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Acer Aspire One Not Posting

My elderly aspire one D150 is, alas, no longer working (screen dead, not posting either by the sound of it). I've swapped out the ram, checked the battery and charger.

It powers on, no screen activity. The fan is definitely firing up, but it's clearly stopping after 2 seconds, the device does remain on. Key presses yield no additional response.

I did try using an external monitor via the dvi port, but no dice (checking if the monitor is dead).

Any thoughts on fixes, or do I have a new paperweight?

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Making the Jump - A Tale of Two Machines

This year, so far, I've moved two older family members over from windows 10 onto Linux. I opted for an ubuntu based distro as I'm familiar enough to troubleshoot it, even remotely.

The first was a laptop, about 10 years old; windows was unusably slow. Luckily, the transition was smooth, Linux Mint took first attempt and no issues were had, everything worked out of the box except swipe scrolling - a quick tutorial sorted that out (terminal intervention was needed). 4 hours total setup (including a pile of desktop shortcuts), dual boot just in case she had issues.

The second was an older machine, a desktop, Frankensteined out of old parts (oldest being the motherboard at 15 years old). It ran windows 10 without a single hitch or slowdown.

2 days to get it "running", I had to repair grub to get the damn thing to boot after an install finally took. In the end I had to go with lubuntu with a manual cinnamon install because I hit my 4th mint install attempt and got a strong case of the"fuck thats". At the end I have a machine that has ghost headphones flickering into existence giving choppy sound that is pretty unusable. There is also horrific graphical glitches when booting (harmless, but I crapped a brick when I first saw it) - though I suspect this is just the fact there is an elderly Nvidia card in there.

A lot of time spent in terminal was unable to even identify what was happening - a first for me! My money is on a bios update, but yeah, not fun on old boards.

All in all, two very different experiences. It's not a warning against Linux (make the change now while the support is there!), just a warning that the road isn't always smooth. The bumps can come in odd places - you'd think the laptop would be the tricky one but nope, desktop rig was the worst.

Good luck out there with the change folks!

View original on lemmy.world
linux_gaming·Linux GamingbyHexesofVexes

Dual Boots and File Systems

For the past decade or so I've mostly had a windows rig for gaming, and a dual boot laptop for travel/work (windows for Microsoft Access/PowerPoint, Ubuntu for everything else).

An odd issue I ran across was drive data format; it caused unending issues with steam/lutris when installing games running under wine/proton to drives formatted for windows (they'd just not run, no error messages till one day I tried to force it via terminal and got an error I could search via Google).

In the end I just partitioned off the drive to a native Linux format and that fixed it (had to dump the contents of the drive to a portable which took a while!), but now I am wondering if there was another alternate workaround?

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Puppy Linux UEFI (alternatives?)

So, in the past, I used to make a bit of money fixing up comps for folks.

With slightly trickier cases, I used to boot up puppy Linux to check the more essential hardwares (and if it booted, back up essential files for the customer). My students are now asking how to manage similar things.

Alas, puppy is no good for a modern system, as it really does not like UEFI boot. I was wondering if anyone can recommend an alternative.

I'm looking for a very lightweight gui os I that can run some hardware diagnostic tools, runs on a wide range of hardware, that is easy enough to set up on a pen for novice users.

View original on lemmy.world