Mint here we come

Well finally I have put my main computer onto Mint. The preparation was mainly making the various backups to ensure I don't lose any data on switching over.

As you can imagine it is not always straightforward especially if doing something a little out of the ordinary. Some of these different elements in my setup include:

• The two disks in a RAID-1 array where my home folders are stored.
• The NVIDIA video card driving three display screens.
• The separation of the home folders from the boot volume.

So I had to use the custom partitioning to split the installation over two different disks. First mistake was to redirect /usr to the 1 TB disk instead of /home (once upon a time /usr was the home folders root path but it was changed to /home quite a long time ago in fact). After realising the mistake and looking at options I decided it was just easier to do the installation again as no data had been put into the home folders at that stage. With this done it means the core operating system files are on the SSD but the home folder is on the 1 TB hard drive where there is plenty of room. At least Linux supports this properly unlike Windows where it can be put in with a registry key but Microsoft won't support it. In fact, recent editions of Windows like 8, 8.1 and 10 will not update to a new release if the Users folder has been moved to a different path.

Now that I have the home drive set up I can start copying stuff across from the other half of what used to be the 1 TB RAID-1 array. Basically when I was setting up to install the computer, one of the tasks before shutting down Windows for the last time was to break the mirror, so that I ended up with two separate 1 TB disks that just happened to contain the same identical data. When I did the install, the first of these disks (/dev/sda1) was set up to be the home partition. This meant of course it was wiped, but the other disk (/dev/sdd1) was left alone. So /dev/sdd1 is still waiting for me to shift stuff across onto /dev/sda1. And once I have completed doing that then /dev/sdd1 can be set up as a mirror of /dev/sda1.

The second major issue was getting the system to boot with the NVIDIA card with only the Nouveau driver that comes in Linux. As it happens I had to edit the boot configuration in GRUB to add a couple of switches to it. The articles linked below are helpful (the boot options couldn't be edited on the fly and I had to boot from the install CD then figure out how to mount the boot volume and make the edits and then update the configuration). This took quite a lot of fiddling before I managed to get it to work properly. The second time I worked out how to do it before rebooting at the end of the install so that went a bit more smoothly as it came up at the first boot into compatibility mode (software rendering).

Things are generally good as of now but naturally there is a mountain of work getting everything set up and running. The Mint driver manager had no problems installing the Nvidia proprietary drivers and getting the card going so I have three screens back on and things are moving along pretty smoothly at the moment.

• http://askubuntu.com/questions/145241/how-do-i-run-update-grub-from-a-livecd
• http://askubuntu.com/questions/100232/how-do-i-change-the-grub-boot-order
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD
• https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/910
• https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=122257&sid=09d41220fafd2469be99cdf08e89de21

Enable Presentation Mode and Mobility Center on a desktop computer

Presentation Mode is something I am trying out with Windows 10 desktops that are permanently connected to a projector. Microsoft don't seem to have got their head around the idea that people will use a desktop to do presentations, and so these capabilities are disabled by default on a desktop. But they can be enabled by adding some registry keys. Put the following lines into a .reg file and then double click to add it to the current user's registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MobilePC]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MobilePC\AdaptableSettings]

"SkipBatteryCheck"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MobilePC\MobilityCenter]

"RunOnDesktop"=dword:00000001

It would be advisable to add these to the default user profile on a computer which can have a lot of users via a domain login. 

Once you have these then Mobility Center can be run from the start menu.

You can also run presentationsettings.exe directly with the /start or /stop switch to turn presentation mode on or off.

The reason I am interested in presentation mode is to see if it will stop the Windows Updates nag screens on Windows 10. We don't want those popping up all the time in the middle of a presentation.

UPDATE: Unfortunately this has not stopped the update nags so back to the drawing board, or in this case, a Windows Updates server is the next thing to try.

Mislabelled ADATA Pen Drives

So another ripoff by the look of it.

I have two Adata pen drives that are reported at less than the labelled size. Even if we understand that there are two different ways of defining what a gigabyte is (one uses 10^3 as the multiplier and the other uses 2^10), the size of these devices is being reported as less than would be expected.

An older model Adata drive in my possession reports as 8 GB while a modern one shows as 7.5 or 7.0 GB.

An enquiry has been made with a wholesaler to see if any recourse can be obtained.

Another Intel rip off - Core CPUs

One of the annoying things about Intel is how much they mix and match features on their CPUs to try to screw you into paying more money. It gets that you have to drill right down into the specs of individual CPUs to make sure you are getting the features you need, for example virtualisation support.

It turns out this is still the case on the Core i3/5/7 CPUs and in a major way. A lot of people probably used the table below for a long time:

• Pentium G - 2 cores, no hyperthreading
• Core i3 - 2 cores, hyperthreading
• Core i5 - 4 cores, no hyperthreading
• Core i7 - 4 cores, hyperthreading.

It was therefore a shock to me to discover some Core i5 and i7 chips out there have only 2 cores. It turns out this has, in fact, been the case almost since the beginning of the Core series. At first, though, it was only mobile series processors that had reduced numbers of cores. However, starting with Sandy Bridge, there has been a desktop model Core i5 in each architecture with only 2 cores.

This situation emphasises that a significant amount of the price you pay for a CPU is based on marketing hype and as I may have said previously, for my personal use the lower spec Pentium G dual core chip is more than good enough and does not command an exorbitant price. And Intel really loves all the billions they are creaming from us every year.