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Linux Deep Dive Part 2: End of Week 3

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am continuing my coverage of my deep dive into Linux. Let’s get started!

Last time, I installed Debian Linux on a USB external solid state drive using skills I learned from previous projects.

I am very much still in my trial period for Debian. Most of my time working with it has gone into exploring and diagnosing the system.

A lot of my MATE explorations into panels happened on at least day two. While I was able to assemble a semi-convincing Start bar look-alike, it still has a way to go.

I discovered the first of two big hitches when I took it in to Third Workshop and booted to Windows to demonstrate Minecraft in its unplayably slow state. I hit restart, booted into Debian, and it was still unplayably slow. I even rebooted several times, only for it to refuse the decent performance I knew I had seen already. We even put a simple clone of Minecraft by the name of Mine Test on there to test the FPS. I got it home, booted straight to Debian and Minecraft unexpectedly worked correctly.

It took me a while, but I finally narrowed the pattern down. The performance drop only happened if and only if I first boot to Windows and restart into Linux without shutting down completely.

Even though I didn’t master the problem by solving it completely, it hasn’t come back, so long as I don’t reproduce it on purpose. I’m fine leaving it alone.

And now for my other problem: Debian only successfully boots about half the time. I still don’t know this one. All I can do is lay out everything I know about it and hope someone knows what the deal is because I’ve yet to find a help topic that matches my problem exactly.

It used to be that Debian would boot every other time, but it did have a spell where it booted and failed about six consecutive times each. A few days ago, it’s gone to not booting at all. Whenever it fails, it drops into BusyBox, displaying an ash shell with the prompt (initramfs). It has some basic commands, and I think the general idea is that when the Linux kernel can’t find the files it needs, a knowledgeable operator can manually mount a drive and boot from there.

Now, I’ve mounted drives by hand before. I met someone going by hyperreal who generously spent over an hour and a half of his time on me. We seemingly tried everything to try and get BusyBox to boot. Nothing. We even peeked at the hard drives’ contents from a GRUB boot menu console (Don’t cite me on terminology here!). Everything looked good until BusyBox showed up again.

A lot of it was repetitive. In short, it looked like /root had the contents of my Windows… I may have it. What if GRUB is looking for sda or sdb specifically and they respond in the wrong order? I’ll check into it.

As I was saying before a flicker of hope interrupted me, The Windows drive was mounted to /root and I was able to umount it, but neither drive would mount there. I kept getting an “Invalid argument” error. Maybe the BusyBox mount command is a little different, but it should have worked each time. We tried mounting it from /dev, where devices are listed by an internal shorthand per system, and from a more out of the way place that listed them by UUID. There were four entries, and I suspect the two that didn’t look like hard drives were my mouse and keyboard.

Moving along, I also tried burning a Super GRUB Disk a total of three times. The first two were on my laptop, but they both flopped. I detoured for a while, doing other stuff mentioned above before making a good disk from my desktop.

I still need to mess around with the disk to know exactly what is going on. The working theory has been an unreliable install of GRUB. I have a new idea since writing this, but for now, I have a way to use my computer when I want.

Final Question: Any ideas on this one? I could really use the input, though I should probably get the comments section working some time.

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Family Photo Chest Part 4: PyCharm Migration

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am moving PyCharm from Windows to Debian. Let’s get started!

The past month didn’t feel all that fast in terms of this project. I reread a few of my paragraphs from last month, and I get the feeling I didn’t have a clue about what I was looking at.

There are at least a couple reasons why I believe IDE’s are only for when you have an expert handy. They are full of stuff beginning programmers don’t need to be using yet and that stuff can be incredibly fragile. The moment something breaks, progress stops and you need someone familiar with the program to sort things out. If you’re engaging in self-study, working from the command line has fewer things to break and most language tutorials provide command by command instructions anyway. If possible, you should seek out one or more groups to join who can answer programming questions when they come up.

PyCharm was a little fussy to migrate to the new operating system. I made the mistake of just importing everything straight from the configuration on the old install. First of all, all the file paths were written in Windows. I tried routing the interpreter to the one that came with Linux, I had to move the link to my project file around, and I went hunting through the venv settings for references to Windows paths.

The easiest thing to do is to just say no to importing anything on first launch and recustomizing everything. I ended up moving looking into individual files in my settings and plucking out the ones with intrinsic ties to the old install. I had a lot of custom colorization going on, so I sifted through my settings files and plucked out anything with file paths starting with C:\.

Project files were a separate but parallel undertaking. With all the errors I kept getting, I ended up grafting my old project files into a new set of project files. Almost everything copied over, but a hidden .idea folder holds a lot of ties that rely on things not moving. I also had to remove a workspace.xml file or something similar over a reference to the old hard drive. Pycharm brought up a dialogue box to fill in the appropriate information and that angle was solved.

Now, about virtual environments. Implementing them is an important gesture toward seasoned programmers collaborating on projects on different computers, but they complicate things a bit much for the average novice on his or her own. On my windows install, I managed to hack it out of my project, but I never told PyCharm that I didn’t want to use them in a way it could understand. This time, however, I had help addressing the issue.

The IDE is a powerful tool. Powerful tools are okay to pick up and use, but the learning curve can be sharp, and reckless newbies can easily damage something while careful newbies just get slowed down by all the things to research. Supervision like what I used to get in my programming classes or what I’m getting now at Third Workshop is a practical must-have. I don’t always get the answer I’m looking for right away, but stray comments tend to provide seeds to plant in a search engine.

Final Question: Have you ever made a major change and had little cracks you didn’t anticipate?

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Linux Deep Dive Part 1: Day 1

Good morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am covering a giant step I’m taking into Linux. Let’s get started!

I’ve known for a while that I would be switching to using Linux on my laptop as part of my program to keep it shambling into the future. The final straw for my laptop was a painfully slow Minecraft experience in Windows. It was giving me between 8 and 15 frames per second on average, but the drops to 0 fps were unacceptable. I started shopping.

Some months ago, I installed Kali on an external drive and ran it live. I had some reservations about how you are logged in as root by default, and even watched a video by Cyber Weapons Lab about things you’d want to do when you install Kali. A more recent major update changed some things to be more friendly towards people looking for a new main OS, but a developer blog explicitly said installation on a production computer is “not recommended.”

I spent a few days considering what distro to go with. There are a number of distro pickers out there that ask you different questions like, “How old is the hardware you want to use?” or, “Do you care if you use closed source drivers?” I am after stability and access to community support. Besides, many knowledgeable Linux experts say that distribution is ultimately irrelevant. YouTuber Chris Titus Tech considers each distribution “a starting point.” While there are fundamental differences between major distributions, you can customize pretty much everything with relative ease once you know what you’re doing.

I only have an idea of what I’m doing. I don’t need bleeding edge for anything I’m doing, nor do I want to have an otherwise stable machine develop problems on me. Debian has a reputation for rock solid stability and enough of a community out there for when issues do develop.

Chris Titus Tech may have had some influence on my decision. He has a series of challenge videos where he covers a year of using Debian on his production machine. One of his warnings is that it takes a week to set everything up before it’s fully stable. I would add the caveat that that only applies after you know what you’re doing. Again, I only have an idea of what I’m doing. As such, I am going into this expecting a month or more. Chris Titus Tech provided a much needed boost here with a video about installing Debian, including how to navigate the list of Debian downloads for an easier ISO to work with. I highly recommend you look it up if you intend to install Debian. LINK.

Considering my aging computer and desire for an easier transition, I chose the MATE desktop environment for being relatively lightweight, yet customizable and went with an ISO that includes “non-free” software, like freely available drivers owned by different companies, for greater compatibility.

I had a few false starts when creating my install media. In my travels, I came across a tool called YUMI (Your Universal Multiboot Installer) LINK. It looks like a good tool to build a replacement for your army of install USB’s or CD’s, but I didn’t get far trying to install Debian on there normally. It’s worth looking into later, though.

If you ever decide to judge a distro by its live session, don’t. Running Debian live from USB is about as sluggish as the Windows OS I’m moving out of. It got so bad that I spent a while asking if an internal HDD or an external SSD on a USB 3 is faster. I couldn’t bring myself to install over Windows when I might be missing some paid license file or something, and the notion of internal partitioning made me nervous. I benchmarked my candidate drives and found the SSD was between two and three times faster than my internal HDD. I installed for performance.

Installation was nerve-wracking. If only I had studied the video I had already had found where someone installed that exact same operating system, I would have known I when the settings were locked in and ready to destroy whatever partition they landed on. I would have known the hard drive selection was almost at the end, and I would have known not to say no when it offered to install GRUB to my master boot record.

I adjusted the BIOS to prefer external USB drives over internal hard disks. Boot continued to a simplistic screen and stayed there indefinitely. I looked into making a Super GRUB disk, but I stopped after two attempts and went with the nuke option and reinstalled, this time following the instructions.

For the record, by the time I hit the ugly mug of the ISO’s login screen, I had a thumb drive for install media and an external SSD with Debian on it.

The following days were a different kind of challenge. The MATE desktop offers enough customizability to almost put Windows to shame. The details would fill up their own post, and there already enough tutorials out there. The only word you need for massively improved searches is panels. You start with one at the top and one at the bottom, but I moved mine around to make like a Start bar across two screens. I’m still working on it, though.

Minecraft was a little tricky to install. I grabbed the .deb file and it wanted a couple dependencies before installing, programs most distros normally come with. Minecraft wanted me to log in again, even after mounting my HDD and copying over my .minecraft folder/directory. Whatever comes next, the improvement in performance is worth it. At the end of my first day on Debian, I was managing between 25 and 40 fps during normal play.

Overall, I think Debian will work out for me in the end. I still have to finish patching it together, but my previous work with Ubuntu and especially Micro Core has prepared me for this overall challenge.

Final Question: What projects have you embarked on that naturally feel like direct sequels to earlier projects?

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