Moss

I’ve been working slowly on my next review for Distrohoppers’ Digest. Some interesting things going on in Zorin OS.

I can’t seem to keep my power supply plug plugged into my Galago Pro 2. If it just moves a tiny fraction of a millimeter it stops charging. I’m not sure what to do about that, other than to keep an eye on the battery icon on my desktop.

I received a Raspberry Pi 3B with a Pimoroni clear case from Tony Hughes via George Doscher of Tech + Coffee (Thanks, Tony and George!). Handing this little item off to George at OggCamp saved Tony quite a few quid in postage, and George, I am told, refused to accept money from Tony for US postage.

So I plugged in and started up the Pi 3B while my Galago Pro was running. The Pi was on HDMI-1 and the Galago Pro was on HDMI-3 on my TV/monitor. The Pi worked great, but when I switched the monitor over to HDMI-3, my Linux Mint was badly overscanned (about 20%) so I could barely use it. I changed resolution to 1480×720 and it worked, but of course everything was so much larger. I later discovered that it had the same effect on my Bodhi 5.1 installation, which was doubly weird and not as easy to fix (ARndR is much harder to work with on an overscanned screen than Displays is), but there was no effect at all on my installs of Pearl Desktop 8 (based on Ubuntu 19.04), Ubuntu Budgie 19.10, or Q4OS (Debian 10 Buster). Apparently it triggered something in 18.04 code *only*. The fix ultimately was to change the Galago Pro to HDMI-2, and it’s a good thing the TV has 3 HDMI inputs. The guys in the mintCast Telegram group tried to talk me into plugging in the Pi again to prove the concept, but I decided I had my system working and wanted to keep it that way.

Dale Miracle sent a nice donation, including a new Logitech M570 trackball. Thank you, Dale. I now have all the tech stuff I can use at the present time, and still have two laptops for sale as well as a few other miscellaneous bits of gear.

Just before the show, I got the proverbial wild hair up my patootie to set up a new partition on my 1 Tb drive in the Galago Pro 2. So I did. GPartEd performed like a champ. I shrunk sda1 to 250 Gb, and then shrunk sda3 the other way — forcing GPartEd to copy files to a new location on the partition. While that is scary, and while they say it CAN destroy files, once again GPartEd performed like a champ and did everything without a hitch. And I learned something — I thought you could only have 3 Primary partitions on a drive, but I now have 4. Sda4 is now formatted and waiting for a new distro to be put on it. I’m going to go out on a limb and try Sabayon first.