Moss

I’ve been playing with my new laptop, a Lenovo Ideapad 110acl-80TJ with all AMD chips (I did it for you, @TuxDigital). It isn’t quite as robust as my T430, but I needed a larger screen and full keyboard, and it was the price of a Pinebook. There have been a lot of revelations, and I think I’d do better blogging them or sharing them on the Discord group.

The biggest issue is the Realtek wifi modem, which, according to some distros, is broken and I need to load an open source driver for it; other distros just see it as broken and assume I have no wifi. But Linux Mint sees it, loads the driver, and it’s full speed ahead with the installation.

I managed to get OpenMandriva Lx 4 to install fully, but it didn’t write the boot sector correctly so I lose all ability to boot. I’m trying to find a fix for that in their forum. Some users are saying I need to have Secure Boot enabled, others say disabled, but that does not appear to be the issue.

For now, I put KDE neon in to get some Plasma love.

The TV that I bought my wife as a belated birthday present, which would not be recognized as a VGA monitor except at 1024×768, required us to purchase MiniDisplayPort-to-HDMI adapters, and now we’re both on HD. It has made a clear difference in our TV viewing (on my 32” TV/monitor), although I wouldn’t have cared enough to buy the adapter if it weren’t for my wife’s issue (Amazon had a set of 2 adapter cables for not much more than the price of 1). Now I get to go try to install OpenMandriva Lx 4 again and see if the external monitor is not an issue.

Distrohoppers’ Digest will be recorded this Wednesday, i.e., the day after this episode should hit the podcatchers. It will be different, and, despite being longer since the previous episode, may feel rushed. See next point.