Tutorials – Windy Weather

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”

CoreHeaterQt Program

I recently wrote a program to test my new computer. I wanted to test the wattage range and cooling of the new processor so needed a program that would keep all the cores of the processor busy. The Core i7-950 is a 4 core processor with Hyper-Threading which means that there are a max of 8 threads. Since AMD provides server processors with up to 12 threads so the program has a maximum number threads of 32. I use the HWMonitor program to monitor temperatures and wattage if your processor supports it.

Continue reading “CoreHeaterQt Program”