Where to Start

[keith]

Sorry if I have come to the wrong place. A friend has given me an Orange Pi 5 Plus, fitted with a 1GB SSD, and I have been trying to get it started up. According to its previous owner, the SSD had been completely erased (I don't know why). It had no SD card with it when I got it.

I downloaded the online instruction manuals, and set about trying to start it up, using a suitable 32GB SD card. I first tried with (OrangePi) Ubuntu, but ran into problems using Balena Etcher. It apparently transfers the Ubuntu Image to the SD card, but just as it appears to complete the process of verification, it produces a helpful error message ('There was an Error'....). I also tried with other OSes, with the same result, so it seems to be either me or the OPi which is having problems.

After a bit of research, I found a description of using the Linux command 'dd' to transfer an image, so I did this, under a machine with Linux Mint - this appeared to go OK.

I then plugged in the SD card, and powered up the OPi. After a delay, I get what looks like a Ubuntu 'splash' page on screen, and it appears to go through an installation process (? not sure if thats whats happening). However, after several minutes, there is a message saying there is an error, and a desktop session will be started to allow debugging - but I can't get anything else to happen.

I have asked the previous owner, but he says probably the bootloader is missing. (I suspect he never got it running). Here I come unstuck - I can't find any info on bootloaders - like what it is, where to get it, what to do with it, etc, so I am hoping someone here can point me in the right direction. I have gone through the instruction manual, but it seems to be slightly out of date, and I had no success using its instructions. Ideally, I would like to boot the OPi from the SSD, if that is possible, but have no idea how to go about this - and there seems to be a great deal of conflicting (wrong?) info online.  

I did try the Orange Pi 'official' forums, but got lost in the chinese messages which came up.

[Werner]

HI.

 

We cannot support 3rd party images, therefore please refrain from asking further questions about other images.

Though Armbian should work just fine with this board. https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/

 

There are some pitfalls that might cause issue. This board comes with a spi flash memory which, when containing a poor/bad boot loader, can prevent proper boot of any OS. In this case rkdevtool might be necessary to erase via USB if possible. 

[CryBaby]

Sounds to me like a bad SD card. If you get a splash screen there must be some sort of bootloader. Another possibility is an inadequate power supply. Try one with more amps.

[keith]

Thanks for the input, CryBaby.  First off - I'm a total dummy when it comes to the OrangePi - no idea where to start, so any help is appreciated.

I think my PSU is OK - it (apparently) was supplied with the OPi (I was given it as well), and it is rated at 4 amperes. I measured the voltage when loaded, and it is 5.12 volts, so I guess it is OK.

After the problems with the SD card, - I tried again installing Balena Etcher on my Linux Mint PC, but when I tried to burn an image (I tried several, not just Ubuntu), it appears to do this, then fails just as the verification process ends. I then tried the AppImage version of Etcher from the OrangePi downloads, and this did the same thing - failure at the end of verification.

So, as you suggest, I suspected a dud SD card, but I had no spare, so just tried what I had (I know ....sorry!), and this is when I get the splash image and nothing further.

I now have a new SD card, and the image burn/verification appears to be OK - no errors.

But now the OPi board does not appear to switch on - The LED remains red, and I can feel that the components on the board are getting warm, but no video output.

If there is a bootloader, where is it located? and can I reload it it to be sure it is there (I understand your comment about getting a flash screen, but I have my doubts about the integrity of any of the software after what I was told about the OPi)

Thanks for your help, Keith.

 

[The Tall Man]

On 9/26/2025 at 1:47 PM, keith said:

fitted with a 1GB SSD

A 1 GB SSD... don't you mean a 1 TB?

 

I wouldn't start with questioning your bootloader. From what you said, that makes no sense to me. It sounds like that part of your system is already working.

 

From what you said, I would begin with an Armbian image instead of  Xunlong (official Orange PI) image - as Xunlong really doesn't do a good job with OS support.

https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-5-plus/

 

Don't download a 6.12 image because they don't work. 6.1 is does work. Here is a specific Armbian Ubuntu Gnome image for the Orange PI 5 Plus 0 click on this and the download will begin:

https://dl.armbian.com/orangepi5-plus/Noble_vendor_gnome

 

You were right to use dd in Linux instead of some fancy piece of software. The images from Armbian are compressed to .xz. To decompress the image, after you download it:

unxz [FILENAME]

 

After you decompress it, dd the. .img file to your uSD. Remember to dd it to the device itself, not to a partition on it. This assumes there's nothing on the drive you want to keep, because this will overwrite its GPT (partition) table if it has one.

 

Then verify your image:

cmp -l [FILENAME] [DEVICE]

 

If the verification is a success, it will not list any differences between the two files. It will just say EOF on your FILENAME. If it lists differences, it's a failure. Then simply dd again and verify again. I've had occasional instances where I've had to dd something twice from another computer.

 

Then place the uSD in the Orange PI 5 Plus, and power it up. Everything should go well. It'll ask you a few easy questions. Then take you to your (Gnome) desktop.

 

Then of course, do an update and reboot.

 

Then run armbian-config. They have an installer program I've never really used so I can't speak to it. But it's supposed to let you install it on another device (i.e. your SSD).

 

Whenever the uSD card is present in the Orange PI 5 Plus, it will take precedence in boot. So after you do the install onto your SSD drive, shut down and power off the Orange PI 5 Plus, then remove the uSD .Then power it on. Hopefully it will boot from your SSD.

Edited September 27 by The Tall Man

[The Tall Man]

52 minutes ago, keith said:

The LED remains red

Don't concern yourself with the LED light color and whether it flashes or not. It will flash with some kernels and say red with others.

 

And FYI, kernel 6.12 seems to boot, but it has no video output. This is why I suggest starting with 6.1 (vendor).

Edited September 27 by The Tall Man

[keith]

Thanks again for the inputs - I'm slowly working through the instructions, and hopefully learning. TallMan is right - I meant 1 TB, not 1 GB - (it was tiring day!)

I'm not really bothered at this stage with which OS Image I use - My original intention was to get the thing going, then eventually try each available OS until I found something I could live with. Normally I use Linux Mint on my desktop computer (user - not nerd!), so this was why Ubuntu came to the top of the pile for testing because of the common Debian background, but not necessarily as the 'finished' job.

I more or less did as suggested above (using the Orange Ubuntu 'Official' download. As noted, I seem to have had a dead SD card, and did not have the error reported after validation after I got a new card - but the odd thing now is that although the old 'faulty' SD card at least produced a 'splash' screen, the new card does nothing - the OPi just does a good imitation of a warm brick. I did the SHA check, and the Etcher validation was OK, so presumably the burnt image was OK (?).

I'll work through Tall Mans instructions, and see what happens, and report back - thanks for the detailed description - its more useful than many people realise to someone who doesn't do this sort of thing every day.

Just out of curiosity - is the 'no-video output' of Armbian 6.12 a bug (as I suspect) or deliberate - and if so why?

Thanks again for the help.  Keith

 

 

[SteeMan]

1 hour ago, keith said:

is the 'no-video output' of Armbian 6.12 a bug

Lack of feature implementation, not a bug.  6.1 is the vendor supplied kernel where most things will work, but the vendor doesn't provide support.  6.12 is linux mainline kernel, where much functionality may be missing (as the vendor doesn't work to get their features into mainline linux, but relies on others (volunteer opensource developers) to do their work for them).

[keith]

SteeMan - OK - so as a total non-developer, I will steer clear of 'mainline kernels (at least until I can learn some more😀

 

TallMan - I only wish everyone online was as helpful as you have been. I actually got the thing to work using your instructions, which is a first for me using online 'help'. I no longer have a useless brick.

I have a red/blue flashing LED, a working desktop, and (now) a need to learn something about Armbian - this being my first sight of it. Some of it looks familiar from Mint due to the Debian heritage

I also want to learn how to make the OPi boot from either the EMMC or the SDD, as I understand this is much faster - although it works, booting from the SD card clearly doesn't do justice to the OPi hardware (and life is too short😀.

Thanks to all who responded - you all helped.    Keith

 

[The Tall Man]

1 hour ago, keith said:

I actually got the thing to work

 

Great!! I'm glad you got it working!

Edited Sunday at 06:50 PM by The Tall Man

[The Tall Man]

Additional Tip: The sync command:

 

Btw - an additional tip, whenever you're copying files or images, it's a good idea to finish it off with the sync command. When using cp or dd, the prompt returns when the CPU portion of the copying is done, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the final data buffer has finished transferring its data to the drive or device. The sync command holds and only returns the prompt once the buffer has finished copying to the drive or device. Note that if you're copying a batch of files, the sync command will return only when the current file has finished, not necessarily the entire batch.

[The Tall Man]

Recommendation: Switch to the edge kernel (eMMC drive access + better performance + more complete kernel features)

I just tried out that Armbian Noble image with the vendor kernel. I noticed the eMMC drive didn't show up. Also the user interface seemed a bit sluggish. I normally use the edge kernel, it's far more complete than the vender kernel. I tried that here, and the eMMC drive appeared, and also the user interface become much smoother.

 

You can use armbian-config to switch to the latest edge kernel (6.16.4).

[keith]

TallMan - Thanks for the recommendations. I thought I would try them, and use it as a learning experience for Armbian - I made a hash of it, I think, and sorry, I need some help again. First I looked for kernel 6.16.4 online, and found at least two, with different SHA checksums. Then it occurred to me that perhaps they were listed in Armbios-config, so after reading about it in the documentation, I booted it and eventually found a list of kernels available, so I selected Vendor 6.16.4 and tried to install it. Somewhere I went wrong, but don't know where - the process seemed to be running fine, and something (?) seemed to be installed. Eventually it needed a reboot - but once again I had a brick. I didn't get as far as installing the OS on EMMC or SSD.

I reflashed the SD card with vendor kernel 6.1 as previously, to start again from scratch, but am not confident about trying the update again - hence the need for one or two pointers.

Sorry about this - your help would be appreciated.  Keith

[The Tall Man]

Kernel 6.1 is Vendor.

Kernel 6.12 is Current / Mainline

Kernel 6.16 is Edge.

 

It's simple to change to edge. Just run armbian-config (it's available in the menu, or just type it in the command line using sudo). In armbian-config, as you make the selections, you'll find that you keep pressing ENTER until you get to the long list of kernels. Then scroll down to the latest Edge, which as of I last looked was 6.16.4. It may also say Armbian 25.8.1.

 

 

[keith]

Thanks for that , TallMan. You told me I needed 6.16.4 - and it took me a while to realise that I could probably find it using the Armbian-config. I thought I did pretty much as you describe, but it wouldn't boot, so I guess I did something wrong, (Probably picked up the faulty card mentioned above!). but didn't have time yesterday to try again - so thats for this evening. I'll get there eventually, I hope. At the moment I guess I'm still scared I'm going to do something irrepairable, because up til now I've always been a user, so not too adventurous yet.

 

Keith

 

[keith]

So I now got Edge 6.16.4 Kernel on my SD card, and I want to boot from either EMMC or SATA to take advantage of the extra speed. Arbian-config presents several options. Which option is generally recommended, from the 5 shown in Armbian-config?. For me, Option 3 (boot from EMMC, System on SATA, USB or NVMe) seems to be what I want, but I am interested to hear any recommendations or problems, since this is and Edge Kernel.

Tanks, Keith

[The Tall Man]

Hi Keith, I'm not too familiar with the in and outs of armbian-config. Just navigate around and see what's available. The kernel being Edge makes it easiest to install to a different device (i.e. if that's eMMC), so you're goo there. And remember, if you break the operating system, you can always start again with a clean install. So don't be afraid to experiment. It's how we learn. But I am very careful with the 16 MB SPI-NOR, and not to mess with that. I'm not sure if overwriting that with junk would brick the machine or not. Perhaps someone else who knows more about that can comment. But otherwise just follow your instincts as best you can and do what makes sense to you. Armbian-config is meant to be pretty straight-forward.

[CryBaby]

I would put boot and system on the eMMC. Then it will run with or without the SSD, which I would reserve for data. Things like VMs and containers that get a lot of writes can go on the SSD and be symbolically linked to their system folders.

[keith]

Thanks for the information, everyone.

I transferred the OS to the EMMC as recommended by CryBaby, and all is running well. I am slowly finding my way round Armbian - not too difficult, due to the similarities between Armbian and Linux Mint. So far, the only thing I really dislike is the Chromium Web-Browser. Not Chromium per se, but its infested with Google, and if there is one thing that I have always considered detrimental to any computer is Google (and Microsoft). I've been looking for another browser to install, but no luck so far - any recommendations, anyone? - as a Linux user, I would like Firefox, but so far, haven't found it.

The software cache seems very slow to update - Its been about 30 minutes so far, and has not even reached 50% - I'm comparing again to Linux Mint, which usually updates the cache in 2 or 3 minutes (I have a fibre-optic internet connection, with 948 Mbit/s upload/480 Mbit/s Download, and its connected by cable, not wireless, so not slow).

It looks as though I will have to stop using '-' as a connector between parts of my text - I just read somewhere that it has been hi-jacked by the AI wallies to indicate that a particular text is generated by AI. I may make mistakes and be slow, but I'm definitely not Artificial Idiocy (I know - you're Natural Idiocy.....😉

Seriously - thanks for all the help you provided - I've got from a pricey little brick to a useable computer with your inputs - thanks again,

Keith

[The Tall Man]

You can install firefox. Not sure why you're not seeing it. If you're using Ubuntu Noble, firefox has issues. I think it normally installs from an Armbian repository, and last I installed it in Armbian Noble (just a couple days ago), it didn't work at all, so Armbian's firefox is, at present, non-functional. However you can install Ubuntu's, but their version is only available as a snap rather than a debian package. In my experience snap applications are slower to start up, plus they invade your home directories with a snap folder. Snap applications are also not necessarily open-source behind Cannonical's wall.

 

Armbian desktop images also come with a Microsoft program: Visual Studio Code. And a Microsoft repository is added to the apt repositories specifically to handle updates for that program. You can, of course, uninstall it. The package name is just called code. Then you can go it:

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/

and delete the microsoft file (using sudo), if it's still there. That will remove its repository. Then apt update. If there's no microsoft file there, then it's already been done.

 

Not sure why it's taking 30 minutes to run apt update??? There is an Armbian repository that's usually slow, but it's I've never experienced it being that slow.

 

If you really want an OS created by those who are more trustworthy, I would recommend Debian over Ubuntu. In Debian, firefox works without issue. Although the Armbian firefox hijacks your home page to keep returning to Armbian's site, despite your settings. There's a settings file somewhere that they modified to do that, you can delete their modification to stop that. I'm not sure which file it is though. I looked it up once, but never kept the info. But Ubuntu does seem to run better, and it has many more software options in its repositories, but those extras tend to be closed-source. But in Debian, there are a couple of software GUIs you can used to install snaps and flatpacks if you want to. Apparently snaps are maintained by Cannonical (Ubuntu) and tend to be closed, whereas flatpacks are openly-maintained and are apparently more efficient - though I don't have much experience with either. I prefer straight debian (.deb) packages when available.
 

[Werner]

9 hours ago, The Tall Man said:

Not sure why it's taking 30 minutes to run apt update???

Never had an issue like that. However we also have mirrors in Asia or RU/UA where politics might interfere with bandwidth. So perhaps you hit one of those? Or you simply hit a mirror which was under heavy load at this time.

[torz77]

22 hours ago, keith said:

I would like Firefox, but so far, haven't found it.

Firefox is called firefox-esr in Debian (Extended Support Release)

 

[keith]

Hi, Werner and Tallman. 

The slow update did seem a bit odd to me - its why I mentioned my good network connection. I'll try again later and see what happens. I am in eastern europe, and we don't normally get this kind of problem. I used to have a network connection of only 6 Mbit/s until about a year ago, and even that worked OK at the time. (948 Mbit/s as we have now is great). Normally my Linux Mint apt-update is usually less than a minute. 

 

Tallman:- we seem to have common likes and dislikes!. First, Firefox is definitely not installed on my Armbian, so I'll have a look at trying to install it later.

Like you, I also dislike Snap and Flatpak packages. My first experience with a computer was back in the early 1960's with a Honeywell 803 - it had 1K x 18bit word magnetic memory, so any program written to run on it (usually Algol 63 - more or less machine code) had to be *tiny*. A colleague wrote a successful program to play whist on it - it rather makes the bloat associated with snap/flatpak packages look very silly to someone like me. My programming experience ended some years ago for various reasons, but I am firmly convinced that modern machines could be far faster and more efficient than they are if modern programmers had to use much less memory. We had to be very careful how we used space, and spent time optimizing anything we wrote. (actually not written - it was mostly hand-punched paper tape. (whats a keyboard)?  I believe if modern programmers had to do this, we would not hear so much about the insecurity of software/networks - and I won't even go into how much companies like Microsoft appear to contribute to this bloat.

I would have thought that an OS should contain all the elements (dependency files) necessary to run any software compatible with the hardware, so therefore it should only be necessary to install 'system' packages, instead of snap/flatpak with all the attendant dependencies (bloat).

- Sorry - rant over.

Finally, another question, which is driving me nuts. While I was playing with Armbian, I accidentally dragged the LibreOffice Write icon over the Armbian Config Icon, and got a new 'unnamed icon'  folder - and I can find no way to get rid of it. I assumed this created a similarly named folder somewhere, so all I had to do was delete it but extensive file searching hasn't traced it so far - any pointers please?

Thanks again,  Keith

 

Edit: thanks for that Torz77 - should be able to find it, I guess.

Edited yesterday at 04:01 PM by keith
Posts crossed - information acknowledged.

[The Tall Man]

With the errant icon, yeah that kind of thing can be really frustrating with linux design. I'm not that deeply familiar with it. Usually when I experience something like that, I look it up in a search engine. What I can say is that many settings are stored in hidden directories under the user home folder. Hidden files start with a period. Go to your home directory:

ls -la

...but which one to explore and what to look for... You'll probably find what you're looking for with a search engine.

 

And on your rant, yes I've sensed our views of the computing world to be similar as well. Punching holes in cards - yes! You really would have to think and get it right the first time. And it's not so hard to do. You set the standard, practice it and make it a habit.

 

My second computer was a Commodore 64, back in the early-mid '80s. I played lots of games on there. Even though I'd started programming in BASIC before that, I learned more to program on that computer, in BASIC, and in assembly language. I experienced from others' software and what I could do on my own, to be resourceful, and that creating software that is highly functional and can do "a lot" really doesn't require much more than a tiny program. There's no excuse for complicated software. Also others and myself created it right the first time without any "patches" or "software updates" BS - once it was done, it was done right! I almost never encountered bugs from others' software on my C64. I think there was one game than had bugs in it - that's it, it was an outlier. But that computer, you'd turn it on and get the prompt within maybe 200ms. There was no "boot up" BS. And its user interface is always immediately responsive. It was never sluggish.

My first experience with the extremeness of bloating was with my first x86 PC around 1991 i think. It ran MS-DOS 5.0, which took up around 7 or 8 MB as I recall, on the hard drive  (or was that Windows 3.1?). And to create an assembly language program that was just a "hello world", an executable .com of that would be around 30 bytes or so, but an executable .exe was enormously sized - just from the file format overhead, so that 99.9% of the file was .exe format overhead junk! And for today's operating systems and their functionality, there really is no excuse why the total size of the complete operating system on the hard drive should exceed a megabyte (or half that), let alone several gigabytes.

 

The bloating of today is so far beyond reason it's way off in another galaxy. A minimum of 10,000 to 1. So much software today is based on scripting languages and run-time interpreters. Plus the linux operating system was originally designed back in the 1960s!!! ...as unix, before it was ported to personal computers as linux. Apparently, they've got layer upon layer upon layer of patches and changes and different ideas and outdated models all enmeshed  in a galactic-sized mess.

 

I've also seen how the MB, GB, and TB have been hijacked by a crooked industry which has redefined those terms to be powers of 1000 rather than the truth that they're powers of 1024. Even with that, the amount delivered on memory and storage devices, in may cases, falls short even of that crooked re-definition. Now an actual GB or MB is called "GiB" or "MiB", while what is often now called a MB or GB is a bold-faced lie!

 

What the computer hardware and OS development needs is to throw away the existing model and create a new one from scratch. As a software engineer, I have done that numerous times on my own projects, and the result is always a spectacular improvement because I can apply what I learned from the previous iteration in developing the new foundation. And that's always a simple, creative and enjoyable process. It does take a some time to do, but the results are more than worth it, and the resulting accelerated pace of development later more than makes up for it.

 

The Orange PI 5 Plus is my first ARM board. What I'm more looking forward to though is getting into RISC-V. I'm not to familiar with it yet, but It's completely open and apparently values simplicity. That might be a really great development environment for something genuinely new.

Edited 2 hours ago by The Tall Man

[keith]

Hi, TallMan,

...And here was me thinking I was all alone with my disillusionment of the way software has developed!

 

I have to agree with most of your sentiments, with one exception. I have been a long time user of Linux (I stress user, as opposed to developer). This came about because more years ago than I care to remember, I worked for two major German companies on development of what was then known as Point-to-Multipoint communications, which later became the foundation for modern mobile phone network backbone communications. As part of this work, we had to carry out network planning for what are now the major phone network operators. Basically this consisted of predicting whether links would work under varying conditions (this was at frequencies up to 20 GHz). 

The tools we had to do this were the usual company Microsoft computer setups, satellite photographs of the area (in digital format), and a software tool written in Unix which used this data to predict lines of communication in 3 dimensions. This was my first experience of Unix, and it became a bit of a life-changer. Those of us who had to learn our way round it (as users), eventually all realised very quickly how much better/faster/more reliable it was than anything from anyone else, especially Microsoft.

 

Of course, getting Unix for personal use at the time was not really on, but eventually Linus Torvalds produced Linux, and I for one never looked back. I'm well aware that users of Linux are regarded as nerds, and I'm happy with that, even if I try not to be one! As I got older, I eventually began to lose my interest in programming (another story!), but I am still a Linux user, and always will be. Its true it has its problems - but then all OS's have problems. In my opinion, sadly, these problems are not really the software as such - its almost always down to lack of information, or the proliferation of false and misleading information - after all, until recent years, developers set out with good intentions.  Perhaps I can draw a parallel with my experiences in this thread using Armbian - While information and help does exist (Armbian documentation, for example), it is limited, and by no means comprehensive. It seems to be very difficult to make people understand that an OS is a tool, and should be usable, just like a screwdriver or a hammer, yet all too often the information to make productive use of the OS is simply not available. Instead, people like me rely on the good offices of people such as yourself - yet where would we be if the Internet didn't exist?.

 

I do agree with you that even Linux is becoming 'overburdened' - but to some extent, that is one of its virtues - I have been able to make ancient computers run using Linux - Windows can't even make the transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 unless the user buys a new machine. At least Linux has never declared good equipment obsolete, like Microsoft. 

 

It is easy for me to see a very close similarity between Armbian and Linux - I know this is intended, because of the Debian connection, so for people like me thats no bad thing. I can also see the attraction of RISC-V (probably too late for me to take it up), but one can hope these develop in a more organised, less monetised way than some OS's.

 

Great to hear about the Commodore - a classic!. I still have my very first personal computers - a Sinclair Z80, which still works, although its keyboard has troubles. I got it around 1981, and it was one of the early self-assembly versions without a case. No-one was more surprised than me when the thing worked. Maybe I'll find another keyboard for it - I also have books giving its full ROM listing, and a circuit diagram, and 'advanced' programming - or BASIC in other words. Then I moved on to an Oric Atmos, produced in 1984 by Tangerine Computers (Shades of Orange!). It was a 'real' computer, with a proper keyboard, and used a Rockwell 6502. I did a lot of machine code programming on it, and very quickly changed the processor to a 65C02, which has a better, expanded instruction set. (in ths days, the 650s was often cited as having the first Reduced Instruction Set). I also still have it in working condition, plus a full ROM listing/circuit, and books on programming it (machine code). The BASIC it used was also very good. Later machines included a Dragon, Atari520 and some forgotten (perhaps for the best)

.

Like you the OPi is my first ARM device (actually given to me by a friend). I was interested in a Raspberry PI 5 (I have an old RasPi3), but they were so hard to get and expensive, I gave up. (I think the friend gave up on the OPi, which was why I ended up with it)!

 

I also would have like to have seen most modern OS's lead to development of better systems, but I guess it won't happen in my lifetime, but at least I can support work on things like ARM and RISC-V. Incidentally, did you see that Qualcom won a case brought against them by ARM because techniques developed by ARM were allegedly used by Qualcom in their mobile phone processors? - probably not a good thing for ARM.

 

And finally...I'm still stuck with this confounded stray icon on my Armbian installation, so another night searching for it.I 'm quite impressed otherwise - it seems very fast and efficient, (compared to my Ryzen7 Desktop machine) so I'll keep at it - It has most of the software on it that I need for now, so its definitely usable. I know about the hidden and system folders in Linux, and they are fairly easy to access in Linux Mint, but a search doesn't throw it up (yet) - I'll keep trying.

Thanks for the Help,   Keith 

[The Tall Man]

It sounds like you're much more familiar with Linux than I am... especially on a deep level. It does have its strengths. I am grateful that it's a working alternative to anything from Microsoft or Apple.

 

But I'm a firm believer that whether hardware or software (or any kind of design), simpler is better. Complication only arises from lack of clarity and understanding. One of the hallmarks of a good operating system is to provide complete support and essentially get itself out of the way - to make the computer an immediately usable tool for what you intend to use it for.... to be a clear conduit for that intention.

 

Edited 1 hour ago by The Tall Man