David's Computer Blog

So in a previous article I mentioned installing OpenBSD into Hyper-V. I had encountered a problem with disk space while trying to install packages. A partition the size of 20GB and 30GB was too small for the auto-partition feature of the OpenBSD installer. Gnome and Firefox took too much space for the auto-partition feature. In fixing the space issue, I thought about possibly redoing the OpenBSD installation and use manual partitioning in order to have more space. It worked. The auto-installer creates 9 partitions for OpenBSD. There is the root partition along with tmp, var, usr, usr/X11R6, usr/local, usr/src, usr/obj, and /home. So I deleted all these non-root partitions. I then had to delete the SWAP partition as it was preventing the root partition from being resized. I resized partition A to 95% of the 30GB disk and created a new SWAP partition that used the remaining 5% of the drive.  This arrangement probably isn't ideal for a production or a long-term setup, but it works we...

So I wanted to try out the  new FreeBSD 13.1. Rather than installing it onto a physical computer, I decided to try creating a virtual machine in Hyper-V.  Hyper-V is a Microsoft product, and it was all I am able to use in the work environment that I am in. In a previous experiment I was able to create a Linux Mint virtual machine in Hyper-V with no problems.  However, I did encounter problems setting up FreeBSD 13.1 in Hyper-V. I eventually gave-up on getting FreeBSD 13.1 to work in Hyper-V. I tried a few different ideas, but I was never able to get X-Windows to recognize the keyboard. The keyboard worked fine to type in startx, but once X started, the keyboard wouldn't work.  It was a little disappointing not being able to get FreeBSD working in Hyper-V, but alas, some times such things happen. To stay within the BSD family, I decided to try out OpenBSD. I had very little knowledge of OpenBSD, but I decided to get it a try in Hyper-V. Unlike FreeBSD 13.1, X Windows...

So in relation to me looking for old Word Processor applications, I started thinking and trying to determine the core reason or reasons that caused me to like old word processors.  After giving it considerable thought, I started to conclude that maybe is was, oddly enough, the font used in the old word processors that actually caused me to like the old word processors. Trying to find a font that is nostalgic to me. Some times one simply cannot get away from the things of old. And the things of old seem to be comforting, for some odd reason.  So I started looking around the Internet for fonts. Since I started word processing with WordPerfect 4.3 way back in 1990 or so, I started there. WordPerfect 4.3 was a MS-DOS based application, so all of the typing was done in a MS-DOS interface with whatever font was used in MS-DOS.  Searching the Internet for the MS-DOS font eventually landed me with a font named, " Code Page 437 ."  Font names commonly associated with and simi...

I have configured and run Haiku in VirtualBox, but I was wanting to try running Haiku in Hyper-V. Hyper-V is a Microsoft product that is part of Windows Professional, and since a commercial license is required when running Virtual box in a commercial environment, I decided to try out Hyper-V instead as not everyone will be able to use VirtualBox if they are working in a commercial environment and don't want to pay for a VirtualBox license.  In Hyper-V I configured a standard machine, and I removed the default network adapter and installed a legacy network adapter instead. Initially I had configured the machine with a legacy network adapter because I was trying to get OS/2 Warp 4.52, eComstation 1.2, eComstation 2.0, eComstation 2.1, and eComstation 2.2 Beta 5 to work, but I wasn't able to get a machine to boot any of these OS/2 versions. More research is needed for that, so I decided to try Haiku as Haiku is a more modern Operating System. I thought Haiku would work better with...

Way back in the 1990s, I experienced IBM's OS/2 Warp 2.1 operating system. There wasn't a lot of software for it compared to Microsoft Windows 3.x, but OS/2 was a stable system. Had I stuck with writing instead of gaming, I may have stayed with OS/2 through the years, but alas, one cannot change history. Fast forward to 2022, and OS/2 is less popular than even Linux. Nevertheless, OS/2 is still around and being actively developed. ArcaOS is the new name for OS/2. But between OS/2 Warp and ArcaOS, there was another developer that had named OS/2 as Ecomstation. Ecomstation was an updated OS/2 Warp 4 distribution that added drivers and support for more modern computer architectures.   After my recent experiments with installing OS/2 Warp 4.52 in VirtualBox, I decided to try locating a copy of Ecomstation that I could try out. Several years ago I had downloaded a copy of a demo of Ecomstation 1.2, so I knew there was a demo image of Ecomstation somewhere out there on th...

Well, I got it to work. I wasn't sure if Haiku would even boot on a Dell Optiplex 3020 desktop computer, but it did. I had a large monitor attached to the Dell Optiplex 3020 computer, so when Haiku booted, part of the bottom of the screen was jumbled, but after setting a higher resolution, Haiku filled the entire screen with no problems.  Haiku also detected the NIC, and I was able to access the Internet by default. The only hardware I was not able to test yet is the sound card. This is because I hadn't connected external speakers to the desktop. The Pulse demo program detected the 5 cores of the installed Intel i5 processor. The method of booting Haiku on the Dell Optiplex 3020 was a USB memory stick that had Haiku Beta 3 on it. I had burned the 32 GB Sandisk memory card with a bootable Haiku image. I wasn't sure the Optiplex would be able to boot from a USB stick, but it booted from the Sandisk with no problem. As a bonus, it booted faster than a DVD-ROM or CD-ROM, which ...

So I had this idea of installing a legacy word processor application onto an old Operating System. I decided to use OS/2 Warp 4 as the OS.  In the past I was a fan of OS/2 Warp. I liked its stability and its responsiveness. It was truly, in my opinion, better than Windows 3/95. In a previous experiment I tried working with OS/2 Warp 3, and I even bought a licensed copy off of Ebay several years ago. My copy of OS/2 Warp 3 came on 3.5" floppies and included  CD-ROMs.  I had installed OS/2 Warp 3 on an old computer, but I quickly realized that without Internet connectivity, it was hard to do much with it. Warp 3 was around at a time when the Internet was still young, so extra networking software was needed to browse the World Wide Web. After this realization, I moved on to other Operating Systems. For some reason I have lately been interested in using old Word Processing applications. I was researching WordPerfect and discovered there were two versions of it for OS/2: ...

Sometime in the past I was able to install Icaros Hostbridge on Linux Mint 19.3. Since Linux Mint 20.3 was recently released, and I had installed it on a Dell Latitude laptop, I decided to try the newest version of Icaros 2.3 on it.  My effort was not successful. Icaros is an Aros distribution that is based upon the Amiga 3.1 operating system. I have used AmigaOS in the past, and I wanted to try Aros hosted in modern Linux environment.  I had downloaded Icaros Desktop light as it was the smallest-sized download that could be run hosted in Linux. After downloading Icaros Desktop light, I burned the iso file to a 32GB Sandisk memory stick, and then mounted it in Linux. I set the script to install Icaros on Linux to executable, then ran the install script.  The Linux install script installed additional packages for Linux Mint, and then attempt to install the Icaros files into the ~/IcarosDesktop folder. While copying the files over to the ~/IcarosDesktop folder, this is wher...

I decided to try installing the current version of Linux Mint (v. 20.3) onto a Dell Latitude E5570 laptop . I was curious to see how well Linux would function and perform on a somewhat recent laptop. The laptop has an Intel i7 processor and 32GB of RAM and was running Windows 10. During the Linux install, I simply had the installer wipe the SSD and use the entire drive. Goodbye, Windows! I created a bootable 32GB USB jumpdrive with the Linux Mint 20.3 installer. To create this, I used the balenaEtcher utility on Windows 10 to create the bootable jumpdrive. Once created, I inserted the 32GB USB memory stick into the laptop, rebooted the computer, then, using F12 after reboot, selected the USB device as the boot option. The laptop booted flawlessly into the Linux Mint 20.3 installer. Following the reboot after installation, Linux Mint booted with no problems to the login screen. I logged into Linux, then was greeted by the Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop as well as the login sound. So the ...