Linux Life Episode 51
Hello folks as I have managed to get myself a quiet moment it’s time to check in with the blog. As I said I will be a bit more sporadic with the posting here this is due to family situations.
So what have I being doing with Linux since the last episode. Well my Kingston 120GB SSD I was running Linux on decided to have issues and for all of the attempts to save it I had to swap it out and replace it with my Integral 120GB SSD.
Luckily because I don’t keep my home directory on the SSD but on a separate 1TB Seagate hard drive no data was really lost. So I had to re-install Namib Linux onto the new drive. This was a bit odd but I got it working.
The installation went smooth but upon restart GRUB would start and then pixelate the screen as the video didn’t initialise correctly. So I went in using mode 3 to just a text prompt but upon signing in this way MATE actually started which was odd but handy.
At first I could not update as Pamac would not download any of the required 538 updates from the base Namib. So I opened a terminal and tried to use pacman. First attempt using ‘pacman -Syu’ it just sat there after updating the main repositories as it failed to download just as Pamac had.
In the end the way I managed to get it working was to use the ‘pacman -Syyuu’ which forces the update. So finally I managed to get the system updated and working. I also managed to install the Nvidia drivers while I was there and all of the previous programs I was using which luckily was not many as I have been pretty quiet on Linux at the moment.
After installing Grub Customizer from the AUR I was able to put Grub into a mode that I knew would work with my ageing monitor. I really must get a new one although this works it’s an old Dell 19 inch monitor with a max resolution of 1280x800 so it really is showing its age. It works fine however and there is no pixel damage so I really can’t complain.
So within an hour I was back up and running and even managed to get my desktop back including my Cairo Dock at the bottom of the screen with all its icons restored and reworking including the Vulkan drivers and DXVK to get games working through Lutris.
However I have not really been playing games lately but it is nice to have that capability should I start using it.
I have however been messing around with stuff. I was playing with the Previous emulator. If you remember I discussed this NeXT emulator before. Well I managed to get a few programs installed using ISOs of the Peanuts Archive including a few games and a few applications.
I have also been messing around with DosBOX and I decided to have a bit of fun playing with some old programming stuff to see if I can remember any of it. I honestly can’t but I installed Borland Turbo Pascal 6.0 for DOS and Borland Turbo C 3.0 for DOS and I was playing with them.
I vaguely managed to get a basic “Hello World” type program that cleared the screen and then waited for a key press to exit but it took me far longer than it should have as I have totally forgotten how to program Pascal and C++ and to begin with could not even remember the keywords.
This could be because the last time I actually did any programming in DOS has to be more than 25 years ago. However I did have fun playing with them and although it won’t lead to anything serious. Trust me I don’t desire to become a programmer as I just don’t have the patience, it is fun to mess around and do small things with.
I did create their own dosbox.conf files so they auto-start in DosBOX from a launcher and now they sit on my Cairo Dock bar along with everything else. I’m sure in time I will kill them off but for now it keeps me vaguely amused in this tricky time.
So that’s what has been happening in my little Linux world so until next episode. Take care.














