Re: [Dorset] Playing with OS's

2017-08-14 Thread PeterMerchant via dorset

On 10/08/17 09:46, PeterMerchant via dorset wrote:

On 08/08/17 19:12, Ralph Corderoy wrote:

Hi Peter,


Because I have been a bit restricted in what I can do lately, I dug
out my play computer and tried a few Linux OS's on it.

Ah, well, if you're bored then you might be interested in trying
https://manjaro.org/  I haven't, but it's an Arch Linux derivative
with... a GUI installer!  The download page looks to have KDE flavour.

Cheers, Ralph.

That kept me from being bored. I downloaded the KDE version, and every 
time I booted it, my screen displayed a message " out of range " which 
implies that it cannot adjust the resolution to that of this ancient 
Toshiba 13".  I  think that it is 'working' because every time I hit a 
key the CD runs up.  I booted into SolyDK and that worked OK, as does 
everything else.


I have a cheep IDE-to-SATA converter on the hard disk drive and it is 
giving me grief too as I keep swapping drives.


Graeme, I used to be a great fan of Mandrake about 12-15 years ago, 
but didn't like Mandriva. I'll have to give the latest incarnation 
another try.



Peter 
Have given up/finished. Have now four HD's with PArrot, Kali, Mageia and 
Zorin.


As per Graeme's suggestion I tried Mageia, but could only find the XFCE 
version. I liked it because of the ease of installation and guidance, 
but on booting it always brought up a terminal window and needed a root 
login before proceeding to the GUI login. And it was dreadfully slow.  
It says my screen is a 15"  Toshiba  with 1024x768 resolution.  I think 
someday I'll have to try it again as it doesn't seem right.


I could never get Manjaro to recognize my screen. It always came up 'out 
of Range' on the screen. This is a condition that I have seen years ago 
when a computer could not set the screen size.


SolydK  DVD would boot but I could not install it because it would not 
find my hard disk.


And at the end of it I decided that my IDE-toSata converter had a poor 
solder connection on the SATA connector so have had a go at fixing that.


Cheers,
Peter

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Re: [Dorset] Playing with OS's

2017-08-08 Thread Ralph Corderoy
Hi Peter,

> Because I have been a bit restricted in what I can do lately, I dug
> out my play computer and tried a few Linux OS's on it.

Ah, well, if you're bored then you might be interested in trying
https://manjaro.org/  I haven't, but it's an Arch Linux derivative
with... a GUI installer!  The download page looks to have KDE flavour.

Cheers, Ralph.

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[Dorset] Playing with OS's

2017-08-08 Thread PeterMerchant via dorset
Because I have been a bit restricted in what I can do lately, I dug out 
my play computer and tried a few Linux OS's on it. Here is a bit of a 
report.


The computer is an ASUS P5K with 4GB of RAM, 153GB IDE hard disk with an 
IDE-SATA converter and a 13 inch monitor. It has a Wifi card that sits 
on the motherboard.


Initially the computer had a SATA hard disk with Zorin 11 on it. This 
had installed easily and worked fine. It is a 'simple' OS that is sort 
of an XP replacement.


I overwrote this with Parrot linux 3.7 as it was in one of the 
recommended lists. It had the old text based installer and went in 
without problems, and updated easily over the wifi.


I then changed this disk for the IDE with converter and installed KDE 
Neon 5.8.5 that I had downloaded back in January. This installed easily 
enough but I had a bit of trouble getting it to stay connected to the 
wifi. It wanted about 270 updates, and when you  hit the 'update all' 
button it overlayed a screen of all the files that were going to be 
updated, but it was a long list and you couldn't scroll down or see any 
way of removing it. Hitting the enter key did it. I had to try and 
update about 4 times over the wifi, because it kept stopping when the 
wifi failed and I was unable to restart it.  In the end I carted it 
indoors and wired the Ethernet in. It eventually updated. One of the 
features was that the machine refused to respond to the power down 
instructions. The only way I found to stop it was the power button.


Not happy so I installed Kali Linux 2016-1 over it. Once again a text 
based installer, it took it's time installing, but got there. It didn't 
mind that i went out for coffee, just kept working, not like the Neon.  
it's quite fast, but the only login on it is root. I haven't found an 
office suite on it yet, but it is a dedicated security toolkit distro 
based on Backtrack and Helix.



Cheers,

Peter


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