Full Circle Magazine FR

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Table des matières

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Q Conky is an amazing piece of software, but only if you get it correctly configured.

The information that you get on the internet is confusing, the official website gives a whole lot of commands, but doesn't give much explanation. Is there a good tutorial on how to set up conky correctly? (module for module?)

A I googled: “conky tutorial” and got some useful hits. One led me to the official manual at: http://conky.sourceforge.net/docs.html

Armed with a working .conkyrc, a lot of it starts to make sense. I still have not found a good description of hwmon, which might be the most useful conky variable.

Q Which wireless adapters will work out of the box?

A It's incomplete and out of date, but this might help: https://goo.gl/oTupHA

That's the entry in the Community Docs for WifiDocs/WirelessCardsSupported

Q How can I change the size of a terminal window?

A It depends on exactly which terminal comes with your version of Linux. For Gnome Terminal, select Edit, Profile Preferences. Change the initial terminal size and close the window; there's no Save dialogue.

Q I experience constant screen flickering and my external monitor turns off every other 3-5 seconds on a Intel i915 with Ubuntu 16.04.

A Install kernel 4.6.4. See https://aboutsimon.com/blog/2016/07/20/Ubuntu-16.04-external-monitor-flickering-and-turning-off-on-intel-i915.html

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Tips and Techniques

A performance boost

Last spring, my brother gave me a seven-year-old Lenovo laptop. It was adequate to run Xubuntu 16.04.

The Lenovo has several benefits. It's built like a tank, and to swap the hard drive all you have to do is remove one screw. When a three-year-old 60 GB Solid State Drive fell into my lap, I put it in the Lenovo and installed Linux Mint 18, 64-bit Mate edition. The performance blew me away. One example: Google Chrome loads in three seconds.

It didn't take long to decide that my desktop computer should have an SSD. After a bit of research, I settled on a 250 GB Samsung 750 EVO. The 750 is the latest SSD family from Samsung, not quite as fast as the two previous families, but a lot less expensive, the equivalent of $82 US. For context, the 256 GB Samsung 850 EVO Pro costs the equivalent of $131 US, and I might not notice the difference in performance.

I disconnected the existing hard drive to ensure no damage would occur, then used Parted to format the SSD. I foolishly specified GPT for the drive, and had to later revert to what Parted calls msdos. Then I installed an evaluation copy of Windows 10 Enterprise in a 90 GB partition, and Linux Mint 18, 64-bit Cinnamon edition on the rest of the drive. (Windows 10 will be replaced by various evaluation versions of Linux, typically two or three a year.)

Mint would not boot into a graphical interface if I specified acpi=off, so I ran without it during installation. (See Issue 111 for the acpi hard crash story.) Fortunately, after installing the Nvidia proprietary video driver, I could use acpi=off.

Even with the small fumbles, it only took an evening to get everything set up and updated. Then I re-attached the normal hard drive, so I had access to all my data.

The performance boost from the SSD should extend the life of the computer for the foreseeable future. My forecast is that my next big technology upgrade will be to a phone with a docking station, perhaps in 2021, when Mint 18 expires. Alas, there is always the possibility that the computer will fail before then, but that has always been true.

A desktop computer that lasts 12 years seems almost too good to be true. All hail the mighty Linux!