[nmglug] Mtg this week, Apr. 25th, 1730,

[Ted Pomeroy]

NMGLUGers, thank you al for the responses, I want to WINE a little. I am
using wine on an irregular basis to print greeting cards and some other
tacky graphics projects from a W-8 era set of CDs called "Print Artist."
The graphics are not current, they weren't then, but I find them usable. My
first trial with wine did not work. I set up directories and followed
instructions. I eventually found a helper unit, but I do not have that
handy in my human memory. Current wine associated packages are: wine,
wine32:i386, wine32-preloader:i386 and libwine:i386. these are necessary
due to the age (32-bit) of the program I run under wine. The real key item
is called "playonlinux" which is a front end for wine. That 'helper'
package got the kinks ironed out and I have a consistent experience with my
one ancient program. One can actually do similar printing of cards and such
in LibreOffice, but I kept the disks and have the graphics library on hand
with a kind of index. So, take a look at playonlinux, and note that you may
be needing a 32-bit environment for legacy programs. My OS is Debian 12,
64-bit.
I don't recommend units as old as 12 years, but this one in hand had few
scars and a 64-bit processor. It is too hot and slow to use too much, but
may be good to pass on to someone in need. So bring an old laptop, if it is
64-bit and see what can be done; or a 5 year old, multi-core 64-bit unit
that can pack in more ram - that is usually a good place to start. But one
must be able to add ram, a newer disk or ssd. Some of the "thin" books are
too tricky or soldered into a fixed configuration.
Hope to see you on Thursday. Thank you, Ted P


On Wed, Apr 24, 2024 at 4:19 PM Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com> wrote:

> I'll try to make it tomorrow night. My latest project: I've been chatting
> with some people on mastodon about barn-door trackers (a cheap low-tech way
> to track the sky with a telescope or camera) and that inspired me to dig
> mine out of the garage and see if I could fix the problems that plagued it
> (a slipping motor). I spent some time today getting my rusty arduino
> development environment working again.
>
> Two other little things I've been working on:
> first, a little python script that watches idle time and tells me to take
> breaks from the computer every half-hour. Some podcast, maybe
> Freakonomics?, recently challenged people to do that, and the people who
> took breaks reported they felt a lot better and more energized throughout
> the day. I have a tendency when I'm working on something to get way too
> wrapped up in it and stay at the computer longer than is healthy for me.
>
> Second, a guitar flash card program. I've been taking beginner guitar
> lessons online, and this program quizzes me on the chords and helps me
> learn. It's really cool what you can do just with the sox command line. For
> instance, here's a 3-note guitar chord with the command-line:
>  play -nq -t alsa synth pl D3 pl A3 pl D4 pl F#4 delay 0 0.06 0.12 0.18
> remix - fade 0 1.75 .1 norm -1 vol 0.5
>
> Ted Reichelt writes:
> > I am still on a quest to get to a point to become a solely linux user
> but because of work and other things not quite there yet
> > as for the personal side.'
> > If I can make use of wine for maybe a couple of programs that are just
> not available in linux I'll be happy.
> > As it is wine has not worked for me. out of the box none of these
> programs are working with wine.
>
> I haven't had much luck with wine. There's really only one thing I care
> about that needs Windows: Adobe Digital Editions (for e-borrowing library
> books or buying e-books). Every now and then I manage to get it working in
> wine, and it works for a few weeks then stops working and I can never find
> a solution besides removing every trace of wine and starting over, possibly
> on a new Linux machine. I even tried buying Crossover, with the same
> result: ADE worked in Crossover for a few months, then stopped working, and
> Codeweavers doesn't support that app so there's no recourse. I don't know
> what it is about wine that makes things stop working after a while.
>
> So instead I keep a Windows VM (using the Windows 10 that came with my
> current laptop) that runs in QEMU off an external disk, which I fire up
> once or twice a month.
>
>         ...Akkana
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