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Showing posts from April, 2019

Installing Xubuntu 19.04 on my Thinkpad T430s

I've been using my Thinkpad T430s for game development using the GameMaker Studio engine (GMS). GMS only runs on Windows, though it can produce Linux and Mac OS X files. My desktop computer has 2 drives inside it, a 512GB SSD that I just upgraded from Ubuntu 18.10 to 19.04 and a 1TB drive running Windows 10. I already have both GMS 1.x and 2.x installed on my desktop computer. Additionally my desktop computer has 2 monitors, so it makes more sense that I use it for game development. I've been uploading some Youtube videos to my @chaslinux account lately, always recording them in Linux. These have all been recorded on my desktop computer - which isn't located in the best place for recording. It makes much more sense for me to record on the laptop, so I'm switching the laptop to Xubuntu 19.04. Actually I should say switched because in the time it took me to start this post to this point the installation finished (actually it finished about 4 minutes before I got to t

If you haven't bought an SSD you really should

I just finished upgrading my home workstation from Xubuntu 18.10 to 19.04 and the upgrade not only went smoothly but finished in less than 30 minutes. This might seem like a long time, fresh installs can literally be minutes when using a flash drive to install to an SSD, but upgrades usually take a long time. Lately when someone asks what they can do to speed up their computer I almost universally recommend they upgrade to an SSD over upgrading RAM/CPU/etc. One of our local computer shops has been carrying a 120GB SSD for $26.99. I bought one of these SSDs about 2 years ago for $69.99 and at the time felt it was a pretty good deal. Although the write speed on this particular SSD is only 350Mb/s it's still much better than the speed of a 'spinning rust' hard drive. During a distribution update more than a thousand files get updated and often more than 2,000 files are downloaded. The process also involves deleting some packages, and unpacking a number of programs befor