Booting DOS?
Just as a matter of interest, why can't you boot DOS on a UEFI machine? (In spite of the length of my grey beard, I am UEFI newbie, having acquired my first such PC only a couple of months ago.)
626 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2007
I bought a 12th-gen one recently, to replace my ancient i5 laptop. I'm very happy with it. There is a fan, but it only kicks in occasionally and is quiet enough for me, even sitting on the desk 50cm from my ears. I had no problems installing Linux on it, and Intel even maintain (currently) a .deb archive for firmware and video drivers.
The Hebrides have tried rocket mail. In 1934, two solid-fuel rockets packed with letters exploded in the sky over Harris & Scarp.
I have a little netbook which I use if I don't want to get out of the armchair...
The power button toggles suspend-to-ram, which means that it "boots" in less than a second if I need it. Obviously, if I don't charge the battery for a week, or however long it takes, once recharged, pressing the power button will do a normal cold boot.
I do have a script that does a suspend-to-disk if the battery gets very low, but of course, that only works when the device is alive. Historically, I've always created swap partitions larger tham memory size, but I'm pretty sure that suspend-to-disk does compression anyway.
I wrote a script which polls the council's website and scrapes the bin collection dates. It then changes an icon on my home page to tell me which bin to put out. It must save me literally seconds every month.
Of course, it will break if they make even a tiny change to the format of their page.
A couple of years ago I found a stash of installation floppies and even a CD in the attic (I was moving house) and got OS/2 Warp working except that if I booted it a second time, it thought it was being installed from scratch again and asked for all the floppies in turn. I fiddled with it for a while but didn't get any further before I lost interest.
...why have I never been able to get it running in a Qemu/KVM virtual machine? To install ChromeOS Flex, you had to tell it what the hardware was, and only some specific machines would be accepted.
Or has that changed?
If it's open source, I suppose I could build a version from scratch.
I've just replaced 2 home "servers" -- security and media streaming -- with Raspberry Pis. Both were antique laptops. (I was spurred into action by the fan failing on the Thinkpad for the second time.)
My everyday computer is also a laptop, driving two screens, but also long in the tooth. I was thinking that a small, fanless unit would be a good upgrade, but I'd want more power than a Pi.
I wonder what this decision will do to prices.
These were my thoughts too. Why not spend the same effort testing, and if necessary, debugging a kernel release from Torvalds?
I've been compiling my own kernels from kernel.org for almost 20 years now and have never had one that crashed or wouldn't boot. (Except once when I forgot to include the new-fangled ATA drivers.) OK, so I'm a hobbyist, not an enterprise.
I remember that a version of iTunes would delete music files from local storage and use the "cloud" version instead. It worked from the song title and artist, and so it upset people who had an alternate or rare version of the music, and found that it had been deleted forever and replaced by a pointer to the mainstream version.
My own quirk is that I dislike bloat. I've used Debian, and then Devuan for about 20 years, and I constantly strip out stuff that isn't necessary. Things like Avahi, which is installed by default, and appears to be a piece of software that runs constantly, waiting for me to buy a new printer. Consolekit claims to "keep track of seats". I have one seat. And so on.
Recently, I installed Devuan from scratch on an old laptop from the official ISO, and then spent about 2 days removing packages.
This led me to my current little project, which is to create a bootable image which has busybox, dpkg and apt-get, so that I can install a system by adding, rather than subtracting, packages.
User scripts are installed by the user and live on his or her device. They aren't random bits of code that download and run.
On these web pages, I have one called "WiderReg", which I wrote to expand the content and remove useless white space on The Register.
In pre-GPS times, my first solo flight away from my home airport took me over the wide open, uninhabited areas of Georgia (USA). When I turned around to come home, the sun was lower and there was a haze and I couldn't see a fucking thing. The airport had an omnidirectional beacon at the end of the runway though, leading to happy landings.
But hasn't non-free software always been available in the Debian repos? I used Debian from pre-1.0 days until moving to Devuan to avoid systemd. If I count the packages now with "nonfree" or "non-free" in their one-line description, there are 27 hits.
$ apt-cache search ""|grep -c "nonfree\|non-free"
I've been compiling kernels from source for years now. Just because I like things lightweight and efficient. Obviously, distro kernels have to allow for a variety of hardware, mostly through modules, I suppose, but I can tweak other things as well. It's a very long time since I've produced a kernel which won't boot. In fact, I think the last time was when I forgot to include the drivers for the brand new SATA technology that had arrived.
I admit I enjoy tinkering too. I'm currently playing with an AMD-based 2007 laptop (came with Windows 7) and kernel 6.2.0, and the only thing not working yet is the ethernet. It seems to be the same chip as the wifi, which is working.
If you dislike the promotional messages, you could use the apt package management functionality to override the dependencies, or make a "null" package to replace the annoying one.
But why would you bother? Just adopt another distribution. Most of the well-known ones offer the facility to try a desktop session from the installation media without installing.
I use the Vivaldi browser, and a few updates ago I noticed that the bookmarking mechanism had changed. When you clicked on the little icon in the address bar, there was no dialog to ask you where you wanted to put it. The bookmark was just instantly added to the same place in the heirarchy where the last bookmark had been inserted.
It turns out that you have to set a special flag (not accessible in the settings menu) to bring the bookmark dialog back.
When mobile phones first gained the ability to use MIDI files as ringtones, overnight, all the user-submitted files on the internet were stolen and put up for sale. However, when smarter phones evolved, and could play MP3, many MIDI files reappeared for free.
Technically, I guess, if someone makes available a MIDI version of someone else's music, it's a copyright violation, because the MIDI is fully equivalent to musical notation. But that doesn't seem to make a difference in practice.
As very much an amateur musician, I have fun by downloading MIDI songs and singing or playing along. As it happens, I do own a 1980s Roland synth and a USB/MIDI interface, but mostly I use a software renderer and play from the PC.
Chrome-based browsers have had an option to turn it off for a long time now, but I've no idea if MIDI works otherwise. It's something that I check is set to "Block" when I upgrade Vivaldi. Also I block access to my Bluetooth devices. Why would I want that?
I had an OSI Superboard (what was the UK board that was a direct rip-off of it?) and got to the stage when I could remember enough of the most common 6502 opcodes to patch code without needing the assembler. In fact LDA being 0xA9 is still floating round my brain.
Just so readers know: your problems are not universal ones. My phone runs MicroG LineageOS (i.e. no Google services, no Google telemetry) and is perfectly happy with my banking app and MFA verifier, along with everything else I had on my previous Googlified phone.
Ironically, my current phone is a Google Pixel...
Woof. There's a lot going on there. I don't think I have the mental flexibility any more to drive that. In fact, I think the last major change I made in command line was from VAX DCL to csh.
However, I'm very interested in any alternative to Wayland. As the article says, X functionality has been gratuitously discarded. Also, I don't like the way it's tightly integrated into the Red Hat architecture.
p.s. "#" for job id. What's a comment then?