Zorin does have problems.
Picky about Nvidia graphics cards and doesn’t like a few of them I have.
Slow to load applications, and open network drives, with constant Not Responding popups.
Needs rebooted EVERY day or starts acting up.
Mint is running a lot better and I’m going to test a Kubuntu installation
My machine will sometimes run for months without a reboot. Similarly, my router runs DDWRT firmware, it had 530 days of continuous uptime, until someone hit a power pole near us and took the power out.
One thing I’m working on trying to figure out now:
I shut down both Zorin & Mint PC’s, then put the Mint drive in the better PC - that has speakers and 2 monitors
However when it booted up it only sees one basic unknown monitor at low resolution even though the Nvidia Optimus app is running. Tried different settings, logging out and rebooting but still one basic monitor
Plus Mint won’t pin QCad to the taskbar - doesn’t show the option to pin when I right click on the tab
Have you looked at Mint’s Driver Manager to install the NVIDIA driver? I find that to be a better route than trying to install it myself.
For the QCad question, go to the LM menu > Graphics, right click on QCad, Add to Panel
Sneaky little sucks, all the other apps it showed on a right click of the tab.
Plus, Driver Manager showed no updates available when I tried to get a new Nvidia driver
Huh, must be some difference between preinstalled and user installed applications?
No, because I downloaded & installed Opera and right clicking on its tab shows the pin option
This is a fascinating read. I’ve never tried any flavor of Linux. I am only chiming in to mention that the reason I ended up as a PLC tech was because of Atari Asteroids. I won the city wide contest at Penn Square Mall with a score of like 138,000 points with the hardest possible game settings. First prize was an Atari 400. “Great, now I am going to write my own video games.” Next thing I knew, I learned all about sprites, ATASCII, binary, hexadecimal and tons of other things I still use to this day.
A couple of years later, I discovered girls, cars, beer, and rock concerts and didn’t touch a computer again until Windows 3.11 was out. Shortly after that, I was in maintenance tech class for Goodyear Tire and the week of PLC training, I told the instructor, “You mean to tell me they run those multi-million dollar machines with computers that have 8K ram and what looks like live graphical assembly language?” The rest is history.
I worked for a distributor in the late 70’s that ran on an IBM Model 10, had 6 workstations, one Greenbar printer and a solid gold HDD that back then I was told was $30,000.
Went to a manufacturers event for all distributors and found a few of them were running on Mac PC’s, but the boss said they had to be lying because there was no way a Mac could do what his Model 10 did.
Also, when you rent (IBM did not sell them) a Model 10 you HAVE to have a programmer on staff - this place lucked out because a plumbing distributor across the street had a staff programmer we could borrow.
My original was a Radio Shack Color Computer I still wish I had kept (used ones on eBay are pricey)
Similar to my first motorcycle a 1974 Kawasaki F7 175cc that cost $999 and now a 52 year old one with many miles costs $4,000
My very first exposure to computers was in 6th grade. At the end of 5th grade, I tested well in math so they told me I would get to take advanced math and computers in 6th. I had visions of Star Trek tape drives and flashing lights. I had no idea what the hell a computer was!
In 6th grade “Advanced Math”, it was basically beginners algebra with very little daily work. If you could write out and answer 5 problems correctly, you were free to go in the “Computer Lab” where they had 4 TRS-80s.
One was a Model II, the others were Model I. There were cassette drives and BASIC manuals, and a stack of computer magazines with a few examples in them. No instructor, just figure it out. It was cool, and I was usually the first one in there. It didn’t take long to figure out you couldn’t do much fun stuff on a TRS-80, but I did learn a bit of BASIC and how to transcribe from a magazine to a computer and debug all my typos.
It wasn’t until 9th Grade when I won that Atari 400.
My apologies for hijacking the thread to go nostalgic.
I had Kwaker 175 street/trail that I commuted to work with. Went head over heels when I hit a pothole off-road once and bent the forks.
Yeah, mine was a street/trials bike.
Highest center of gravity of any bike I ever rode. When it started going over there was no stopping it and as a skinny 16 year old I had to have someone help me get it off the ground.
Fortunately now I can lift a Gold Wing by myself, unfortunately I can’t ride a bike anymore unless I break down and buy a trike
Back on topic - some issues with Mint.
First, I have 3 different Nvidia graphics cards that Mint refuses to recognize 2 of and only shows one basic monitor of 800x600 resolution. The one it does recognize only has 2 VGA and 1 {unused} S-Video outputs and is the oldest graphics card I have.. Driver Updater says all good, Downloading the latest directly from Nvidia does nothing.
EDIT: Forgot, the 1 recognized graphics card has a frame rate of 3 to 4 frames per second. That’s watching a video online in a browser or one on my HDD with any of the video player options, including VLC. They look more like a slideshow than videos. Same graphics card with Zorin running goes 60FPS.
Second, after running 24 to 48 hours Mint just freezes. If I’m watching a YouTube video the audio continues for about 2 minutes then goes into a loop of the last word while the screen is frozen and nothing works until the PC is forced off and rebooted. I checked inside and the HDD, Nvidia card, CPU, memory and other components were not overheating. Replaced the memory JIC and it still does it. If I put the Zorin HDD back it it doesn’t ever freeze like that.
Third, if I set my second HDD to automatically mount (that I keep all my data on) it mounts as Read-Only and I can not rename, delete, edit or add files or folders.
Plus if I try to open any photos using IrfanView from the second HDD, even when I can write to it, IrfanView faults that it can not read the file, but it can read files from my mounted NAS and any USB drive plugged in. I have gone through all the settings but can’t get it to access files on that HDD.
I wrote a Kubuntu HDD and that has big problems as soon as it boots up in either of the PC towers, so that’s getting abandoned.
Another OT JFF bike fact.
My son kept calling Suzuki bikes Kawa-zuki’s and I kept trying to correct him, but turns out that’s what they say because Suzuki does not have any bike manufacturing lines in the world.
They design Suzuki bikes and the tooling, but then have Kawasaki make them for them.
Unfortunately Nvidia and Linux have a bit of a troubled history, Nvidia has officially supported Linux for a while through their proprietary drivers, but they have been known to have issues. There are free drivers such as Nouveau that seem to work well, but have their own issues. I’m not sure which driver set Linux Mint tries to use by default but this might be where I would start to look, I haven’t used a Linux system with an Nvidia card in a while (at least not directly, my work laptop has an Nvidia card, but is running Linux in VMs with a Windows host)
This one is going to be harder to answer without more info (which I’m sure you don’t have and and may not know where to look for). Honestly it’s even possible this has something to do with the Nvidia drivers. I would probably start by trying to look into the logs after the crash happens, and see what you can find. Doing a quick look it appears Mint uses journald for it’s logging. Here is a rough tutorial on how to view stuff. There are some graphical viewers (1, 2) if you don’t feel as comfortable dropping down into the, but I’ve never used these and can’t speak for them. It’s possible Mint actually comes with some sort of graphical log viewer, but can’t say.
This could either be incorrect mount settings, or possibly permissions? What format is the HDD? Is it an NTFS drive from when you were on Windows? Or has it been formatted to some Linux File System? How did you set it up for Auto Mounting?
I can’t say on this one as I’ve only ever used IrfanView on Windows, not Linux, so I’m not certain, but if you are having other issues with this drive being mounted properly I would probably try and get those sorted first and see if it happens to clear up this issue.
NTFS. This was a Windows PC I took the C: drive out of and put a Linux drive in. Actually 3 different Linux drives now.
In Disks under Edit Mount Options I unselect User Session Defaults and select both Mount At System Startup and Show In User Interface, and don’t select Require additional authorization, otherwise I would have to login to the drive after logging in to the system. This mounts it read only.
With the system default ON I have to manually mount it, but then it mounts Read/Write.
As for Nvidia EVERY graphics card I have in every PC and all the spares are Nvidia, with one that is a Zotac using Nvidia.
Linux certainly CAN be run with Linux, but some people do have issues with it. I’m just not sure how much I can help you without digging since it’s been a while since I’ve used Linux on a machine with an Nvidia GPU.
As for the HD, that line that says nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show that’s your mount options. For NTFS drives, I think it typically should default to read/write. That GUI looks like a Linux Mint thing I’m not familiar with but I’m wondering if that line with the mount settings is being used to overwrite the defaults. Try appending a ,rw to the end of that line and see if that works.
I entered it, but have to reboot.
But when I clicked on it there was a yellow popup saying “Mount options stored in the /etc/fstab file” which the entire /etc folder is read only. I tried before because I found online instructions on editing it to have the NAS auto mount, but couldn’t edit the file.
Is there a way to edit the Fstab file?
PS - on my other one I am downloading Zorin 18 to try that again, and Ubuntu and Debian - since I have a stack of empty HDD’s I can use and wipe if I don’t use them.
Going to reboot and see what happens…….
I rebooted and it auto mounted as read only.
Checked Drive options and it still had the ,rw butt had to change it back to User System, unmount and remount and now it is Read/Write
