just curious before I start buying hardware. but both platforms seem to have ample support however. I enjoy hearing peoples .02$

:D have a good day all

Are you looking for anything specific in way of suggestions @shaggy?

both the t61 and x60 are pretty old these days.

@Seth yeah, I know they are old, but from what I hear, they are hefty machines with a solid track record.

I believe they are.

I also picked those thinkpads because they have been around so long, I feel that there would be plenty of backdated support for them, just wanted something solid to learn on and out of all the older machines, they seemed 'tried and true'.

however, on the other side of the coin... I've recently discovered chromebooks and their out fo the box hardware support for the linux kernel.

I like the idea of modernity, portability, and clean styling as a linux box. Just wondering if there were users on here, if they could kick back there personal opinions about one or the other.

I just want the best learning experience possible :D

well I'm not 100% confident old machines will provide that, but Chromebook support can be hit and miss too from what I hear. Google doesn't exactly want you installing something else.

@derobert I ordered an Asus Xonar DX sound card. Keeping my fingers crossed that it works.

@shaggy Chromebooks have very low specs, don't they? Are they reliable hardware?

OTOH, Thinkpads are (or were) solid machines. I'm not sure how they are faring under Lenovo.

@SHW you can post your edit as an answer

@Pandya Have you tried to run that code-snippet ?

@SHW yes

@Pandya What was the result ?

@SHW list of licenses

as you grep License and cut with :

@Pandya Ok Deep. I added my Edit as a solution. Please have a look

+1

@SHW By the way, you can count the no. of occurrence with grep

Example:

find /usr/share/doc -type f -name copyright -exec grep "License\:" {} + | cut -f3 -d: | sort -u > list

This can be used as rough estimate for: how-many software (actually files :P) using GPL @SHW

@shaggy Hey man, welcome to the switch! If you're going to run on a Chromebook, then first I'll suggest looking at ChrUbuntu (solution for booting into Ubuntu). I'm looking currently at LXLE GNU/Linux (Linux) for my old pc, and it looks slick, and it's easy on the resources (good for a Chromebook).

@shaggy Problem is, I'm not sure how easy it would be to add LXLE, or any other distro (Linux distribution) to a Chromebook. Ubuntu, at the end of the day, is great for beginners, PLUS there's the ChrUbuntu hack project that makes that a reality. Perhaps stick with Ubuntu then? Plus, there's a Stack Exchange site for Ubuntu as well, so you can head on over there for any help!

Wow, some crazy person wrote a tetris game in bash!

@FaheemMitha Hopefully. Though probably all the special features of it are things the Windows driver does.

alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-Asus

@derobert Yes, I've seen that.

What are special features?

@FaheemMitha all the DSP stuff they advertise on the product page

@derobert The ASUS page?

yeah

asus.com/us/Sound-Cards/Xonar_DX ... all that stuff

I think you said you use onboard sound.

@FaheemMitha yep, though where it matters via digital out to an external amp

Well, I'm using a Sound Blaster Live!, so hopefully it will be an improvement.

@derobert Is there a missing "is" there, or similar?

@FaheemMitha don't think so...

where I have real speakers (my home theater setup), i.e., where the sound quality matters...

I don't see anything about DSP there. What does that stand for?

@derobert I see.

digital signal processing

all the stuff that changes the sound waveform...

Pro-Logic IIx, Dolby Headphone, Dolby Virtual Speaker, ...

VocalFX, ...

all that is DSP stuff, and I'd guess it's done in the Windows driver. Probably on the host CPU.

@derobert Oh. Digital Signal Processor apparently.

Is that important to get a good sound?

no

if by "good" you mean "accurate"

There are a few people out there who say the Linux driver works well.

@derobert I just mean it sounds good. And as little hissing/background sound as possible.

@FaheemMitha none of the DSP stuff should be required to get the noise down

that just depends on the quality of the analog circuitry, which of course will the the same regardless of OS.

@derobert Ok. What is the DSP stuff important for? And is none of it implemented for the Linux driver then?

@FaheemMitha It's to supposedly make things sound nicer by changing them in some way (e.g., maybe some of that voice stuff is essentially a equalizer preset). I doubt any of it is available in the Linux driver. Though ALSA might have some of that stuff itself, not sure.

@derobert Hmm.

Some third party free software can be quite capable.

ALSA can apparently use LADSPA plugins, so it can probably do that kind of stuff...

For example, my scanner actually has more (basic) functionality using SANE than the Windows drivers.

At least, Fujitsu's basic program for that scanner is quite primitive, though I am missing some functionality.

This was quite unexpected; I expected the Windows software to be better.

@NAltun hey, and thanks for the welcome. I appreciate your input, and I've done a little bit of homework myself already, I'm aware of crouton and how it 'overlays'/uses chromeOS kernel, and I'm sure that can be fine for a bit, but I really want to end up just going native, so I'm forced to fix my problems, and learn by solution.

the main worry I have about crouton is that it uses chroot, and I might be wrong, but I don't want that to hinder my learnin experiance.

@terdon thats sick.

@derobert Actually, come to think of it, Windows doesn't seem to really do big software programs that interface with a variety of hardware. The individual manufacturers all seem to have their own programs. Score one for free software and collaboration.

@shaggy Aye, that it is.

Bloody VM taking forever to install... unix.stackexchange.com/questions/264393/…

Turns out I didn't have all the LXDE packages cached locally. Unsurprising.

@derobert you probably need systemctl disable lightdm.service

Or, rather, the OP does.

@terdon ah, OP tried it without the .service... but I think systemctl normally adds that on for you...

I think it might not if there are more than one.

Possible. Will find out when this VM finally finishes installing.

Or if there's a .socket or whatever the hell. I don't get systemd very well. I know I've always used foo.service on my Arch.

I doubt there is a socket. But it's possible there is both a SysV init script and a .service.

On the other hand, sudo systemctl status gdm and sudo systemctl status gdm.service give the same output so I'm probably wrong.

... still installing.

I wonder if I accidentally installed both gnome and LXDE :-(

as it's working on gnome-user-guide now...

Finally installed and booted.

@terdon disabling with .service doesn't work either

Answer added.

Nice.

Is there any conceivable reason why running kill $PID_OF_GNOME_SHELL_INSTANCE would block a user from logging in on reboot?

Apparently, the OP tried this, madness ensued, he forced a reboot and now can't log in. I guess the forced reboot might break something but it still seems strange.

More here if anyone cares to join:chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/35976/…

Hi Guys, I have a question about debian 8 installation, after the install my menu becomes like this i65.tinypic.com/x4ol1i.jpg. How can I change it to the regular menu like in debian 7?

@doesnt_matter What's the "Regular" menu? That looks like the normal gnome menu. Were you not using Gnome before?

@terdon, I have been using genome but in in debian 7 , the menu used to look like this i66.tinypic.com/2yjrio1.png, the new menu seems restrictive i.e. I can nor drag-drop to desktop etc

@doesnt_matter That looks like Gnome2. Welcome to the wonderful world of moronic Gnome development.

You might want to look into another desktop environment. Mate perhaps, or Cinnamon.

@terdon ah!, so they changed the new genome to this? I looked at Mate and Cinnamon sometime ago but they seemed a bit un-stable and finicky like ubuntu, I loved the stability of debian 7. oh well...

Mate should be pretty solid at this point. Cinnamon has a few issues but I've been using it happily for years now.

@terdon Thx, I will check out the latest version of Mate!

Good luck. I'd also check out Cinnamon though. I find it's a nice compromise between useful new features/bling and stability/familiarity.

@derobert I don't know if you saw meta.unix.stackexchange.com/q/3657/4671, but I just replied to it.

Here's hoping it doesn't attract more argumentation.

@FaheemMitha Typo: "I favor coming down more strongly on the side of exclusion vs the side of exclusion"

@MichaelHomer Oops. Fixed. Better?

Yes

I would like there to be a slightly more expansive view of which programming questions are on-topic in practice. At the moment it's a bit of a kneejerk reaction as soon as somebody mentions a compiler.

@MichaelHomer Thank you for pointing this out.

@MichaelHomer Define "expansive".

Kernel questions always get closed, but some of them really shouldn't.

@MichaelHomer Yes, that's part of my point.

I don't know how clear my answer was. It's the middle of the night here. I just woke up and saw this.

"How do I build this kernel module?" is a sysadmin question, not a programming question. "What is concept X from the Linux/BSD/Hurd/... kernel?" ought to be valid too.

But if I waited for a better time to answer this, it might never have happened.

@MichaelHomer Sounds like you should answer the question yourself. :-)

I'm not disagreeing with your answer, just musing. A lot of these things probably are, by the letter of the rules, on topic, but they just get closed at the merest hint of non-shell programming.

I think including relevant questions would be useful. I've only included one. I could expand my answer, of course.

Personally, I've got nothing about shell programming. Though I personally have little to do with either shell or Unix programming.

But I certainly favor a more inclusive style here. As I hope I've made clear in my answer.

@MichaelHomer Do you work with Unix professionally? In any case, consider answering my "getting to know you" question. I'd like more answers from high-rep users. It doens't have to be a long answer.

Incidentally, "The Faculty" is a fun film.

Well, I use it

@MichaelHomer Ok.

@MichaelHomer I'm about to go to bed so I can't really talk about this now, but you might want to have a look at the discussion here. Personally, I feel like we're closing too many of the kernel-specific questions but I have a very limited understanding of kernel hacking.

@terdon weird, I feel we aren't closing enough kernel programming question

I tend to leave those questions to the community since they are not in my area of expertise and I can't really judge whether they're on topic or not. I'd love to have a clearer meta consensus about this though or, even better, some guidelines to follow. I think both slm and Michael are more knowledgeable about this sort of thing, but I just avoid dealing with that type of question.

@terdon Um, I linked to that.

for some reason, people who normally migrate programming questions to SO don't do it when it's in the kernel, which is totally backwards: the kernel is the last thing normal users write code for

@Gilles As I said, I don't have a very clear idea of where the line is drawn so my impression may well be wrong.