Thinkpad, Life and the Yearly Distrohop

At this point in my Linux journey, after fully switching to it as a daily driver in Q4 2018, I’d say I’m quite satisfied with using it as a daily OS. Currently I’m using Manjaro Gnome on all of my devices. Above is the picture of the AMD-Ryzen-based Thinkpad A485 I’m running it on when on campus.

The Aero15X, with its finnickyness regarding Linux installs, will stay at home until I have more time to configure a proper Arch install with good Optimus support on it… This Thinkpad gets a solid 5-6 hours of battery life on the stock model battery. I have Lenovo’s proper “61++” battery coming in for it in upcoming weeks so that will be nice.

In terms of personal projects, I’m currently working on modifying Luke Smith’s LARBS script for a Linode-based Arch install in the cloud. Looking to see if I can properly configure AwesomeWM to forward the display of the VPS to my laptop, thereby allowing me to remote into my little project without taking any compute power away from the laptop I’m doing my Senior Design project on. I’ll have more to report in the future! I might fork LARBS and throw it onto my GitHub when I get further along.

Note: I link many things in my blog posts- click the grey-er words to be taken to related or corresponding sites while reading.

Reviving The Old Dell Mini 10 + Update!

Back in early 2009, there was a tiny little “cheap” netbook, designed by Dell, to be utilized for simple web browsing and office applications. The hardware was incredibly cheap, however it could easily withstand being knocked around in an elementary or high school student’s bookbag. This was the Dell Mini 10.

Seeing that I haven’t really done much with the restoration of this old hardware, I feel that it isn’t worth its own project page. Instead, I will document it here in a blog post.

The above picture was what you would originally find this netbook listed as on Dell’s website back in the day.

After upgrading the RAM to the maximum it could utilize, 2GB, installing a little SSD I had laying around and throwing Linux Mint 32-bit on it, we now have a cheap little Chromebook replacement. My goal in the future is to use a Pinebook Pro instead of this little guy or my x360 HP chromebook. I intend on giving away the Dell Mini 10 and the HP Chromebook to others who have more use for them, but for now, this chromecasts fine to the TV.

Now, above, we have the output of an application called “Neofetch” that, in my opinion, should come standard with most Linux Distributions. If interested in doing the same as I have done, feel free to reach out to the Linux Reddit, as they’re very helpful to newcomers looking to recycle some old hardware.

As we can see here, I have installed Linux Mint on this. It is a very lightweight operating system, and much more secure than the aging Windows 7 Starter that was installed on here.

Microsoft is abandoning Windows 7 if I recall correctly, and Linux allows users to own their hardware without relying on needless Microsoft spyware. The goal of this was to outfit the little netbook with a barebones operating system that auto-launched Chrome whenever you started it up. As we can see under the “Memory” section of the output, this OS uses VERY LITTLE memory at idle. Even when casting informative Youtube videos to the TV, it still only gets up to about 1gb.

That’s the news regarding the Dell Mini 10 that I revived, however I’d also like to add that I’ll be working on some Terraform code going forward for a senior design project!

The GameShell Arrives!

My GameShell from ClockworkPi arrived!

Thoroughly enjoyed putting this little piece of tech together. I’ll update the things I’ve done with it and what I’ve learned from the Forums by the end of the day today. Head to my project page for it to see more!

unRAIDing It Up

This picture is a great representation of how I’ve learned to use LXC/LXD containers. Also, many preconfigured apps, I’ve learned, can be easily installed on unRAID. Again, I’m doing this as a personal project, so I’m quite lazy when it comes to configuring things.

So far, Plex and a PXE test VM are running under unRAID, with other operating systems being test-installed on it as I move onward. The default snap of Nextcloud that gets installed with a stock Ubuntu Server 18.04.01 release doesn’t seem to work as well as Nextcloud in a docker container for unRAID. Learning more about this as I go on, but also working with my group to get our Senior Design project up and running on this as well.

DDNS is a great service…

Some developments

Recently I've mainly been focusing on some open source projects I've been helping my friends out with, working on dashboarding and on-call automation at a Tesla internship and attempting to finish Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild.

I gotta say, as much as I love Nintendo games, damn that one is a bit more brutal than previous iterations! Previously, you could actually manage to live for a while in Zelda games...now it's as if Nintendo partnered with From Software...Nonetheless, onward with more tech blather.

I've recently been working on more self-hosted things. I'm likely going to host my own Sandstorm instance with Rocket.Chat and some other apps on there when I get back home in August from California. The Factorio Ansible playbooks that I somewhat talked about here on another page are still in development- Ansible can further my understanding of how automation can be used in both personal and professional environments. I'm also looking into Terraform to see how, upon return to the midwest and my homelab, I can map out my infrastructure for future reference.

Outside of homework and open source projects, those playbooks and tools I covered...I haven't done much outside of work at Tesla. I'll update this again when I get time...usually once a month.