My Notes on the Aero15X

Hello again. Little update here on my personal laptop, the Gigabyte Aero15x. I’ll probably go with an all-AMD laptop in the future or a laptop with no GPU, seeing that the support both from NVIDIA and the Linux community is lacking a tad for laptops with this specific NVIIDIA Optimus setup using a GTX1070.

I have added my notes on what has and hasn’t worked thus far under the project page Linux on the Aero15X if anyone is interested. I’ll update it once I install the original Linux distro I was using on the laptop, though I’m a much bigger fan of the more-complete-feeling Manjaro distro. I’ll have blog posts detailing future projects coming up, once there’s more to report!

Reviving The Old Dell Mini 10 + Update!

Back in early 2009, there was a tiny little “cheap” netbook, designed by Dell, to be utilized for simple web browsing and office applications. The hardware was incredibly cheap, however it could easily withstand being knocked around in an elementary or high school student’s bookbag. This was the Dell Mini 10.

Seeing that I haven’t really done much with the restoration of this old hardware, I feel that it isn’t worth its own project page. Instead, I will document it here in a blog post.

The above picture was what you would originally find this netbook listed as on Dell’s website back in the day.

After upgrading the RAM to the maximum it could utilize, 2GB, installing a little SSD I had laying around and throwing Linux Mint 32-bit on it, we now have a cheap little Chromebook replacement. My goal in the future is to use a Pinebook Pro instead of this little guy or my x360 HP chromebook. I intend on giving away the Dell Mini 10 and the HP Chromebook to others who have more use for them, but for now, this chromecasts fine to the TV.

Now, above, we have the output of an application called “Neofetch” that, in my opinion, should come standard with most Linux Distributions. If interested in doing the same as I have done, feel free to reach out to the Linux Reddit, as they’re very helpful to newcomers looking to recycle some old hardware.

As we can see here, I have installed Linux Mint on this. It is a very lightweight operating system, and much more secure than the aging Windows 7 Starter that was installed on here.

Microsoft is abandoning Windows 7 if I recall correctly, and Linux allows users to own their hardware without relying on needless Microsoft spyware. The goal of this was to outfit the little netbook with a barebones operating system that auto-launched Chrome whenever you started it up. As we can see under the “Memory” section of the output, this OS uses VERY LITTLE memory at idle. Even when casting informative Youtube videos to the TV, it still only gets up to about 1gb.

That’s the news regarding the Dell Mini 10 that I revived, however I’d also like to add that I’ll be working on some Terraform code going forward for a senior design project!

unRAIDing It Up

This picture is a great representation of how I’ve learned to use LXC/LXD containers. Also, many preconfigured apps, I’ve learned, can be easily installed on unRAID. Again, I’m doing this as a personal project, so I’m quite lazy when it comes to configuring things.

So far, Plex and a PXE test VM are running under unRAID, with other operating systems being test-installed on it as I move onward. The default snap of Nextcloud that gets installed with a stock Ubuntu Server 18.04.01 release doesn’t seem to work as well as Nextcloud in a docker container for unRAID. Learning more about this as I go on, but also working with my group to get our Senior Design project up and running on this as well.

DDNS is a great service…

VAIO Update and Incoming Projects

Recently I’ve restored an old Sony VAIO UX380N and got it to run Xubuntu Linux after replacing some components. Too bad replacement batteries and such are hard to come by these days…I’ll have to find a good use case for this when I move…

Due to schoolwork and such, burning through all my personal projects in the pipeline is pushed to when I have free time. More projects will be incoming! I may be building some little Dat Network nodes or a Miner in the future…Stay tuned!

College Woes and a Quick Update

Now that I’ve started yet another semester of college, it seems that I have vast amounts of homework related to core classes that have been forced upon my schedule at the last minute. In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be working on the following things:

• Licensing the unRAID server

• Installing Xen on the “bigboi” server

• Hosting some applications and game servers in LXC containers to check out how they’re useful

• Hosting our Senior Design capstone project in a vm, though I’ve never played with Xen so I might go down a rabbit hole

• Building Kodi boxes, retro consoles etc with the remaining Raspberry Pis I have, in order to reduce the number of projects I have

• Prepare for moving back to the West Coast in June

That’s all for now! This is a quick update!