I hate computer, I now use mostly a samsung Tablet with android, tab9 ultra plus.
I had no choice to upgrade to win10 with 2080ti RTX water video card. But I bought recently a windows 7 computer for audio measurements which is compatible with my electronic scope, arbitrary wave form generator, logic analyzer, and THD analyzer , and it browse internet flawlessly it does everything perfectly !!!
I had no choice to upgrade to win10 with 2080ti RTX water video card. But I bought recently a windows 7 computer for audio measurements which is compatible with my electronic scope, arbitrary wave form generator, logic analyzer, and THD analyzer , and it browse internet flawlessly it does everything perfectly !!!
Hi gabdx,
Keep Win7! As long as you can.
Hi Tony,
Love CLI. That's how you get things working when the IP connection is messed up, or the device is confused. "Do exactly this to exactly that, right now". No ambiguity. As opposed to "click" ... now what did it really do?
Keep Win7! As long as you can.
Hi Tony,
Love CLI. That's how you get things working when the IP connection is messed up, or the device is confused. "Do exactly this to exactly that, right now". No ambiguity. As opposed to "click" ... now what did it really do?
^
Every Unix computer that I've ever had shared some virtues:
Serial console, CLI, ls, find, grep, vi, df, ds, and so on.
I can boot a Unix machine and with the console I can do 99.99% of what it needs to do.
WIth Xterms and the mouse it becomes even better. I can cut and paste with the mouse from on vi sessions in different x terms.
Right click, highlite, move to next window, i, click to paste.
There, simple.
I interviews once. After 45 minutes of asking me about all kinds of stuff... they asked me how we were developing code (this is '95). I told them, console, vi, grep, find, gcc, make... on the spot, they offered me the job.
No fancy discussions about the GUI.
Every Unix computer that I've ever had shared some virtues:
Serial console, CLI, ls, find, grep, vi, df, ds, and so on.
I can boot a Unix machine and with the console I can do 99.99% of what it needs to do.
WIth Xterms and the mouse it becomes even better. I can cut and paste with the mouse from on vi sessions in different x terms.
Right click, highlite, move to next window, i, click to paste.
There, simple.
I interviews once. After 45 minutes of asking me about all kinds of stuff... they asked me how we were developing code (this is '95). I told them, console, vi, grep, find, gcc, make... on the spot, they offered me the job.
No fancy discussions about the GUI.
I don’t know what the current status is, but during all my experience with Cisco IOS the CLI was always the primary interface. The GUI was a clunky JAVA afterthought that nobody used - or if they did, there would be eyes rolling behind their back. From PIX to ASA, routers, switches, etc. if you didn’t know how to get things done in the CLI, you didn’t matter.
For “version control” we used to manually copy ACLs (via puTTY) into a text editor and then do a find/replace on the ACL name (appending a new number _#) and then paste the new ACL into the CLI and finally bind the new ACL to the interface. If something went wrong, simply bind the previous known good ACL to the interface.
I really liked PIX and ASA. Ran an ASA 5505 at home up until I moved recently. IPtables is no slouch though, and you can do a lot with it.
This talk of HP equipment and HP/GPIB reminded me of an event that took place about a month ago. It was a very windy night when I went to bed. No rain or lightning, just wind. Sometime in the early AM I was awakened by a very loud noise. It was a loud burst of some kind but since I was asleep, I can't say exactly what it was. The next morning my wife told me that the 12 year old Sony TV in her room didn't work. Investigation revealed that a couple lights did not work, so I checked the breaker for that room, and it had a ACFI trip (Arc Fault). Reset the breaker lights work, TV dead. OK, it was 12 years old.
A few days later I turned on one of my HP RF signal generators and it did not power up. I tried another, then all of them and none worked. OK, maybe the surge suppressor / power strip tripped. No, both "good" lights were lit and other stuff on that strip worked fine. nothing was left on at the time, but the generators have ovens for the crystal in the master reference clock. They are always on. I finally ripped everything out of the rack to get to the back of the generators. The fuse in each one was blown. Not just a little blown, 4 had their insides vaporized and the 5th one had exploded. What happened to the sig gens that took me forever to acquire and restore? Nothing! I replaced all the fuses, and they all worked. I'm guessing that a tree branch or some other flying debris put the 7200 volt line in contact with our 240 V feed, or some other short circuit further upstream caused the big bang event. Our house is closest to the pole transformer, 30 feet from pole to breakers kind of close. All of the dead stuff is close to the breaker panel. The Sony is directly above it and the generator rack is about 10 feet away in the basement. Everybody else on that transformer is fed by a long piece of triplex.
A few days later I turned on one of my HP RF signal generators and it did not power up. I tried another, then all of them and none worked. OK, maybe the surge suppressor / power strip tripped. No, both "good" lights were lit and other stuff on that strip worked fine. nothing was left on at the time, but the generators have ovens for the crystal in the master reference clock. They are always on. I finally ripped everything out of the rack to get to the back of the generators. The fuse in each one was blown. Not just a little blown, 4 had their insides vaporized and the 5th one had exploded. What happened to the sig gens that took me forever to acquire and restore? Nothing! I replaced all the fuses, and they all worked. I'm guessing that a tree branch or some other flying debris put the 7200 volt line in contact with our 240 V feed, or some other short circuit further upstream caused the big bang event. Our house is closest to the pole transformer, 30 feet from pole to breakers kind of close. All of the dead stuff is close to the breaker panel. The Sony is directly above it and the generator rack is about 10 feet away in the basement. Everybody else on that transformer is fed by a long piece of triplex.
Attachments
Maybe double check service grounds at your panel and water.
I lived for a few years in a house that did not have a ground at the breaker panel or at any sort of water pipe. Also the utility said there was a ground wire missing on an adjacent pole.
I Added 1200 square feet of addition to my house years ago and replaced the panel and meter housing at the same time. Realized there was no ground stake at the breaker panel. Also the water pipe that had a wire clamp did not actually run to the panel.
The pesky RF leakage into the stereo seemed to go away after replacing the panel and adding grounds at the panel and water inlet..
I lived for a few years in a house that did not have a ground at the breaker panel or at any sort of water pipe. Also the utility said there was a ground wire missing on an adjacent pole.
I Added 1200 square feet of addition to my house years ago and replaced the panel and meter housing at the same time. Realized there was no ground stake at the breaker panel. Also the water pipe that had a wire clamp did not actually run to the panel.
The pesky RF leakage into the stereo seemed to go away after replacing the panel and adding grounds at the panel and water inlet..
Hi George,
Yup, high energy fault.
I did insurance claims for consumer electronic equipment for years. That is typical of an over voltage event. I'm so glad you didn't lose anything serious.
It's a good thing HP is so robustly designed. I'm sure your heart sank to the bottom looking at your gear at first. I'm in the habit of installing an MOV across transformer primaries, 150VAC. This also extends the life of power switches by clamping the turn-off spike that sometimes happens. The ovens for the crystals would have been in the line of fire. The equipment may work, but a temperature regulator could go wonky. You would have caught a total failure by now I would think.
Yup, high energy fault.
I did insurance claims for consumer electronic equipment for years. That is typical of an over voltage event. I'm so glad you didn't lose anything serious.
It's a good thing HP is so robustly designed. I'm sure your heart sank to the bottom looking at your gear at first. I'm in the habit of installing an MOV across transformer primaries, 150VAC. This also extends the life of power switches by clamping the turn-off spike that sometimes happens. The ovens for the crystals would have been in the line of fire. The equipment may work, but a temperature regulator could go wonky. You would have caught a total failure by now I would think.
I think you guys would really enjoy the "dave's garage" series of videos on yt. He's like y'all. Last one I watched he wrote a programs to generate prime numbers - and ran it on a PDP 11/70, a 386 and one core of an AMD "Threaddripper". Turns out just one of the 96 cores on that chip is a million times faster than the 11/70, at doing those calculations.
For those of us who's lives have spanned these eras - I think we had an 11/34 in the systems lab at the university I attended, complete with A/D and D/A converters, a bipolar power amp, motor, flywheel, rotation (position?) sensor - it broke often. This guy spends his retirement time / money still fooling around with the old stuff - and new. Certainly spends his money on it. You can tell he genuinely likes it, from getting some old DEC HDD with proprietary interface booting, to running a local instance of DeepSeek on some NVidia SBC. He continues on with his mastery.
I'm, as was said, merely an operator. Oh, the trackpad works a nit better since I found out here that you can install a Synaptic purpose built driver, but the difference hasnt dropped out of conscious perception yet. My BT headphones present a bit of a "headache" going back and forth between the exclusive OSs. I can cut and paste a guitar chord lyric sheet into LibreOffice Writer and put it into two columns. This Mint system sees my printer, but cant get the "info" from it through my routers USB connection, when I go to print. So it looks like I'll have to get one of the network connected ones I have stashed (Brother) plugged in.
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When I worked at DEC - say, mid 80s - we tested the power supplies with this "Keytek" AC line transient generator. Running the test, I used to think "This doesnt do anything" - until the day it did. Found a nice, pointy etch trace close to a screw head...
I'm sure HP tested such expensive equipment similarly, before release.
So, this internship at an atomic research lab.... they had a PDP-8. The professor showed it to me...
"this is a PDP8A with 64K of RAM". As he point to a box, about 10U tall, with lots of nice buttons and lights. Then pointing to TWO boxes next to it...
"this is a PDP8 with 4K of core RAM". As his slides this box out of the rack, full of big boards.... Jeez! it had actual ferrite cores in it. 4K of real "core" RAM.
This was in '80 or '81. I forget. But the Pet Commodore ( 6502 ) that I was programming to control some pumps had more processing power!
"this is a PDP8A with 64K of RAM". As he point to a box, about 10U tall, with lots of nice buttons and lights. Then pointing to TWO boxes next to it...
"this is a PDP8 with 4K of core RAM". As his slides this box out of the rack, full of big boards.... Jeez! it had actual ferrite cores in it. 4K of real "core" RAM.
This was in '80 or '81. I forget. But the Pet Commodore ( 6502 ) that I was programming to control some pumps had more processing power!
I had three huge core memory cards. Ferrite cores with three fine wires running through them under a shield. A huge, square array. Each card was worth thousands even back then.
Just think. NORAD used to run on that stuff, and tubes before that. Isn't that something to think about?
Just think. NORAD used to run on that stuff, and tubes before that. Isn't that something to think about?
Two of my kids recently took some computer science classes at a local community college.
I had to explain that that last course I took there was COBOL on some old state run computer. It would sometimes take 45 minutes to Compile link and run a fairly simple report app that I wrote as a class exercise.
I had to explain that that last course I took there was COBOL on some old state run computer. It would sometimes take 45 minutes to Compile link and run a fairly simple report app that I wrote as a class exercise.
I see this thread wandered off very much into nostalgia lane. Although I hardly can resist to dip into that warm bath as well I want to add something to the topic. 🙂
Switching to Linux is an excellent idea. You will be desperate a few times the next few months, but in 1-2 years the feeling reverses. You'll be totally desperate by the limitations, updates and advertisements in Windows.
I am not a fan of dual booting. First, Windows fills up the entire hard disk it has. Not really, but is says so and makes it hard for the Linux installer to find free space. Windows has put "immutable" space in the middle and at the of the hard drive. Maybe the Mint installer is now prepared for that, maybe not. If the installer can't find sufficient free space, google for how to free up immutable hard disk space in Windows.
Be careful when dual booting. Windows must be shut down not suspended. You never know what Windows actually does.
It might be handy to mount your Windows partition containing your home directory read-only in Mint. So you can read your Windows files without booting into Windows. Preferably do not write back because of the Windows-is-suspended-instead-of-shut-down situation.
From day one use Linux alternatives instead of booting back into Windows. Wine works often, but it is not great. Linux alternatives might not be as polished, and might lag behind the latest and greatest comparable Windows applications. But hey, in 2021 everyone thought those applications were great, so why are they outdated today?
Google for "Linux alternative for XXX"
There is no alternative for Hornresp, but it runs in Wine.
If you are a professional user of AutoCAD or Adobe, stick with Windows. Otherwise use a Linux alternative for CAD (like LibreCAD) and learn Gimp.
Re-learn VI. You know it from the PDP-11. There are some improvements, but basically it has not changed. No ribbon, no advertisements and no co-pilot.
For any problem, Google is your friend. I have not had a Linux problem which I could not solve using Google. Exclude any Reddit results though.
I don't use a malware scanner in Linux. I do ignore warnings about possible harmful content. My wife is on Linux as well, and her knowledge in this field is limited. We never had a single problem.
Use a good back-up though. Everything relevant is in your home directory. Everything else can be restored, you only installed programs, you did not buy or license anything. rsnapshot to a USB disk is great. It is more powerful than any "user-friendly, GUI-drives,
One disadvantage in Mint. It is hard to upgrade, they recommend a new install once it is outdated. But that is pretty much true for any modern distro using a desktop environment. I use Debian which is so stable it hardly breathes. Still dist-upgrading a KDE environment is frustrating and not successful. Dist-upgrading seems to have become something for systems without GUI. Understandable, but you should keep it in mind. Then again, since everything valuable is in your home directory you only have to do a fresh install every 3-4 years.
Switching to Linux is an excellent idea. You will be desperate a few times the next few months, but in 1-2 years the feeling reverses. You'll be totally desperate by the limitations, updates and advertisements in Windows.
I am not a fan of dual booting. First, Windows fills up the entire hard disk it has. Not really, but is says so and makes it hard for the Linux installer to find free space. Windows has put "immutable" space in the middle and at the of the hard drive. Maybe the Mint installer is now prepared for that, maybe not. If the installer can't find sufficient free space, google for how to free up immutable hard disk space in Windows.
Be careful when dual booting. Windows must be shut down not suspended. You never know what Windows actually does.
It might be handy to mount your Windows partition containing your home directory read-only in Mint. So you can read your Windows files without booting into Windows. Preferably do not write back because of the Windows-is-suspended-instead-of-shut-down situation.
From day one use Linux alternatives instead of booting back into Windows. Wine works often, but it is not great. Linux alternatives might not be as polished, and might lag behind the latest and greatest comparable Windows applications. But hey, in 2021 everyone thought those applications were great, so why are they outdated today?
Google for "Linux alternative for XXX"
There is no alternative for Hornresp, but it runs in Wine.
If you are a professional user of AutoCAD or Adobe, stick with Windows. Otherwise use a Linux alternative for CAD (like LibreCAD) and learn Gimp.
Re-learn VI. You know it from the PDP-11. There are some improvements, but basically it has not changed. No ribbon, no advertisements and no co-pilot.
For any problem, Google is your friend. I have not had a Linux problem which I could not solve using Google. Exclude any Reddit results though.
I don't use a malware scanner in Linux. I do ignore warnings about possible harmful content. My wife is on Linux as well, and her knowledge in this field is limited. We never had a single problem.
Use a good back-up though. Everything relevant is in your home directory. Everything else can be restored, you only installed programs, you did not buy or license anything. rsnapshot to a USB disk is great. It is more powerful than any "user-friendly, GUI-drives,
One disadvantage in Mint. It is hard to upgrade, they recommend a new install once it is outdated. But that is pretty much true for any modern distro using a desktop environment. I use Debian which is so stable it hardly breathes. Still dist-upgrading a KDE environment is frustrating and not successful. Dist-upgrading seems to have become something for systems without GUI. Understandable, but you should keep it in mind. Then again, since everything valuable is in your home directory you only have to do a fresh install every 3-4 years.
I think this is a primary reason the rolling release versions of distros have become more popular. Although in those cases you have potential for issues every time you run an update, IMO.
Speaking of dist-upgrading, this thread inspired me to do just that a couple days ago. I decided I was done waiting for Debian 13, so I simply changed all instances of “bookworm” to “trixie” in my sources.list ran an update, upgrade. It didn’t work, so I ran a “full-upgrade”. I didn’t expect it to go perfectly, and it didn’t. However, it only took me an hour or so to get things fixed. Gnome 47 was worth the effort. It seems a lot snappier and feels more polished.
Anyone want to guess what broke when I upgraded? It is the most obvious thing, for those who use Linux.
For those who don't know, a dist-upgrade is once in 2 years for Debian. My last one was fairly painless. When something breaks it's typically clear where to start looking, even if it takes research to learn how to fix it. There's rarely a direct cause to abandon all hope like there can be on a closed system.
I'll wait and see 😉
I give up. Unless it's blatantly obvious, like the kernel itself. Or my smart*** answer: something to do with Rust in the kernel.