The most consequential Linux installation so far!!

1536

SD card storage space via Dell laptop = success! And it can be accessed from another PC.

So here we go with the HP AIO mega-move to Linux…

Just starting the process, and not much to report other than some tiny notes for future reference:

Esc: Startup menu

F9: Boot menu

F10: BIOS

Booting from Linux Mint (LM) installation USB: UEFI, not Legacy.

1607

LM is installed! That was straightforward. 

Now to install all the software I need, and then comes the ultra-fun of making LM look & feel like something familiar to me. Luckily, (I think) I’ve written down most of what I need somewhere in these notes…

Cabbage, cabbage, tabbage; and beginning the REAL move to Linux...

2048

Going on a slight tangent before trying out that SD-card-as-extra-storage operation: the slightly more pressing matter of Windows 10 and its End-of-Life…

My ‘main’ computer (a quite old but still capable HP AIO) is, unbelievably, still running Windows 10 Pro, which is over five months out-of-date and no longer receiving security updates from Microsoft. Despite having a good processor, and plenty of RAM, Microsaft have arbitrarily decided that it’s not good enough for Windows 11 and should be scrapped.

I’ve written before about installing Windows 10 & 11 IoT on various PCs, and this would certainly be a viable option for this computer, but I’ve also written about installing Linux (Mint) on a couple of PCs in an attempt to move away from my dependence on Microsaft. Even if I switch to an IoT version of Windows, that option won’t last forever; eventually they too will be out-of-support and by then we’ll be staring at Windows 12 (though Microsaft’s OS almost certainly just be called CoPilot by then; Windows is dead) and it’ll be 100% subscription-based with no wiggle room to wrangle a blessedly-lightweight IoT onto old hardware.

ANYWAY…

To head-off this inevitable dead-end, I am, as I said, trying out Linux, but I haven’t committed to Linux yet.

This is where the ‘main’ computer comes in: if I divest myself of Windows on there, and install Linux, I’ll have to use Linux!

Will it be annoying? Zark yes! But not as annoying as trying to hurriedly learn Linux in five-to-ten years’ time when the IoT gravy train finally hits the buffers and I have to scrabble around in a panic (and as an older person…) to learn a new OS.

Yes, it’s the right decision.

…but I’m not just jumping off a cliff. 

Time to admit to something rather embarrassing: one of the reasons it’s taken me this long to get around to updating the OS on my main PC is the sheer volume of ‘tabbage’ going on; across three different browsers, in seven windows, I have just over 40 tabs on the go. This isn’t a huge number really (I often have more than that in just one browser on my phone) but they are carefully laid out across the three browsers for different purposes.

Honestly, I couldn’t face shutting down all those tabs in order to replace the OS, so I did nothing about it for months & months…

About that not jumping off a cliff: so what I’ve done this evening is set up my laptop next to the (allegedly) out-of-date desktop and go through all the browsers, windows, & tabs, and recreate the exact layout on the other PC.

Wot a cop-out.

But you have to pick your battles.

And now I have no excuse!

I’m going ahead with that idea using the SD card as a storage drive in the PavNAS, but I’m going to attempt to do it from the laptop; if that works, I know I can still do everything I need to, even if the old AIO doesn’t survive its trip down the Linux-hole.

See you on the other side.

YET ANOTHER post about copying speeds, but it's really mainly about an SD card

1826

Today I’ve been copying all the music from the EHDD attached to PavNAS over the network to the old AIO (with the intention of not only listening to it (which is the whole point), but also finally getting around to sorting it - a massive job…)

It's (obviously) thousands of small files so it made an interesting* test of transfer speed: seemed to proceed at around 10MB\s. Is that good or bad? I should just be glad that it works, really!

In other news, I was helping someone else with their laptop and they were once again bemoaning the lack of storage space; 100GB just isn't enough in 2026, and buying a larger M.2 drive would be quite expensive these days. Why did laptops have to get so thin…? Remember when we could dump out the optical drive and put in a huge, cheap spinning rust HDD as a secondary drive for storage? Obviously optical drives are deprecated these days, but they could have left room for a little 2.5” drive… Or am I just stuck in the past with my 2.5” drives? (And the aforementioned literal stack of 3.5” drives!)

Anyway, I've previously faced the identical problem myself with a modern** laptop and wangled my way around it by using a 128GB card in the SD slot to store extra files (comics in my case; have I written about this before? It was when the laptop that's now PavNAS was temporarily the comic-reading computer).

I don't know why it was only on this occasion that the idea of an SD card hit me, but I popped to the shop*** and bought myself a (pricey) 256GB card; I'll pass on the 128GB card to more than double their laptop's storage.

Anyway (and I don't know why I'm writing about this before trying it), my plan is to put an SD card back into PavNAS and see if I can mount it as a storage device in OMV! I'm everso pleased with myself for thinking this up****. If it works, it should be quite quick to send & receive files to & from. I wanted to try it out today but was terrified of interrupting the music copying; I've previously found that changing anything on the OMV web interface makes copying hiccup, even if what one does has nothing to do with the drive in use. Best let the copying finish.

* subjective

** relative

*** almost; as previously recounted, Curry's barely meets the definition of a shop, carrying nearly no stock, and hardly staffed.

**** jinxed it now

Always copy FROM TreeSize!!

1202 (alarm) I'm having my first go at updating the backups. This consists of copying the latest load of downloads from the Living Room PC (LRPC) (where I do most downloading) to an external HDD; an important next step is sorting the load of downloads into folders which match the sorted folders in the backup locations.

Then, this ExtHDD gets plugged into various other locations and the new data gets copied across to the relevant folders in the backup locations.

I've copied to a couple of locations so far, but have made a bit of a mistake: I've been using File Mangler to do the copying…

As previously detailed, FM (Windows Explorer) doesn't like copying folders it hasn't got permission to access, even though I can give it access without a check or a thought. It's extremely stupid.

What I should be doing is using TreeSize to do the copying, which just needs UAC permission once when the program is started.

I shall use it from the next location onwards.

…or should I go back and redo the places I've already done…?

Can I be zarked to do it?

Maybe I'll just try looking at the properties in FM & TS and see if they agree. The easy way.

An electronic, virtual appendectomy.

1001 The (much) older Lenovo AIO which is in use as my workbench computer has always been a bit dodgy; drivers just aren't available for many of its devices under newer Windowses.

One particular annoyance has been the trying-to-work-but-definitely-doesn’t-work touchscreen. Any touch on the screen is read as a touch in a tiny portion on the lower left side, and sometimes it keeps thinking touches are happening there and the mouse can't be used.

Yesterday, I was finally bothered enough by it to do something about it (N.B. not bothered enough to try to make the touchscreen work - that would be a painful & pointless exercise).

I went into Device Manager - Human Input Devices and simply disabled the two entries which mentioned touchscreen.

There I go again, putting the pro in I.T. professional.

No progress, but good intentions paving the road...

1549 Haven’t done much on the data/NAS/back-up front lately. Actually, what have I been doing?

I really should check it’s all still working and much more importantly, organise an off-site back-up…