Using Linux Mint

Because Microsoft will be stopping support for Windows10, I experimented with Linux Fedora on my laptop. While it was quite attractive it refused to update properly saying there was a problem with three bits of its system. The comments I got from the Fedora community forum were a bit difficult to understand so instead I installed Linux Mint with which I immediately felt more in tune. I stuck with Firefox and Thunderbird and found Keepass and even found Steam. So, with a backup computer that appeared to be working if all else failed I installed Linux Mint on my desktop, and I now have it working well. Here are some of the things I did:

Graphics Card

First I checked whether the Radeon 540/540X graphics card would work. I found that Linux Mint actually hard codes the drivers for it into the kernel. So no problems there.

The Monitor

I had been using an ASUS Swift ROG PG278 G-Sync monitor that worked extremely well with Windows10, but would only display the Linux screen at a very small resolution: something like 600x800 pix. Here is a quote from a review of this monitor: The ASUS Swift ROG PG278 G-Sync monitor only offers a single DisplayPort, which is a bit of a downer. While only the DisplayPort interface has sufficient bandwidth to support the ROG PG278’s high resolution and refresh rates, the inclusion of HDMI or even dual-link DVI ports would make it easy for users to plug multiple sources such as a gaming console to the ROG PG278. The monitor also conveniently features two USB 3.0 ports, but their usefulness is negated by how difficult it is to actually access them. It would have been better if they were located at the sides of the display rather than at the back.

The screen app in Mint wouldn't let me select a higher resolution and clicking the buttons on the side of the monitor didn't appear to enable me set the resolution either. Mint said that it didn't recognise the input port, but I can't remember where I found that. So I unplugged it and attached my LG TV set that I had been using as a monitor before, using the HDMI port.

Email

I imported all my Thunderbird data: addresses, saved emails etc.

Formatting the hard drive for my documents etc.

Next I wanted all my user files on the hard drive. I checked the web for details of how to do this and found plenty of advice to do it using terminal commands, which I found a bit daunting. However, Mint has a graphic application for managing drives, partitions etc. that doesn't involve the terminal, allowing me to format the hard drive as a single large partition, give it a name (I chose "HDD" rather than "Nigel's Documents"), and give it a mount point. I had to take a gamble here but reckoned that "/Home" would probably be where Mint would put all my files anyway. And it worked! Phew! So I was able to copy all my files from the external drive that I had saved them to earlier.

Games

OK, so now I had a working computer. The next stage was to see if I could get Xplane11. I found that Steam was available in Mint's repository so I installed that, logged into Steam and it allowed me to download Xplane11. Whoopee!

Programming

Next I wanted to continue learning Python, and found that the latest version of Python was already in Mint and that I could run Python scripts.

Apache & PHP

Finally, I needed to be able to edit and maintain my website, so I installed Apache and PHP from Mint's repository and they worked out of the box, without any tweaks. When I've used a local web server before my HTML and PHP files have had to be in a directory called HTDOCS within the web server itself. However, when I ran localhost from Thunderbird I got the Apache welcome page (that was good) telling me that all my HTML files etc. had to be in var/www/html. When I tried to add my website files to that directory I got the message that I hadn't got write or execute permissions for it. I found that I could give myself full permissions using terminal commands (a bit daunting), but also found (to my relief) that I could do it from the graphic interface. So copied all my website files into it and that now works.