First, I want to say my hardware specs aren't optimal, I just really wanted
to get going and my tube of thermal paste is spent after putting the cooler
on to test it. My CPU us a Pentium 2.7ghz with 2MB of L2 Cache and can only
support SSE3 and I only have 2GB of RAM installed. That is because while I
actually have the fastest Core2 Quad this board supports at 3Ghz, 6MB of L2
per dual core cluster (It's kinda like a precursor to Zen) and it supports
SSE4.1 and I actually have 8GB of DDR2, the really rare and expensive kind
that can get me 2x4GB and still be non-ecc intel compatible, but I'm kinda
worried if something goes wrong flashing my bios chips, I might fry my RAM
with it, so I figure if I do fry it, I might as well fry the cheap stuff and
I'm out of thermal paste for my CPU, but I do have a graphite pad and I think
those damned push pin coolers with the circular block might snage the
graphite pad, so I'll save that for a bigger and better cooler that probably
won't snag the graphite pad.
So that's why I'm not using the most optimal config, I think I'll flash
coreboot without blobs tomorrow because it's more up to date. Speaking of
which, a good side ramble would be I'm curious of what I could do with a
libre bios instead of disabling IME, I just use it for something else. Maybe
since it's intel 8088 based maybe have it be for a hyervisor for a z80
console with libre homebrew roms or maybe an IME architecture based fantasy
console. "Either the user controls the hardware or the hardware controls the
user". I just want to do it out of spite. Lemons into lemonade I suppose.
But anyway, after installing it, I tried upgrading to 9.0 twice following
instructions found on this forum and I rather not mess with it and one of the
times installing Trisquel, I was frustrated that it wouldn't install and I
looked carefully at the error message and it said my optical drive was dirty,
so instead of cleaning it, I threw it away because the one that came with
that computer didn't even burn DVDs and I put in another one I had lying
around. I also tried installing sysvinit, was a bad time, I'm lucky I knew
how to chroot. I also tried installing other free distros, but Parabola and
the Parabola installation on top of Manjaro didn't work for me. I'm not sure
how people feel about this but I was able to get pidgin working with plugins
(all GPL licensed) that hook into centralized trash "services" like discord
and Skype. Yeah, I know the national spying agency looks at those logs, but
if I want to talk to boomers, it's better than running their applications
that could be doing heave knows what. I also installed the latest mumble.
But I have to say, so far, I am quite pleasantly surprised. When I was
messing with Manjaro on this machine, it used way more ram (even on xfce) and
it took forever to compress a compiled package. Having midori, mumble and
pidgin up with all of the plugins and chatrooms, the whole system runs on 1GB
of RAM and the gaming performance really surprised me. on my Sandy Bridge
Machine, Quake3 in the latest build of IOQuake3 was dogshit slow, but I
cranked up everything on Openarena at 1920x1440 and got 20fps and on Sandy, I
got lower numbers on lower settings in Quake3. I can see why people donate so
much, you can see the care the maintainers have taken in picking optimized
experience for thees experiences. The distro is a work of craftsmanship. (I
use that as a gender-neutral term)
My experience of installing Trisquel brought me back to the days when I first
discovered GNU/Linux Distros. Having a couple issues, but figuring it out and
those days when I searched the Ubuntu Repo for games and I discovered
OpenArena. I think I'm satisfied with this level of computing and I feel free
software is a good part of a technology diet. What makes a diet work is the
lifestyle and it seems like most people's technology diet is just pop-tarts
and cinnamon toast crunch. I'm going to be more analog.
- [Trisquel-users] My experience using Trisquel so far commodore256
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