Who's treated themselves to some new hardware recently?

Puppy related raves and general interest that doesn't fit anywhere else
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Mike Walsh
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#61 Post by Mike Walsh »

Point taken, David..!

Yes, I shall have to have a re-think on that one, too. Thanks for reminding me; it simply hadn't yet occurred to me. I've been familiarising myself with the hardware, this last few days; haven't had that much time to do owt else thus far..... :lol:


Mike. :wink:

p310don
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#62 Post by p310don »

Mike - boot up a modern Pup, install Virtualbox, and then play with the older ones in that. Voila, best of both worlds :)

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Mike Walsh
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#63 Post by Mike Walsh »

p310don wrote:Mike - boot up a modern Pup, install Virtualbox, and then play with the older ones in that. Voila, best of both worlds :)
Yah, that's an idea. This does support VT-x, etc, so I might try that, too. Decisions, decisions.....


Mike. :wink:

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greengeek
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#64 Post by greengeek »

Mike Walsh wrote: I'm weeping here over the loss of 'old reliable'; my 'perfect' Slacko 560. But on this hardware, it's not to be.....unless anybody knows different.
I have been buying pre-UEFI hardware (ie Vista era) in the hope of forever escaping the need to upgrade beyond Slacko 5.6

Maybe there is a way of upgrading S5.6 to a newer kernel?

I know it is not as easily done as kernel swaps in newer puppies, but still, maybe someone already achieved this?

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nic007
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#65 Post by nic007 »

Easy. I've done some fairly recent kernel swops for older Puppy's. Only inconvenience was first startup and time lost waiting for x to load. You should get good results after the swap by booting pfix=nox and then running xorgwizard and xwin. Once your settings are saved the delay at starting X to desktop will be shorter.

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Colonel Panic
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#66 Post by Colonel Panic »

My local computer shop put a machine together for me this week after my old one failed unexpectedly (it only cost me £20 and I got eIght months' use out of it, so not bad at all and I'm not complaining).

I now have an Athlon II X4 (quad core) processor and 6GB of RAM (5.58 indicated ) to use, which is more than enough for anything I'm likely to want to do online.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

dancytron
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#67 Post by dancytron »

My faithful 1.8 Gigahertz duo core intel with 3 Gig of ram exandable to 4 bit the dust last week. I paid almost $800 for it when it was new.

For $38 plus shipping and sales tax, I got a HP 8000 elite small form factor Intel duo core 3.0 Gigahertz with 4 Gig of ram, expandable to 16, complete with Windows 7 oem license sticker.

I've defeated some annoying quirks and now are running exactly what I had before.

I'll document it in the right thread, but it will not boot grub4dos drives on usb. It was very strange and annoying since the only bootable DVD/CD I had was Windows XP Black and my old usb DVD burner has also apparently died. I had to install XP, use Universal USB Installer to make a not grub4dos Puppy thumb drive, and then install from that. :roll:

But, hard to complain for $38

edit: it may be the ext4 file system, not the grub4dos that kept it from usb booting

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Mike Walsh
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#68 Post by Mike Walsh »

.....and further 'ramblings'.

I had a good look inside the new desktop last night. I'd removed the main 500 GB drive from the Compaq yesterday, and last night installed it before hitting the sack. It's been neatly put together, this thing; HP have definitely given some thought to how to make best use of the limited space.

The hard drive cage swivels out, after undoing just 4 screws. The 500 GB WD slots in nicely beside the 1 TB Tosh, giving me a total of 4.5 TB of internal & external storage, running @ SATA3/USB 3.0/3.1 transfer speeds. The second power lead is just sitting there, waiting; I re-used my own SATA 'data' leads. All wiring is very neatly routed out of the way, with dozens of wee clips all over the place for securing things.

-----------------------

Interestingly, this thing is using high-rated ceramic SMD (surface-mount) power caps most of the way round the motherboard, with a number of polyester SMDs and just the odd electrolytic 'leaded' variety here & there. Should make it easier to spot any 'blown' ones, some years down the line.

Despite the limited space, compared to the old tower, there still seems to be more room to work in than the old one.......probably due to the fact that everything seems so much smaller to begin with!

I'll still feel happier if I can "up" the output from the PSU; that diminutive 180W worries me, I tell you...


Mike. :wink:

dancytron
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#69 Post by dancytron »

I just added the hard drive from my old computer to it and mine is built the same way.

No tools required. Flip up the cage with the DVD drive in it, slide the hard drive in underneath it, hook up 2 wires, flip it back down, close the case, and that's it.

A lot of nice engineering.

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Colonel Panic
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#70 Post by Colonel Panic »

Not exactly new, but I'd like to give a reminder that it's worth checking on EBay if you're looking for hardware. After my old monitor started failing I was lucky enough to get a 22" EIZO Flexscan (model number S2202W) this week, used but in good condition and for less than I would have had to pay for a new monitor of the same size from the likes of Argos. It supposedly has a scratch on the casing but I haven't seen it yet.
Gigabyte M68MT-52P motherboard, AMD Athlon II X4 630, 5.8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250 GB Hitachi hard drive running Ubuntu 16.04.6, MX-19.2, Peppermint 10, PCLinuxOS 20.02, LXLE 18.04.3, Pardus 19.2, exGENT 200119, Bionic Pup 8.0 and Xenial CE 7.5 XL.

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Mike Walsh
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#71 Post by Mike Walsh »

Colonel Panic wrote:Not exactly new, but I'd like to give a reminder that it's worth checking on EBay if you're looking for hardware.
Ah, don't I know it, mate. Where d'you think the beating heart of the old Compaq tower came from.....that dual-core Athlon64 X2? From eBay.....for all of around £6.....and it gave me almost 5 years sterling, trouble-free service before the old girl decided to "croak" back in early January (for whatever the reason was).

You can get some real bargains on eBay, that's for sure. (You can also get some real 'lemons', too, but usually your nose'll tell ya what to avoid!)


Mike. :wink:

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Mike Walsh
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#72 Post by Mike Walsh »

Well, I'm just about now set with this new machine.....

Storage setup is now 4 TB, all internal. The 1 TB Toshie is the default installed HDD; the 3 TB is the Seagate Barracuda, which has been 'removed' from the fancy external case with USB 3.0/SATA adapter it originally came in, and is now plugged directly into the mobo's SATA3 ports.

The WD 500GB Caviar 'Blue' is now a 'spare', in case I ever need one.

RAM has been upped from 4 DB DDR4 to 8 GB DDR4 - still 2400 MHz (this is the max the custom HP board supports, though it's interesting they supplied it with a stick of 2666!) This is, I feel, a perfect amount for my use case; allows plenty of multi-tasking if necessary, and gives Openshot a good chunk of space to play with when rendering. Which leads me nicely onto my latest, and probably final purchase.....

.....an Asus GeForce GT710 GPU, with its own, dedicated, 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM. Far more modern than the very basic GeForce 210 I'd purchased a few years ago, and with which I was experimenting some weeks back.....never having been able to use it in ye olde Compaq tower due to a damaged PCI-e slot. Plenty of folks have been recommending GTX 1080s and 2080s, and look at you 'gone-out' when you explain that you just want a usable GPU for every day stuff, with enough grunt for the odd mad session. Serious gamers just seem incapable of understanding anything other than their passion..... :lol:

This is one of these silent, 'passively-cooled' cards, with a large, oversized heatsink and no fan. 'Passive radiation' is the cooling method of choice, y'see. I definitely didn't want a fan anymore after playing with the 210; the teeny fan on the 210's diminutive heatsink did a fair impression of an angry hornet trying to break out and win its freedom. I wouldn't have believed it possible for something so small to create such a persistent, intrusive whine.....3 or 4 days of that, and I had to take it out, or I'd have gone bonkers!

Specs-wise, it's not much of an improvement on the Pentium 'Gold's on-die UHD 630 GPU; a few more cores, a few more execution units, slightly higher memory and base clock speeds, etc, etc. Increased performance wasn't the overall reason for the 710's purchase; I'm happy enough with the UHD 630's performance, but like all on-board graphics, it eats into system RAM for its VRAM. I wanted, essentially, to keep all 8 GB for Puppy & what I want to do, yet have a card with the same level of performance that had its own pool of dedicated RAM to play with, and which would have enough grunt to handle video rendering in Puppy.....Openshot likes to offload this stuff to the GPU whenever possible, and this thing will handle it nicely.

I think power draw was the biggest surprise. The older 210 pulls around 30W from the slot itself; the GT 710, despite having a vastly higher number of cores/execution/shader/texture units, etc, because of being built on a much smaller fab process, sips a mere 19W from that small, 180W PSU.

(Which was quite a relief, 'cos research has already shown the PSU on these HP 'mini-towers' is not easy to upgrade; not only are they a weird size to start with, but HP, being sneaky, have carefully fitted it with custom, one-off connectors, haven't they? No 20/24-pin ATX connector here; the entire board is supplied via just 4 pins, plus a 4-pin for the CPU supply.... (*Grrrr....*))

----------------------------

Overall, though, I'm satisfied with my new set-up. It'll keep me productive for quite a while to come, I feel..! :D


Mike. :wink:

ndujoe1
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#73 Post by ndujoe1 »

I transferred my data to Solid state hard drive.

linuxcbon
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#74 Post by linuxcbon »

Because many PC stuff broke down, I had to buy :
Second hand stuff :
- an old USB logitech M90 mouse. (simple, practical)
- an old fujistu siemens keyboard. (simple, robust, practical)
- an old gpu card MSI GTX 750 2GD5/OCV1 , but it broke after 2 months LOL.
- an old 24" HP screen (average image quality but enough for my needs)
- some old DDR2 RAM sticks (average but enough for my needs)
And new stuff :
- a "spirit of gamer pro-h5" headset. (sound quality is bad, but it's enough for my needs).

ndujoe1
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#75 Post by ndujoe1 »

Mike I like your graphic logo. May I share to my friends. It is says it all and is true.

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Mike Walsh
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#76 Post by Mike Walsh »

The final piece of the 'puzzle' turned up today.

A couple of years ago, I went through a spell of what I can only assume to be RSI in my right wrist. It cleared up after a while, but I've always been wary ever since about using a mouse for too long at a time.

Over the course of the last year, there's been an explosion of what are termed 'ergonomic mice' on the market. They look odd, essentially being a normal mouse, but being turned through around 60° on the lengthways axis. The idea being that, unlike usage of a 'normal' mouse, where you keep your hand horizontal with your wrist angled slightly up & back all the time, these allow you to hold your mouse in a far more natural, and presumably more comfortable, position. More importantly, where the former puts strain on the nerve bundle where it passes through the bones of your wrist, the ergonomic types keep everything in much more of a straight line, thereby obviating the chances of getting RSI.

I tried one of these types of mouse at our local PCWorld back in January, and was surprised by how comfortable they are, despite feeling 'odd' initially. Other concerns drove it out of my mind till the other day, when I came across an article on these items on one of the 'tech blogs', and thought, 'Yes; time to sort myself out one of these things'. And so I have.

After scouting around on Amazon & eBay, I've settled for one of these:-

https://www.prohavit.com/products/hv-ms ... cal-mouse/

Strange-looking beast, indeed:-


Image


.....yet unbelievably comfortable in use. Havit themselves refer to this as a 'bionic snail design' (!!) :? Time will, of course, tell as to what it's like over an extended period of usage, but initial impressions are encouraging so far....

We shall see.


Mike. :wink:

Gobbi
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#77 Post by Gobbi »

This month I got a new laptop . I usually like a desktop but my work makes me travel a bit more lately and so , I opted for a laptop .
It is a Schenker Work 15 . They let you decide what to add for components , starting from a minimum . So I spared not paying for an
internal SSD ( or hard drive ) - I don't use them , and took minimum of upgradable RAM . It took a month to get it due to the lockdown .
It has a good i7-9750H processor , that's what made me look at this option , too . Integrated graphics with a 15" IPS FHD panel , but it's fine for me ,
I'm not a gaming guy and I don't work with professional graphic content . I was happy to recycle some RAM left from a previous NUC .
And , it came with no Windows , of course . It's a total UEFI machine and , it came with no keys at all . Actually I had to learn a bit about
UEFI to understand how to manage it . I delayed this as much as I could but ...
With Secure Boot disabled ( it came this way ) and a USB flash , GPT partitioned , with Fatdog64 installed on it in UEFI mode the laptop
worked from the start . Many thanks for that to @jamesbond who gave many useful informations about the process and also made
Fatdog64 UEFI bootable a while ago . Later , editing the grub.cfg file allowed me to add and boot several Pups from the same flash drive .
It's a total UEFI machine because there is no CSM , no legacy mode , only UEFI operating systems can boot . And guess what , not even a 32 bit
OS can boot . Strictly UEFI booting ISO's .
I tried and , after the UEFI and GRUB part do their job , the system hangs on a black screen or the splash image if the ISO has any . I think
the firmware doesn't allow it because the CPU is able of running 32 bit . So it's a machine designed looking to the future and not to the past .
Thank God I could still disable Secure Boot . Yes I can still test 32 bit systems in a virtual machine but not directly on this hardware .
I tried Xenialpup and Bionicpup which boot fine in Qemu in UEFI mode . The same Bionicpup with a 64 bit kernel inside instead of the 32 bit one
boots fine on the laptop ( thanks for the tip @peebee ) . Fatdog64 : 721 with kernel 4.14.12 , 800 with 4.19.92 kernel and 810 with 5.3.15 are working fine .
Even 700 and 710 boot to the desktop but those kernels gave me no sound and no network , which I'm not surprised . LxPupSc64 with a 5.0.3.kernel has
no problems , actually I have direct rendering and the best picture with it . I even tried to boot Lighthouse Pup ( 64 bit ) from @Tazoc and I noticed that the
UEFI process went well but then the 3.8.7 kernel went on panic and froze . So from 64 bit kernel 4.14.12 onward , it works well .
On the other hand the laptop works fast , heavy tasks are now a breeze and it has no issues with connectivity . My last laptop lived 8 years and I hope this
one can last as much . It's not cheap but I'm glad I could take it , choosing the barebone of it .
I'm afraid there will be computers in the future without the choice to disabe Secure Boot . Even this one was designed to be as much compatible
with Windows - the illuminated keyboard has a program for Windows 10 to handle various configurations , even turn illumination off . In all Pups it remains blu .
Linux friendly ? I would say yes ( assuming UEFI is now unavoidable on new consumer hardware ) but not to very old operating systems .

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8Geee
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#78 Post by 8Geee »

An iPad7 & Pencil. hasn't arrived yet.
Need it for better communication than my ASUS eee.
Have no fear, the Atomic Pup is still the daily driver.
The iPad7 is needed for video conference/ wifi comm/ on the road.

Fortunately my Laser Printer is wifi enabled JIC.

Regards
8Geee
Linux user #498913 "Some people need to reimagine their thinking."
"Zuckerberg: a large city inhabited by mentally challenged people."

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Moose On The Loose
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#79 Post by Moose On The Loose »

audio-technica headphones seem to work ok.
Yes a thing working rates as a special feature

https://myboogieboard.com/
Not exactly hi-tech but they work to not need paper for writing down dimensions before getting out the saw and stuff like that.

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Flash
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#80 Post by Flash »

I found a flat bed scanner in an alley, so it's new to me. :) As far as I can tell, it's in perfect working order.
But it uses a parallel port connection and I haven't been able to get it to work in Bionicpup64. :( http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=118649

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