Recent content by Thunderpants

Used Linux for 21 years but still make a right horlicks of my system on occasion. I prefer rolling back partition backups to a full reinstall. It's installing all my preferred applications and removing other people's choices in the distro bundle that takes most time.

I have Xubuntu with Virtualbox installed so android-x86 runs in a virtual machine. The few android apps I use seem to work OK for cheap WiFi cameras and Hive IOT devices. No need for other apps but Google Play works.

I've also used Bleachbit for years and haven't had a single problem with it. It's a well crafted time saving tool for removing accumulated cruft.

With the 'Canvas Blocker' addon with Firefox I get: 'Your browser has a nearly-unique fingerprint'. I suppose nearly unique is a small improvement over unique.

I look for an uncluttered simple interface without power wasting cosmetic frills. First tasks after installation is to set the screen background to solid black then disable compositor features. XFCE fit's all my requirements so for several years I've stuck with Xubuntu LTS releases mainly for...

Most netbooks, if like my old Samsung N10, only have 32bit Atom CPUs but the Debian 32bit install worked fine with only 2GB of RAM. AFAIK Ubuntu and derivatives dropped support for 32 bit CPUs some time ago.

I've read the forthcoming Debian 12 (bookworm) still supports 32bit CPUs provided they are i686 or later. There's a certain satisfaction in keeping old kit serviceable.

Never used facebook but from what I've read, it seems of little benefit to my lifestyle. Old fashioned email and a bog standard telephone serves me fine for keeping in touch with family and local friends.

I expect cheap 4G basic non-smartphones will become available before the big 2G/3G switch off. Don't want a Google or Apple spy device so if the worst happens, an alternative may be a de-googled or linux smartphone.

5G phones and broadband modems are supported here but FTTP and a VoIP service is much preferred. A cheap PAYG flip-phone with a 2MP camera for emergency use is sufficient for me, I wouldn't use a smartphone often enough to justify any extra costs.

Lenovo Thinkpads are also built to last and great value if bought renewed or refurbished. Bought an ex-corporate 'renewed' Lenovo T480 with an 8th gen i5, 8GB and 256GB SSD for under 300 GBP last year. Added an extra 8GB of used Samsung RAM. It's proved robust with a decent keyboard and fast...

Thanks, the loglevel=3 worked perfectly. No more ugly messages when booting up Xubuntu 22.04.

Worth a try but it didn't work on this cheapo PC. It just crashed (froze) with a blank screen with both 23.04 and 22.04. Xubuntu 22.04 runs fine with the boot error messages so I'll just stick with that.

Just tried a clean install of Xubuntu 23.04 on the same mini-PC and there are still a lot ugly ACPI boot error messages but it does appear to run OK. I tend to give the interim releases between LTS versions a miss since they are more experimental. Will likely revert to my 22.04 LTS backup...

Strange, I have a cheap Chinese mini PC (Intel N5095 CPU) with internal SSD that also displays these ugly ACPI bug error messages when booting Xubuntu 22.04 but it seems to work fine. Not tried updating to 23 yet but I will now for curiosity.