Thanks again Rene. There are a few possibilities here and it will take me a while to work on them. At the moment my consulting work has hit a pause. But I expect to receive assembled boards in about a week and do not want to risk crashing my lab laptop at the moment.
I have a small victory because Firefox now allows my old machine to stream music from Radio Swiss Classic. (Highly recommended) No I will not be doing other browsing…
Both my desk and lab laptops have working DVD drives and my desk machine can also burn them. I think I can probably boot from a DVD if I can burn it properly. Not sure if I can boot from a USB stick though.
I had a quick look at Knoppix. It was once a revolutionary Linux distribution. It was the first that could run from read-only media without installing. Over the years though, this has become a standard feature of lots of linux distributions.
If you look at the forum for Knoppix: http://knoppix.net/forum/forum.php
it seems almost dead with less than a handful of posts per month.
Most of my Linux experience is with Mint, and I quite like it. It’s a quite popular distribution, which is kept upto date (so easy to install KiCad, etc).
Hardware detection “just works”, and you can also boot from it to try it out before installing. The normal way to install LinuxMint is to first boot from it, then click on the “install” icon on the desktop and follow a few instructions and reboot. The Xfce edition is probably the best for old hardware: https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=283
Also:
I would be very surprised if you laptop can not boot from a USB stick, but if it still has a DVD drive that is of course also an option.
If you want to give linux a serious try, with minimum to no risk to flipping bits on your windoze disk, you can buy a cheap SSD and use that for your Linux experiments. These things start at EUR25 in these modern times.
Hi, Paulvdh Well I think I have figured out that my old Core 2 Duo laptop is actually a 64 bit machine (I had assumed that it was 32 bit) and I have found an option to boot it from a DVD. I see no option to boot it from a USB stick. I have downloaded an ISO image after learning what that is supposed to be. But now the process of Windows 10 verifying the ISO image seems too dang complicated.
If your laptop has USB then it is likely that it can boot from it. For some systems it is however done via the boot order for (hard) disks. The USB stick will be shown as one of the options in the boot order selection instead of heaving a special option to place USB in general above normal disks.
Yes the laptop has USB and everything works with no known issues. I liked your earlier comment about needing to run back and forth due to forgetting the thumb drive. Ahhh! Just now on a hunch…I tried plugging in the USB drive before turning on the computer…and indeed now it does list it.
OK thanks! It is bedtime here now but I will look into this further tomorrow…
Many corporate users stuck to 32 bit to this day because they were nervous of compatibility with some dodgy Excel VBA macro that was critical to Accounts
Thank goodness I was never an accountant. Maybe it was caused by COVID->massive unemployment but several USA states not so long ago had to draw (was it COBOL?) programmers out of retirement to deal with the surge in unemployment cases. I guess they are still running 40 year old IBM mainframes.
I learned FORTRAN in college; we would punch a deck of computer cards to run simulations on a networked IBM 360 system at Research Triangle Park. Go to our computer center, punch the cards, hand them to a clerk and wait maybe minutes or maybe hours for a printout, depending upon how busy they were. Usually try to go late at night.
I recently completed this trauma with my desktop.
I downloaded Mint Cinnamon through Firefox onto a USB. The instructions were VERY easy to understand and follow. If you are having problems with whatever Linux you are considering, I would recommend going to the Linux Mint site and at least reading through their instructions to clarify any confusion you have.
Out of curiosity I also downloaded Mint to a DVD. Running Mint from a DVD was just a little slower than the USB stick.
Yesterday I indeed went to Linux Mint site and attempted to follow the instructions. I downloaded Etcher and ran it. But the Linux Mint site gives me this image of what I should see:
So the instructions do not match what I see… I guess I am again in the situation of try this and try that?
Well I am now flashing…I hope I do not vanish in a flash…
Some success and some not so much… Launched Linux Mint; computer froze after opening a .docx file. Forced shutdown. Now Launched Linux Mint in compatibility mode and have opened a .xls file. I was surprised that these opened in Libre Office. The real key will be to see if I can run KiCad from Linux Mint running from a USB stick.(??). I have not yet taken the leap to install Linux Mint. I should not provide an extended running commentary here. But thanks everyone for pitching in to help.
Ahhh… The original Sneaker-Net. My father had stories of the quad at Northeastern turning white with discarded punch cards during exam time (mid-terms and finals).
I have taken the plunge and installed Linux Mint along Win32 with a partitioned HDD. Linux Mint has frozen once or twice already and I did a forced reboot. But now I am trying to figure out how to install a KiCad nightly. I need a recent nightly because my KiCad files are in version 5.99.
It’s an error on the KiCad website.
That part should be “Update Manager”.
Which stumbles directly into the next error on the KiCad Website.
The “other software tab” should be “PPA’s”.
(Almost looks like KiCad documentation is a bit stale).
It’s also possible there are some small differences between different flavours of Mint. (I’ve got Mint 20something with Mate Desktop at the moment).
I have not used the nightlies myself yet.
This looks like a good opportunity to install them.
I’ll be back in (hopefully) 10 minutes or so…
I’m back. In the meantime successfully installed Kicad-nightly 5.99.
Steps:
1.“Update Manager” / Edit / Software Sources -> Enter Password -> [Authenticate]
2. PPA’s / Add / “ppa:kicad/kicad-dev-nightly” [OK].
3. “Refresh” (this updates the database with programs that can be installed).
On a fresh install of Linux Mint, you probably have to “Install Updates” a few times, and this may require a few reboots. Reboots are not very common for Linux, but there has a lot been going on in the Linux Kernel lately, ant that is one of the few parts that need a reboot.
After you’ve added the “ppa:kicad/kicad-dev-nightly” to the packages database, you can exit the “Update Manager” (or leave it open, whatever) and open the “Software Manager”.
In the “Software Manager” you can search for Kicad, and then install the nightlies:
Thanks. Well before your last update I tried to install from Update manager. That got me a bunch of unintelligible choices. But now I go to software manager and that is installing without giving me any choice of builds.
You can search for the nightlys in the search bar.
It is divided into separate parts, so you can choose whether you want to install footprints, templates, etc.
I do not get what you show. “No matching packages found” Maybe my entry in the update manager is wrong? I have kicad dev (nightly) and (nightly-sources). I do now know what is the difference. Keep in mind that this is on another laptop so I look there and type here…not doing copy paste to this forum. I understand if you might be doing other things…thanks for your help so far but I understand if you bail if you need to.
Thanks I did include both. I will go back to software manager and try again.
No it is not found. Maybe I need to change software mirror or something like that?
BTW this thread is supposed to be about XP. But I hope that an admin running this site can wait until I get this sorted out before moving or changing everything!
