Windows 93

[yogi]

The first thing I want to say is, congratulations. Your last post is much longer (and most welcome) than your normal replies. The most interesting thing about it is that it didn't get blown away because you were logged out of the site inadvertently. I don't know what you changed, but you seem to have it all under control for now.

I can't adequately tell you how much I enjoy your stories. Sometimes after reading one I get the feeling that my life has been very sheltered and uneventful. LOL I most admire your creativity and your descriptions of how you think out of the box to come up with new ideas. Now you tell me about a fellow who was equally creative with his passion for tennis. Then again, perhaps he didn't like the game at all and simply was a shrewd businessman much as yourself. This particular story rings a bell because I almost had a tennis court built on the property I owned before this place. My neighbor was very interested in such a project and offered to buy my back half acre to realize his dream. Well that didn't materialize for various reasons so that no tennis court was ever built. It was all residential zoning and I don't think he could have monetized it, but I'm sure he would have also installed lighting to the consternation of several neighbors.

It's hard to imagine an 18 passenger bobsled. I watched some of the bobsled racing during the recent Olympic games and was totally mesmerized by it all. The course was designed for speed racing and some of those sleds clocked in at 70 mph. I think I could be the brakeman on such a sled, but I have my doubts about steering. LOL I don't think your family did that kind of thing unless you had horses that were mythological. I'm very glad I grew up in the city, but I can easily see some of the advantages of country life in your narratives. Kids in my neighborhood would hitch a ride by grabbing the bumper of passing cars. Since the streets were covered with snow and ice the cars were not moving very fast and it was easy enough to grab onto one. I only watched. My mom would have killed me if she caught me doing such a thing. LOL

[Kellemora]

Hmm, I didn't know I got logged out. Interesting, very interesting!

Isn't it funny, how some things from the past pop into one's head as clearly as if it was yesterday?
While I was writing that, I also remembers some things on the farm where I was raised.
Things like a tree house next to and over the pond. A deep square manhole where all of our storm drains went into before heading on out to the mainline sewer. And a clubhouse we built right next to it. The old boiler room with those monster sized big boilers that ran on coal. Lot's of memories kept popping into my head most of the day yesterday.

Oh heck Yogi, the first bobsled was like only 20 feet long, made from a single 6 x 12 x 20 large heavy plank that had the top edges rounded off. The skis sat about 24 inches apart on a steel frame, with angle irons going forward and backward to hold the steel U frame vertical under the bobsled. On the front of the original were the tree and arms to connect it to a horses yoke. That was replaced with a large steel pipe to pull it behind the cub tractor.
The skis were mounted to old leaf springs from some old vehicles around the place. Really wasn't much to look at.

When it was rebuilt to carry 18 kids, they just added a 4 x 12 x 20 on each side of the original plank, and it was mounted on top of the existing U-frame that held the skis, so this placed the skis under the finished bobsled. The seats were not fancy at all, they were simply steel sheets with rolled tops, and the sides of the sheets had holes in it so it looked like a basket weave sorta. The sides stood about a foot tall where you sat, and about 4 inches tall up to the seat in front of you. There was a wedge of wood for you to set your feet on and if you were over 10 years old, your knees were almost touching your chest. Later on, they did remove every other seat sorta, so now it only held like ten younger teenagers, hi hi.

At the time we had this bobsled, we still owned the back 40 acres that became a subdivision, so it was a nice long ride to go all the way to the end of those fields and come back the other side, up and down hills and through a creek a couple of times.
But as we got older, it wasn't so much fun anymore, because all we could do was go down behind the barns and back again.
What used to be a half hour ride, was now only like 10 minutes, hi hi. And it was uncomfortable too! I doubt if it ever went over 3 mph even when using the yellow Massey Ferguson tractor.

[yogi]

I didn't mean to imply that you were logged out of the long post from above. I simply wanted to note that it was long and apparently complete. There have been times in the past when you lost something of that size because you were inadvertently logged off the site. I know that happened because you wrote about it in a sentence or two and you didn't have the wherewithal to reconstruct what you lost. I don't think we ever came to a conclusion to explain why you get logged out of the site from time to time.

I also know what you mean about ancient memories suddenly coming to the forefront of consciousness. That does seem odd, but it is not that unusual. My life, and I'm fairly certain yours too, consists of daily events that repeat ad infinitum. In other words there are very few new memories being stashed away in our brain cells. At this stage of our lives it's just rehashing what we did yesterday and will likely do again tomorrow. Those childhood memories are still there and it is a very good sign that you can recall them at all. They come to consciousness because, well, the brain gets tired of the same old routine. Thus it calls up something from the past that adds (virtual) variety to your life. I actually don't know how true all that is, but it sounds like a good explanation to me. LOL

This city boy never rode a bobsled across a 40 acre farm section, nor did I ever go on a hay ride. It so happens both of those things were available if I had the inclination to participate. The hayrides were particularly popular around Halloween and were typically sponsored by the park district. I suppose that could have been fun, but it would be nothing like what could be experienced down on the farm. I am pretty sure I've seen ads here in O'Fallon for hayrides in the fall. So far I've not tried any of those either. Also, I've seen ads for a hot air balloon park somewhere around St Charles. THAT sounds like something I would like to try.

[Kellemora]

I am getting in the habit of hitting CTRL-C before I hit send, but that don't help when I get knocked out while typing, hi hi.

I'm of the belief that not much remains in our head. But instead our head is like a transceiver. The stronger an event, the more power is used on the transmission of it over our nucleus around the outside of our headbone. A trauma would have the highest power signal going out, so will remain longer for us to retrieve.
But the reason we can remember things from decades ago is more likely because we remembered it on other occasions, and each time you recall something in your receiver, it retransmit it back out again and low to medium power, unless it was something really special to get a higher power transmission.

At one time, I had a story with references to back up my thoughts on that matter.
A college lined a series of tiny rooms with lead. A person would go into the deepest room and read a short book, then write a book report. Move out into the next room and write another book report, then repeat that for the next 2 or 3 rooms. By the time they got to the last room, they almost didn't remember reading the book and relied on what they remembered from their previous book report. Once outside, they didn't recall reading the book at all, and their book reports was jibberish.
They did several such tests while they had the rooms set up for their experiments. One of those test was just reading a 4 sentence paragraph on the wall, then go to the next room and rewrite the sentence. You would not believe how the sentence changed from the first room to the last.

Would you believe, after two years of occasional lessons, I was finally qualified to take my hot air ballooning licensing test, but was only 25 bucks short and not one person there would loan me the 25 bucks. That made me mad, hi hi.
Now, I can't even go up 6 feet in a bucket truck without having a panic attack. Sounds odd since I used to change the lights in radio and TV towers. But I was young and invincible back then too, hi hi.

I used to love to go a Corn Maze and take a hayride, then walk through the Maze. Back when they made sense that is.
Ever since GPS, the Mazes have become so complex it would be impossible to find everything in the Maze.
On a normal Maze, even ones with a secret room here and there, as long as they were placed properly, you would find them.
Back then, the trick to finding your way through a Maze, was to follow the either the right or left wall throughout, but always stay on the same wall. If you start at the entrance using the right wall, use the right wall throughout the Maze, and you will traverse every part of the Maze and come out the same door you went in.
But now, they take a picture like a coloring book picture, often of a cartoon character and make that in the field as a Corn Maze. You will miss 80 to 90% of the Maze if you use the follow the wall trick.
Some of the old Mazes used to have a room across the hall you were following which you could miss, because the Maze did not bring you back down that same hall. The door was on box in the middle of the Maze, so when you encountered a possible hidden room done that way, you could cross the hall into that door and follow the Maze in that box using the right wall until you came back out the door again. Then cross the hall to where you left off going through the Maze.

I did get to take Debi through a couple of Corn Mazes down here that I knew were done using the GPS coloring book type of image, so I brought a whole box of clip on barrettes with me and used those to mark a place where I may have crossed the hall. A couple of those cartoon figures have a ring for an eyeball, another ring for the iris in the eye, and a couple of exits to mess you up. The barrettes came in handy to backtrack and get back to where we crossed a hall. Even with all that planning, we still missed the You Found It room, hi hi. Plus we lost about 8 of the barrettes to. Don't know if we never were back that way, or if other folks saw them and snatched them up, which is highly likely.

[yogi]

My understanding of memory in the brain is far from comprehensive, but it has been a topic of interest to me for much of my life. In some ways your concept of intensity is part of the memory process. I would substitute feelings and emotions where you use signal power to describe how retention is accomplished. The stronger the feeling associated with an event or sensation, the longer the memory will last.

Memory retention is not the same as total recall of the details. The actual event and it's initial sensory inputs to the the brain contain the most amount of information and detail. Any recollections thereafter rely on how much detail we committed to memory and the feelings associated with it. Obviously we do not store every possible detail. We only retain what is significant to us at the moment. Thus right at the starting point a lot of information about an event is lost, or not stored in our memory cells.

The brain does not store memory events as does a computer, for example. There is no digital representation of the entire event that can be played back at a later date. Instead the brain has nodes that deal with concepts and form. The shape, color, and aroma of an apple, for example, are saved as concepts so to speak. When the senses input all those characteristics to the brain there is a processing center (a CPU ?) that ties them all together. Combined with past experiences (feelings) we know apples are non-threatening and edible ... unless they have worm holes, of course. LOL Think about describing an apple to somebody who is blind and never saw or tasted one before. You would need to relate concepts that the blind person can aggregate to determine exactly what an apple is. Then, of course, you need to explain how to determine if it's edible or if you want to eat it at all. Now get two of your buddies to give this blind person their description. There would be some common characteristics, but we would not expect any of the three depictions to be identical, Yet they are all talking about the same apple.

Human brains sucks at recalling detail. The brain is simply the processing unit for all those concepts and their associated feelings/emotions. Thus, you may go through a boring and routine work day when you run across something that made you "feel" like you did when you were a kid. That feeling may be associated with more than one event or circumstance and thus your brain would assemble an entire string of occurrences related to that feeling. It's not likely you have vivid images with intense details of any of those pleasant events, but the feeling is common to all of them.

A lot more than I can say here goes into memory retention and recall. The mechanics of the neurons that constitute the memory centers is still not fully understood. They do know it's not a digital world as was once thought, i.e., a neuron is fired up or not. It's more like a quantum potential that varies depending on the stimulus. That's why some memories seem stronger and more vivid. The associated emotional feelings produced by the triggers vary.

I learn so much from you, Gary, that you might be astonished. LOL My memory had no previously stored concept associate with corn mazes. I had to look it up in order to get some idea of what you were talking about. I am truly a-mazed. LOL My first impression was that you did this maze thing as a kid, but the article says it didn't happen until about 1996. Plus, it is very short lived. It's not a permanent installation. I'm particularly fascinated by the idea of a theme that can be applied to the maze. I don't know how you could tell where you are unless you had a drone to view things from up on high. You did some amazing things, is all I can say.

[Kellemora]

Up until I had my first heart attack, I took Debi, her niece and sister to three different corn mazes. They had a wonderful time!

Back home, there was a permanent maze made with bushes, they were in business when dad was first married, and went out of business before I was thirty, when the property was sold to make way for some big manufacturing company. It cost like 25 bucks to go through it the last time I was there, but it was worth it. Lots of things going on, and things to find also. Each day they put out around 50 tags, often hidden in blind alleys where you could see the end of the alley, so most didn't walk to the end, and that is where many of the tags were hidden. You would get a dollar back for every tag you found, after you exited the maze and turned them back in. I don't think I ever found more than 10 of those tags, and that was after I learned where they seemed to hide them most often, hi hi.

Shortly after I moved down here, I looked for unusual things to take Debi to see, that I knew she had never seen before. Ran across a company named YeeHaw printing company. They made those big theater marquis signs. However, they were done on like a Gutenberg rolling press, all made of wood, using wood type, and all done by hand. It was a busy place and set up for tours so you could see how they made the large printing plates by hand, using knives and chisels, plus how they set the old wood type for the lettered items. Plus you got to see all kinds of old printing equipment, much from the early 1800s, and all kinds of trinkets sitting around from that period also.
I wanted to take my son while he was here visiting for a week, only to find they either moved or closed down.
Their Farcebook page is still up, lots of pictures, but the link I'm adding here is only of the shop itself.
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... 415&type=3

It was a most interesting place!

[yogi]

Recently, and almost every day now, I am experiencing a "senior moment." You know what they are, I'm sure, those little quirks that you don't remember ever doing before. Most often they have to do with memory and forgetfulness, but other things too such as arthritis in joints you never realized you had. Well, this post was answered yesterday and I see today that my reply is missing. It could be those nasty Russian hackers breaking into our site and trying to drive us crazy, or it could also be that I never posted what it is I answered. Fortunately it wasn't anything that needed to be preserved in the archives for future generations of web surfers to find. It simply irks me that I know I answered this but forgot to press the [Submit] button.

Basically I commented on the Olde Tyme print shop you and Debi toured. It would be the kind of place I'd like to see, but am not sure how much I'd pay to see it. Back in the last century I worked at an envelop company for about a year before Motorola took me in. That company had a letterpress machine with moveable type that resembled a Linotype machine. There was no hot casting involved and it was a unique machine for special orders. Most of the envelopes were printed with offset lithography. It's a shame that a shop like that was not preserved for historical purposes. I suppose somebody would have to pay to do that and not enough folks saw the historical importance of it.

There seems to be a lot of preservation of old buildings here in my part of Missouri. Several places have a commercial version of their Old Town of which I only visited a few. Hannibal was one of them and I can understand why they want to preserve that place. Some of the Old Town buildings obviously are the genuine originals and those are the most interesting to walk through. We have a few of the original settlement buildings here in O'Fallon but none of them are tourist attractions. One is a church, for example. So, I guess the moral of the story is that if it pays, then it's worth preserving.

[Kellemora]

Let's not talk about Mr. Arthur Writis, OK. Every time his name comes up, my hands ache for a week or longer, hi hi.

I've actually worked on old rolling presses, but with cold type, and I've run Linotype machines, but the more modern ones.
When I worked at Tradin' Times newspaper, I ran all the galley strips every Saturday. This was a photographic process where films made the letters on positive paper, which had to be developed. But all this was done inside the machine. I took the galley strips out of the machine after running them, and hung them up to dry. Then come Monday morning I waxed all the paste-up boards and the backs of the galley strips. So by the time the crew got in, everything was ready for them. It was an interesting job, almost totally now replaced with laser typesetting that doesn't need to be developed.

Working as a draftsman, I have used nearly every type of printing processes available.
And even before then, Hectographs, Duplicators, Stencils of all types, flat bed letterpress, roto-die type letter press.
Just think, all of those have been replaced with either Laser Printers, or Laser based Offset.
I bought an old very used Offset press once. It was the kind that was a royal pain to use also.
I think I spent more money on gas and wear and tear on my car, running downtown to the only place left that could make the stencils for it.
When I was a kid, I had a rotating printing press, a toy actually. It used rubber letters you stuck in a U channel, then lined up the U channels on the machine and clamped them down. It had a 4 inch wide by 6 inch long printing area on the drum.
And of course you know I was in the Hot Foil Stamping business for several years.

We tried to save the Log Cabin than Debi's mother was born in. But the minute an apartment complex developer bought the land, even though this log cabin was way away from where they were building, and not in their way. They must have known I had preservation requests filed at city hall. Because the first building they knocked down was that log cabin.
Ironically, it was in use as an office up until it was torn down. Six different families lived in that log cabin, not at the same time, but one after the other, then her grandfather got it, and her mom and dad had always lived there. They lived there up until after Debi's mom was married, and the family members all began buying houses here in the at that time New Plaza Park subdivision. Which is how most of her relatives lived around here, until they all passed away. One is still alive and in their house, but she is 98 years old now. We do think her family will keep the house though, at least for another generation.

I loved to visit old historical buildings, which is probably how I wound up working in several over the years.

[yogi]

I know you say that you have memory problems, but at times you bring up things that I forgot about nearly 70 years ago. LOL That printing press toy is an example of what I'm talking about. As I recall it was cranked by hand but I don't recall much about how the rubber type was attached. The images in my mind are quite vague except for the rubber type. I have no idea why I remember that. The high school I attended had an entire curriculum centered around printing. They had some awesome presses that produced a daily news sheet and a magazine that came out quarterly. I could have taken that route but decided it was better to do the college prep classes. Little did I realize how bad I would be at college. LOL



I had an encounter with Debian Linux today that reminded me why I still favor something else. I have Kali Linux installed on this tower along side Mint and Windows 10. They play well together, albeit I have to brute force them to do so at times. The big issue is and always has been the boot process. That long standing rule of the last OS installed takes over the boot process has bugged me since day #1. Fortunately now that I've battled with it for a few years I have the technique mastered. When any of those Linux miscreant operating systems decides to take over the boot process I know exactly what to do to get it back to normal. Normal on this machine is not the Windows bootloader as is the case on most other computers. I've had my fill with how Microsoft thinks the secure boot should operate and did away with their loader as much as I could. rEFInd is the solution to all boot problems and has save my butt more than once.

Anyway, I decide to update Kali today and discovered that it needs boot login credentials to do it. This is one of those operating systems that does not have a root account by default. The "sudo" command requires the root password to do certain things and I could not do updates because I forgot what I did in the past to create a root account. Thus, I had to reinstall the OS in order to create the root account anew, and this time I documented the login credentials. LOL Kali is heavily Debian and for that reason I don't like it. During the install of the operating system it refused to install Grub. The installation module is actually pretty good and I like it. It was easy to delete the old partition and make a new one and all the installation instructions flowed intuitively. Kali is on a hard drive along with the Linux Mint and a swap partition. Windows, and the EFI boot partition is on a drive of it's own. In essence Windows populates that EFI directory with all the different Grubs I might come up with. It does this for it's own security purposes and takes a little understanding in order to force things to work properly. Well, the old Kali Grub was in that EFI directory just as it should be. But the new Debian installer would not replace it, write over it, or create a new directory. And, to its credit, the installer did give me the option to install without Grub being put into place, which is what I did.

I used rEFInd to boot the unbootable new Kali Linux and eventually was able to re-install Grub into the EFI partition on the separate Windows disk. It seems as if I didn't have that problem when I originally installed Kali, but now a few updates later Debian decided not to play at all with the Windows boot manager. Truth is, since I use reFINd I don't need Grub or the Windows bootmanager. I did want them installed and working just because I might need them some day, and there is no reason technically why they can't work together.

It's crazy, but I think I know what the Debian developers were thinking. Normally they build their Linux operating systems to be stand alone, but capable of dual (or muli) boot if you really want to do that. While all that is true, the developers obviously did not take into account the situation where their OS has already been installed and only needs to change the partition UUID in order to make things work. The part that really ticks me off is that there are no error messages telling me what the problem is. It simply says Grub cannot be installed on this machine and leaves it at that. I had to jump through a lot of hoops and it's very fortunate that I took some good notes when I was investigating how EFI works, or is supposed to work. Those old notes came in handy. I knew what the problem was but needed help in the details of how to fix it. I now feel as if I have super powers because I got it all to work in spite of Debian's best efforts to complicate my day.

[Kellemora]

When I have an attack, it seems to only erase current learning which may have required book study or classroom training. In other words, newer things. Almost anything from when I was growing up, and things I learned hands-on over many years time, all of that stays locked in the headbone. This is why I could always fall back on the construction trades. It was indelible in my headbone, except for remembering what was code and what wasn't after an attack, but the old solid codes have always remained solid, only the new fandangled stuff they add gets changed.

As far as the toys go, they also made a toy duplicating machine that you cranked also. It used a stencil you typed on a typewriter and it got wrapped around a felt covered drum, and ink was in the drum.
I can say this much. Back in the 1950's we had some of the most outstanding and amazing toys!

You sure are a glutton for punishment doing things the way you do.
I need my computers to work all day every day, and the Silver Yogi does just that with no problems running Debian.
Some of the problems you mentioned, I'm surprised they don't appear on my computer. I still have all the OS's I've installed on it, still on there, and although old, when I do a kernel upgrade and it has to refind all of them, it sometimes takes way to long for the new kernel to finish installing, and the computer ready to use again.
I just use Grub, and it finds all of those old OS's, and I'm afraid to remove them, because I can't seem to figure out which partition has the current version of Debian I'm running right now.
I know when I boot up, it shows the partition name as Debian 8, so I don't dare delete that partition, hi hi.

Most of my old computers around here are giving up the ghost, one by one. I have one with Windows XP Pro MCE edition that probably just needs cleaned real good. It boots up, then after about 15 minutes to a half hour, shuts down due to overheating.
I normally took all the computers down and cleaned them out real good once a year. But since my second heart attack, and now with my lung issues, I've neglected to even try. I'm not supposed to lift anything for one, and when I exert energy my O2 plummets like a rock, even if I have my O2 tank on and breathing from it.
Such is how my life is going lately!

[yogi]

Really, Gary, it's no punishment at all to be aggravated by what I consider shortcomings of computer software. I may complain a lot here but truth is that I enjoy troubleshooting. That's what I did for thirty-six years at the big M. Only difference is that now I don't get paid for it. LOL

There are a couple reasons why you don't see some of the problems I have. Essentially you and I are doing two different things. The other contributing factor is that your setup is not at all like mine. I believe you never migrated over to GPT format and are still using MBR for booting. That alone explains why you will never see any EFI related problems.

There are situations wherein I have configured a disk with multiple OS's and don't recall which one is in which partition. It really bugs me that for all the information you can glean from gparted and the built in Linux partition commands there is no way to read the files that contain the information about what OS is installed (/etc/os-release, for example). The data in a partition is simply data and not readable per se by any of the partitioning tools. However, most of those tools do allow for assigning names to disks and labels for partitions. I create those labels and then get a print out of the gparted display for my files. That helps tremendously to keep track of where things are. The problems I run into, and this was the case with the latest Debian catastrophe, have to do with devices or /dev/sb... . All my notes and all the comments online refer to those devices but none of them have the same designation as does my configuration. Thus the examples might refer to /dev/sdb7 for the location of the Linux install, but my system has it at /dev/sdc3. I can't copy and past when the names are different.

Anyway, I worked through the problem and it is now resolved. I was able to do that because I do not suffer the same memory problems you have. I read your description of how only current learning gets erased. To be honest I don't think I would be posting about all the problems I have with Linux if that was a problem for me. Just about all my Linux problems are recently learned. Fortunately the notes I keep do help and trigger memories of past experiences.

[Kellemora]

I'm of the opinion that no software will ever be perfect. There are nasty glitches in everything. And this applies to OS's as well!

I doubt I'm using EFI, don't even know if it is on the Silver Yogi or not, hi hi.
I know on Debi's newest computer I bought for her, which I now have up here with Linux Mint on it. However Linux Mint installed itself is how it is, but it works fine, much better than Windows 10 did, that's for sure.

I do, and did give all of my partitions names, so I knew which OS was on them, or Swap, or Data Storage.
But then up upgraded instead of doing a new install. Then when I did finally do a new install in a new partition, it somehow kept showing me Debian8 when I first boot up. But if I check the version number, it is the newest.
I really am not all that smart about what goes on under the hood. If it works, I don't mess with it, hi hi.
I'm not an explorer like yourself into the inner workings of my computin' contraption, hi hi.

My very first encounter with Linux in any form was when I took an old computer and installed RedHat on it.
This was way back when you could buy a RedHat set of 5-1/4 floppies for like 20 bucks.
It didn't work at all like DOS. And when Windows came out with 3.0, and then 3.11 I went back to using Windows.
Used it all the way up until they came out with Vista, and that is what drove me back to Linux.
I installed Ubuntu on my second oldest computer, because I didn't know about dual boot or partitioning either.
I was very happy with how Ubuntu worked, and the programs for it, like OpenOffice back then, were much better and less problematic than my Windows XP programs.
I tried a few different Distro's back then, learned a little more about under the hood, and was able to do the things I needed to do. When I did get a new computer, I bought it with no OS on it at all, and installed Debian. It took a lot of tweaking to get it the way I wanted it. But I did get it set up exactly the way I wanted it. And was very happy with it. I like the layout which is why after they came out the cell-phone look alike Cinnamon, I reverted back to the Mate desktop, which is what I still use to this day.

I do all of my daily stuff on the Silver Yogi. But use Debi's computer with LInux Mint Mate for a couple of things. It has a few features I like that are not on Debian, so I know when an update is available and use Terminal to get my other Debian computers up to date. Works for me!

[yogi]

The Silver Yogi evolved from the very first computer I had custom built. That first computer was built about the time Windows Vista was released. Up to that point I have been running Windows 98 on a Compaq computer that was handed down to me from my employer. Since the new computer was custom built, I decided it would be fun to have something other that Windows. Linux was the obvious choice, and Fedora was the most popular at the time. I got a disc with the Fedora installer on it, and I don't recall if I paid for it or not. I believe there was a small fee. The guy who build that computer said he could install Fedora alongside Windows but he has absolutely no knowledge of how it works. That was fine with me. I had no knowledge how to install it back then. Fedora booted on demand and I recall seeing something close to a blank desktop. It puzzled me and I wondered what use a blank desktop could be. I abandoned Linux for being pointless and never came back until shortly before you and I met online.

Ubuntu was being lauded as THE operating system of choice, and it probably was the best for a novice back then. I've played with it off and on over the years but have been grossly disappointed with the direction they are taking these days. It was a close clone of Windows until they decided smartphone type desktops were better. Well, now even Windows is going that route but most of my computing experience is with a traditional desktop. When I was a system admin I used a terminal and Unix so that I was familiar with the command line applets too. My intentions were to try and find a Linux OS that I would be comfortable enough to use it in lieu of Windows. That explains why I got involved with so many different operating systems. It was and is very interesting to see how different folks do the same thing, but in my humble opinion nobody does it better than Windows. And, I'll be the first to admit Windows is not perfect. It just works for me.

Having said the above, I will tell you that the other operating system on my tower, along side Windows and Kali, is Linux Mint. There were no root password problems in that OS so that the only reason I had to update it was to be current. Mint offers a few different desktops and I always favored Cinnamon. Mate is ok, but it's old school and I can see why you like it. The latest Mint (20.3) Cinnamon is a beautiful system. There are not Ubuntu-like icons splattered all over the screen, but instead the launcher looks a lot like Mate or Xfce. It functions like those two but has a much nicer look and feel to it. I was hugely impressed with the improved control panel. Mint obviously made a humongous effort to simplify things for the average user. I've said it in the past and will reaffirm it again now. If I was forced to abandon Windows for some reason, Linux Mint would be the Linux system of choice. A very close second choice would be Peppermint Linux because it is way more responsive than any of the others. In any case, I am here to tell you Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop is looking fabulous.

[Kellemora]

The Silver Yogi is more powerful than any computer I've ever owned in my entire life.
Even though I had my computers built for me, most of them were in the 300 dollar range, with 4 gigs of ram.
I had another one built previously with 2 gigs of ram, and it ran OK for what I was doing.
So, I had them build me yet another using 2 gigs out of my 4 gig machine.
The 4 gig machine did not seem to run any slower on only 2 gigs, so I was a happy camper.

It was not until I got the Silver Yogi with 16 gigs of ram did I see some of the things I did went ten times faster.
So, when one of my 3 similar computers died, I put 4 gigs back in. I really didn't see a speed up on those machines.
I sent one to the shop to see if they could fix it for me, they basically said it would be cheaper to replace the mobo and CPU.
It was basically the same mobo, and same CPU type an AMD of the same generation. But he stuck 8 gigs of ram in that machine for me. I honestly didn't see much of a speed difference on anything over 2 gigs, except for playing Farm Town, and then later when I was doing a bunch of photo editing. The difference between 2 gig and 4 gig was not really noticeable on Farm Town, but the jump to 8 gigs made a big difference.
Then the Silver Yogi put that machine to shame, even though it doesn't have the GPU card in it. I figure the Silver Yogi has a much faster mobo and processor that can use that much ram to its advantage.
The sad thing is, all of my older computers are now dead, except for a super old Dell, and the new computer I bought for Debi I now have up here with Linux Mint on it.

Comparing Debian Mate to Linux Mint Mate, Linux Mint has some features I like which are not available on Debian in the same way. But I'm so spoiled having the Silver Yogi, I don't use it for much, it was an off the shelf emergency purchase that turned out to be a bad choice.

You and I both learned we should keep our desktops clean and use the drop down indexes.
Cinnamon is more like a cluttered up Schmartz-Fone to me, and works basically on icons covering your desktop.
There may be a way to use it differently, but being OLDE SKEWL as you said, I like the Mate desktop.
This could be because I use the Wide Monitor in SQUARE Monitor mode, this is so I can see it inside my desktop, which was made for SQUARE Monitors, hi hi.

[yogi]

I confess to being slightly confused regarding your experience with Linux Mint. All those desktop icons (called snaps in Ubuntu) do not clutter my monitor as they do in Ubuntu. Even in Ubuntu it is required to click on a special menu icon to view all those snaps so that the desktop proper is clean most of the time. In Ubuntu there is no drop down (or up in the case of Mint) menu with which to select programs. If you want something special you need to type it's name into the search box an hope you get the desired result. After that, if you chose to do so, you can pin it to the desktop launcher which is typically a single bar down the left side. I realize that bar is what you object to, but it can be disabled. That would go contrary to the Ubuntu desktop philosophy, but it is possible because ANYTHING in Linux can be modified. The 20.3 version of Linux Mint Cinnamon comes clean out of the box. There are no desktop icons at all unless you put them there deliberately. So, I'm not sure what you are seeubg in Cinnamon, but it's seems to be a different picture over here.

The response of a computer depends on a few key items. Changing any one of them (to upgrade the hardware) may or may not produce the desired effects. The amount of RAM is a significant factor in that the bus between RAM and the CPU is the fastest on any computer mobo. Thus the more you can delegate to RAM storage, the quicker you are able to retrieve and store data there. The clock speed is also a big factor, but it can be deceptive. You can have a fast clock but a a slow processor. Thus the faster clock is useless if the CPU can't process the data efficiently. All these vital organs come in a variety of internal configurations, which is why you could have a computer built for $300. That could never be a system designed for high performance, however. Thus no matter how much memory you put into a system with a slow clock or a slow CPU, you will not notice much difference in response time. Your games might load quicker out of RAM, but if all that data can't be processed at high speed, the extra RAM is not very useful. I don't recall all the details at this point, but the Silver Yogi was not built for general use. It was not made to be a workstation. It was speced to be a high performance gaming machine. That translates to a lot of throughput and coupled with the extra RAM the machine is blazing hot. If the mobo had that TPM module required by Microsoft for security, you could even run Windows 11 on it. Not that you would want to ...

Then there is the OS itself that may contribute to performance. Debian probably is a good choice in that it comes out of the box plain vanilla. If you ran it in the terminal mode without a GUI desktop you would see even faster responses. Some of the Linux desktops I've seen are obnoxious as all get out and slow down the system. Anything driven by Plasma, for example, is a resource hog and very inefficient at that. When Ubuntu is installed in the minimum mode it too is fairly quick. But it still has a lot of junk in it. The folks at Peppermint Linux took that Ubuntu shell and stripped out all the crap but still left the important stuff in their kernel to make the system more adaptable to a wider audience. It is probably the fasted working OS that I have run across with a graphical desktop and built upon a Linux core. I use it in my virtual machines because it is so compact and quick.

So, your friend who builds computers is probably correct. You can't upgrade a computer with 25 year old technology built into it. The best you can do is save the box and replace all the guts, and if you are looking for Silver Yogi performance, it will be slightly more than $300. And, I know it is all out of reach for you, but that's the story on how to make things fast.

[Kellemora]

Well, it has been many years since I installed a Cinnamon Desktop. I like Mate so that is the one I always choose.

I can't look them all up now, but at the time I had the computers build they used Asus 2mb 68 something or other motherboards, they were not the fastest, but they also were not the cheapest either. I did go with midrange AMD CPUs, again, not the cheapest and not the fastest either. But they were paired with the mobo for optimum performance of that particular mobo.
I was very happy with those machines. And as I said, the time before last when I checked, a midrange machine was like 475 bucks and now it is well over 600 bucks. But these are not gaming machines, I realize that.
But it does explain why the Silver Yogi is so lightning fast, even without the GPU card.

The computer Debi is using right now, donated to her by her son, was a top of the line gaming machine. It is water cooled, and that broke and drowned out his office, hi hi. He had it repaired, but he needed a machine like NOW, so he had them build him a monster of a machine, well over 6 grand he paid for his new machine. The one Debi is using cost him around 2 grand, which was high dollars at the time. It too is now over 15 years old, but works fairly well still. She has Windows 7 on it.

I know a couple of writers who use very old ancient machines, but they only use them for writing.
Sorta like my oldest machine was relegated to doing my accounting work, not hooked up to the Internet.
So although it is very old, at least 18 years old now, it does what it is supposed to do.
The only drawback is the software is also very outdated and newer software won't run on it.
But, it does allow me to save my accounting files in a portable format that the new machines can read easily.
I just use a flash drive to copy the data over to another machine.

[yogi]

I think computers are a bit like automobiles in terms of the variety of elements you can build into them and end up with a good machine. The trick is to design a computer that maximizes your work flow. A commuter car would not be built from the same parts as a racing car would be, and that analogy can be applied to computers too. My thinking in the Silver Yogi days was to build the fastest machine with the most memory I could afford. Believe it or not that computer you are using is not top of the line for its day. I could not afford the top processor in those days. The same holds true today. I can build a machine with 32 cores of processing power. But, I could buy at least three Silver Yogis for the price of that one processor alone. I have eight cores now and would only benefit from more when it comes to loading browser tabs. It might help with virtual machines too, but I'm not positive of that. I certainly don't do any graphics editing so that all that extra power would only be used a small percentage of the time. Then, too, I am a power user. So who knows?

I love what Nvidia does and I think they make the best graphics cards you can find. But, do you really need a graphics card? Your Silver Yogi proves that it is not necessary to have an extra card to get great performance with graphics. If you did video film editing then something better than the video processor on the motherboard would be required. There are certain games that require all the graphics processing you can throw at it, but neither you or I do that kind of rendering. The truth in the matter is that many of the newest processors today have that high powered graphics built into them. Intel is virtually in a battle with Nvidia in that regard. I'm not sure when I will build that next computer, but I am reasonably confident that it will not have a graphics card. I might want to add one later one, but at the moment I see no need for it given I don't do any 3-D rendering. Should my interests in gaming become more intense, then a graphics card would be needed to power up all those extra displays I would also have.

The bottom line is you don't need an expensive computer to have great performance. Know what you are going to do with it and build it from components designed for that purpose.