Mini Systems – Windy Weather

Impress Show Runner Trivial on Linux

Update 11 April 2020: Using the xdotool method, the QtShowRunner works well on Linux, so there is a portable version for Windows and Linux. Get the latest at the github repo. I’m still investigating “Deployment” for Windows and Linux. Now, previously…

I have beat my head against the wall trying to fix the QtShowRunner program that works on Windows to work on Linux. None of the methods have worked.

Kernel uinput API calls never worked.
Using the X11 XSendEvent to send either Mouse clicks or Key events didn’t work.

Finally I found a command called xdotool which does many X things including sending mouse clicks and key presses. Here’s a shell script that uses the xdotool to launch soffice impress to show a slideshow and then terminates the show and then exits the script.

The script launches the show with the ending & to detach it. Then loops looking for the process using pgrep and if it’s still around, uses xdotool to click the mouse and waits for 5 seconds. When the process finishes the show, and the click ends the show, then pgrep fails and the script exits. Trivial.

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QtShowRunner Runs Shows in Impress

You recall my previous post about using LibreOffice Impress to show artwork?

Well that’s a problem if you have lots of artwork you want to show. The slide shows get very large and so you have a few shows, and then you want to loop them all, right? Impress does not support that. So I wrote a program to help.

QtShowRunner runs a sequence of LibreOffice Impress slide shows one after the other in a loop. Currently it runs on Windows but soon the plan is to move it to Linux Mint.

See my original question about this problem here:

Chaining Impress Slide Shows Together?

After no solution appeared, I wrote a program to do it.

Here is a shot of the program dialog and the Impress Slide Show settings. You need to uncheck Change Slides by Clicking on background for QtShowRunner to work without skipping through your slides.

Here is the SourceForge page for the program.

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Fifth Generation MiniPC System

I’ve been building Mini-PC systems since 2008. I recently got parts to build an AMD Ryzen system based on an ASRock Desk Mini A300.

Screenshot_2020-03-27 Newegg com AMD Ryzen Mini PC Parts Shipped

Those are the parts but in summary:

ASRock DeskMini A300 Chassis
AMD Ryzen 3 3200G 4-Core Processor
Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe SSD
16GB RAM

The chassis comes with WiFi. And it now runs Linux Mint 19.3. It supports the 4K monitor with no issues unlike the previous Gigabyte Brix system, which only supported the 4K monitor under Windows 10 and not Linux Mint.

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Gigabyte Brix 7200 Displays 4K

I’ve had a Gigabyte Brix GB-BKi5HA-7200 for a while now.

This is about the 3rd Mini system that I’ve had. Maybe fourth if you include one that I built from parts. This one has:

Intel® Core™ i5-7200U Processor
8GB RAM
M.2 120GB SSD
60GB 2.5 inch SATA SSD

Linux Mint Fails in 4K

It was running Linux Mint 18 and recently Linux Mint 19. And this was working fine, except recently I upgraded the monitor to a Samsung 40″ 4K TV – UN40MU6300FXZA. I found the Refurbished TV for about $290 for sale by Walmart a couple of months ago. This is quite a good price for this Samsung 6300 level TV.

Since I use this mini system to display photos and game screen shots a large high-rez display is just the thing. However, Linux Mint has never supported the display correctly.

As you can see, when in 4K [3840×2160], the display is sliced up and repeated across the screen. It works fine in 1920×1080 mode on Linux. From all the reading of the processor and TV specs, it looked like it should work fine and when I use a long HDMI cable to plug the TV into a Windows 10 system with a GTX 1060 card, it works fine too in 4K.

I am using a pair of 2K monitors through a IOGear Displayport switch and Linux Mint works just fine with that using a GTX 1050 card, which has DisplayPort output.

After spending a couple of days on various forums trying to understand and fix the problem on the BRIX with no luck, I had the bright idea of just trying Windows 10 directly on the system. So I made a Windows 10 install Thumb drive, removed the M.2 Sata, to avoid messing up the Linux Install with Windows 10, and installed Windows 10 on the 60GB SATA SSD. Worked like a charm and brought the monitor right up in 4K without problems.

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Linux Mint – Migrate to SSD

Every post should start with an interesting picture.

Ok. Now for the article.

I’m using a Linux Mint system hooked to my TV to watch Netcasts from the Twit.tv network and other things. It’s built using an Thermaltake Armor 30 case and a Core i5 Haswell processor, 8GB RAM, GFX 640 graphics, and a 250GB HD.

But the system is slow. So I’ve decided that the best approach would be to get a cheap SSD for it. I found a Refurbished 60GB SSD on Newegg for about $40. That should do the trick. Given there aren’t that many apps installed on the Linux system, it uses far less than 60GB, so the small size is no problem.

Migration to SSD

I don’t want to completely rebuild the system. I’d rather migrate it to the SSD. A forum post led me to using gparted to migrate the partitions from the 250GB hard drive to the SSD. Also, it seems best to test this scheme using a virtual machine before I actually migrate the system. One of the VMs I keep current is a Linux Mint 15 system in a 60GB VM disk on my Windows 7 system. I use Virtual Box.

After I did the experiments with the VM, I successfully migrated a 250GB HD – 9GB used- to a 60GB SSD with no problems using this scheme. Continue reading “Linux Mint – Migrate to SSD”

ZBox Audio with Linux Mint – Tutorial

As I mentioned in my previous post, I just got a ZBox ID80, installed Linux Mint 12 and had some trouble with the sound. Turns out the problems were user error, but setting up sound was a little confusing.

So here’s what you might like to know to make sure your audio is working, at least for this hardware and Linux Mint 12. Continue reading “ZBox Audio with Linux Mint – Tutorial”

Zotac ZBox ID80

After getting the Alienware machine, I found myself with an extra 20″ monitor and noticed that the Blue Diamond box was getting a little long in the tooth. It has been running Ubuntu 10 and while it works, it’s very slow. Time for an upgrade.

The Zotac Zbox ID80 plus was about $300 from newegg, and while they have versions that are with and without HDD and memory, the one I got had 2GB of ram and a 320GB HD. I didn’t really need the HD since I had one of that size, but the price really tossed that in for almost free. I did get 4GB of RAM for it for an additional $21. Continue reading “Zotac ZBox ID80”

Ubuntu 10.04 – Nvidia driver install issue

Update: Restart to clear the error below and then install the [recommended] driver. All is well as far as I can tell.

Using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
Zotac GeForce 9300 Motherboard

attempted to install the [recommended] choice and it failed.

With a previous install, this worked, but then system failed to start graphics when it rebooted. But that system used to have an AMD video graphics driver installed, so I reinstalled the entire system and now this occurs.

How can I clean out the “archives” and try this again?

– windy

Armor 30, Core i7-760 System Parts

Images.

Jetway Atom D525 System Works

The Jetway Atom D525 based system is running with Ubuntu 10.04.

The goals for the system are:

Employ an Intel Atom D525 processor – a high performance dual processor system.
Employ an Nvidia ION2 graphics processor designed for high performance netbooks / nettops. With DVI and HDMI display outputs.
Support DDR2 memory, so that I could use memory parts I already have rather than purchasing new DDR3 SODIMM memory.
Have a nice case with an internal power supply rather than an external power supply.
Run Ubuntu.

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