Another newbie

[Mintedfake]

After an XP computer died with an overheated CPU, I bought a second hand Dell tower without any operating system from a local computer shop for £250 on 30th August. I am not sure if I had a good deal but sudo lshw suggests that I have an AMD Phenom 9750 Quad-Core, 4GB of RAM, a 500 GB disk and other things that I haven't identified apart from a wireless dongle. I downloaded Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon on another computer, pushed the stick in, pressed F12 and became a Linux user.

After just over two weeks, almost all my experience has been positive and my problems seem to come from programs and forgotten passwords rather than operating system issues. Fortunately, I could simply plug in my removable 500 GB hard drive with the files from the old computer and copy them onto the new disk.

There was some fun before I worked out which was my Thunderbird profile, copied it into the correct place (learning how to see hidden files on the way), edited the profiles.ini file to the old name and rediscovered all my old mail, sent and received. I didn't even have to remember my password.

I naturally started to install possibly useful programs which was very easy with ones that were available as packages. Despite the warnings of one review, Gnash handled my elderly .swf files without problems. However, Chess programs have special problems as there is normally a display program and an engine and often an intermediate program such as Polyglot. It was easy to install Xboard and Stockfish but it took many tries before I found online that I should install Polyglot and then type in a terminal Xboard -fUCI -fcp stockfish -sUCI -scp stockfish. I have no idea what that means but it works. I had installed Wine and was about to try to install Arena and Houdini which I had used under XP. I may still try in future but it is now less urgent.

Yesterday, I ran my first non packaged program. This was DocFetcher which I need owing to my total inability to keep my files in reasonable order or remember the filenames. It ran after simply downloading a .zip file, extracting and clicking on the DocFetcher.sh. It was able to index my junk and find files but I may not have solved all the problems as it presumably does not keep track of changes until I run it. I would suggest that anyone from the package producing team with nothing at all to do might consider DocFetcher.

Meanwhile, some day soon I may try editing a configure file. Wish me luck!

I am finding that Icedtea has different issues to Oracle's Jscript. My chess interest caused me problems using the excellent free position search at http://www.chesslab.com/PositionSearch.html on Windows after Oracle's version 7.51 and I installed the old version 6.45 to run the unsigned script. With Mint 17, one receives a message including “is missing the permission attribute” and then a further warning about an unsigned application. One can then locate games reaching a particular position but the script crashes if you try to play through the game. Fortunately, instead of loading the game, one can locate it on other databases using Google, so things sort of work. I also receive warnings using the Java interface at the Free Internet Chess Server. I don't need to use this but, alas, I prefer it to using Xboard.

Of course, as a Newbie, I am not sure how to identify Linux malware. Chesslab's jar file is probably just poorly written and before running it on XP, I had tried http://wepawet.iseclab.org/ on it without finding any known malware. However, perhaps the NSA are maintaining a high quality free chess database to help them install their own software world wide, so it might be interesting if an expert looked at the code to see why it crashes.

[Crewp]

Welcome to Linux Mint, and the Mint forum.

[The-Wizard]

welcome to the Mint family forums,
your tower is a nice bit of kit and hopefully should be fully compatible

wizard

[jimallyn]

Welcome aboard, Mintedfake! There really isn't a lot of malware out there that affects Linux. But if you're worried about something you downloaded, you can scan it with ClamAV, which is available for download in Synaptic or Software Manager.

[all41]

Hi Mintedfake,

Welcome to the forums. You're going to love this place.

[jahid]

Welcome to the Mint family........

[PatH57]

Welcome and enjoy the ride.

[vrkalak]

.
..:: Welcome to LinuxMint ::..

Read everything you can -- Forums - Wiki - IRC

Linux: Tricks of the Trade > http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=38355
"All Linux OS-Distros" Forums and Tutorials > http://linuxquestions.org/questions/
What works for Ubuntu, usually works for Mint > http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/
Linux Alternative to Windows > http://www.linuxalt.com/
LinuxMint Community Forums - Tutorials > http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/welcome

** Remember, all OS-Distro, Apps, DE/WM are Open-Source and have a Help-Forum

[austin.texas]

Welcome to Mint and to the forum, Mintedfake!

Help wiki - https://help.ubuntu.com/community
Good search link - http://home.windstream.net/joelwest/
Rescatux CD: A tool everyone should have (includes SuperGrub2 and gparted) - http://www.supergrubdisk.org/

[jesica]

Welcome to Linux Mint

A Quick internet search, is the answer to success.

Linux Mint Community http://community.linuxmint.com/
Linux Mint Donor http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php
Linux Mint Store http://www.linuxmint.com/store.php
Linux Mint Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/linuxmintmembers/
Linux Mint Twitter https://twitter.com/Linux_Mint
Linux Mint Blog http://blog.linuxmint.com/