Taking an old iMac to Ubuntu 26.04LTS

 Mid last year, I converted J's old iMac to Ubuntu, and made a useful machine out of it, so much so that I now use it for a bit of my recreational photographing of old coins and postcards. (Actually, I'm not sure that recreational is the right word, sure, I do it for fun, but then I also apply what I learn and discover to more serious documentation projects.)

Anyway, it's been damn useful, so now that the new long term support version of Ubuntu - 26.04 - is available, I thought I'd upgrade it.

I can't tell you how long it took as I left it going overnight (I've spent too much of my life watching things upload, download and install to have the need to watch the process happen - these days I tend to think that if it breaks I'll get a screen full of error messages...)

Well, I didn't get a screen full of error messages, and when I tested it this morning everything seemed to work just fine

everything that is except jrnl which I use to keep a log of when I make configuration changes to the machine.

It didn't want to play but reinstalling it with pipx install jrnl --force seemed to fix things.

Havn't tried it for serious work yet, but I did do a little perspective correction on an image with darktable (perhaps one of the more pernickety of the apps I use) and seemed absolutely fine ...

[Update 16/10/2026]

Spoke a little too soon, yesterday, when I was photographing an Edward VII quarter anna,  and following my standard workflow, I found that when I tried to use the montage command out of ImageMagick, the install was broken. However after a re install of ImageMagick, everything worked as expected ...

A workflow for photographing coins and old postcards...

 Since I acquired the little 3D printed phone stand for photographing coins and other small objects such as postcards, I’ve developed a little workflow for myself, based around my Android phone and a Linux based computer, in this case an old iMac running the current release of Ubuntu.

Nothing in it is particularly remarkable, but I thought I’d document it in a blog post just in case someone else finds it useful

•         Photograph the object using phone and stand

•         Download image(s) from Google Photos to computer

•         Create a set of directories (1 per object) with human readable names

•         Move images into directories

•         Use Gwenview to rotate and crop images as appropriate

•         Use Darktable to carry out any perspective correction required

•         Use the montage command from  imagemagick to produce composite images as required eg front/back, obverse/reverse

•         Use Gwenview to crop composite images if required

•         Create small markdown file describing contents of the directory

•         Upload the directory to OneDrive using ‘folder upload’ option for longer term storage

 

As I said, there is nothing super clever in this however, it’s a fairly effective and repeatable procedure. I’d like to emphasise the use of human readable filenames, doing so ensures that it’s easy to find and reuse the images down the track

Using the Xubuntu Yoga 11e

 I've always been a strong believer in eating my own dog food, ie if I blog about a machine or a bit of software, I damn well use it.

Over the past week or so I've been using the now Xubuntu based Yoga 11e for research and blogging.

 I've basically been using the same methodology based around Notable that I developed for family history research, ie collect notes together in a set of notes, sometimes with images attached (although I mostly save any images and downloads in a sub directory in my work in progress directory), and then use Libre Office to produce either a summary or a blog post and so on.

Sometimes, I've used a tablet to look something up and then write myself a summary using Notable, but that's really no different from writing notes in a notebook, except that it's easier to restructure your notes. Using a paper notebook I tend to find I end up with extra post it notes stuck to the notebook pages. 

As a process, it works quite well, with everything local until I decide to upload it somewhere cloudy for long term storage, and like the distraction free machine, it's AI free.

Ergonomically, it's a little heavier and bulkier than the distraction free machine, but still of a size to use comfortably on one's knees if needs be.

I'm not really using it for anything computational, and performance has been fine browsing, using Notable, or writing using Libre Office.

I do have Thunderbird installed as  a mail client, but I don't start it by default, and I don't have any other processes running in the background. 

I'm actually quite pleased with the outcome, and the machine is of a size that it can be used easily in a public library, and battery life is good enough to avoid the continual search for a table next to a power socket.

I actually find that it's more pleasant to use than the Windows 11 based Acer Travelmate I use for cataloguing, even though the Travelmate is a more recent machine...

Victorian tin hat boxes and AI

 Just over two years ago I asked Gemini and Co Pilot to write me an article on Victorian tin hat boxes.

At the time I'd documented two or three nineteenth century metal hat boxes as part of the Lake View documentation project, and had acquired a temporary and probably superficial expertise through looking at museum websites and antique traders online catalogues. However, the topic did strike me as obscure enough to be a reasonable test of both tools and their ability to handle more specialist queries.

Back in 2024, the results were mixed to say the least, and showed that whatever the strength of the algorithms, the underlying data set wasn't great as regards tin hat boxes.

So, today I retried the same experiment, and here are the opening paragraphs of the two responses

Co Pilot

Victorian tin hat boxes are antique metal containers, typically dating from the 19th century, designed to protect top hats and other formal headwear during travel or storage. They were commonly made from tinplate or toleware (painted tin) and often featured carrying handles, hinged lids, and decorative painted finishes.

Gemini

Victorian tin hat boxes are highly sought-after 19th-century antiques that were originally designed to protect valuable headwear, such as top hats and elaborate bonnets, during railway and steamship travel. Typically made of sheet metal or iron, these sturdy containers are celebrated today for their distinct oval or round shapes, hand-riveted construction, and beautiful aged patina. Many authentic pieces from this era featured japanned black or painted exteriors, warm reddish-brown or contrasting light-coloured interiors, robust brass hardware, and lockable latches

While both articles go on to discuss their collectability as antiques and possible use in interior design we can see that both Gemini and Co Pilot now produce sensible responses  on the historic context and principal features, including mentioning toleware (Co pilot) and the use of japanning (Gemini) - toleware being the American term, and japanning being the British term for essentially the same technique, and both engines provided links to sources, with Gemini in particular citing eHive.

While you still clearly need to verify sources, I'm quite impressed by the improvement in the responses...

Xubuntu on a Yoga 11e

 

Way back in 2019, I bought myself a second hand Thinkpad Yoga 11e, with half a thought of using it as a smaller, lighter computer to take travelling, perhaps even on our planned trip to South Africa.

Well, as we all know, the pandemic happened and no one went travelling anywhere for a couple of years.

For most of that time the Yoga sat on my spare desk as a less bulky machine to take down to the lounge room to write a long or complex email, or indeed to take with me on one of these gaps between lockdowns.

By the time the pandemic eased I’d acquired a newer lighter Lenovo Ideapad as a computer to take travelling, and the Yoga moved out to my desk in the outside studio where it sat on the far corner of my desk, for those times I needed to use a Windows 10 machine.

Well, I looked at it this morning and thought I’m not really using it, perhaps it should go to the recycler, but then the screen’s good, and the keyboard’s nice to type on, maybe I should try Xubuntu on it - with 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD and a comparatively slow processor, full Ubuntu might have been a stretch.

So I booted it off the USB I wrote to put Xubuntu on my 2013vintage T440 Thinkpad, and hey presto, forty minutes later I had a working Xubuntu machine.

 

 

Battery life’s good as well, and while I still need to install a few extra utilities, but I think I’ve ended up with an extra basic machine for library research sessions and so on ...

Xubuntu on an i5 based Thinkpad

 

I had an old Thinkpad running Windows 10 (and I do mean old - it's a 2013 vintage T440) that I used for the latter half of the Dow's project cataloguing, and for cataloguing the contents of Lake View.

I even used it for some of my work up at the Athenaeum before I changed over to using a Windows 11 based Acer Spin for my cataloguing work.

Since then it's basically just sat on my desk in the outside studio, so yesterday I decided to install Xubuntu on it.

Why Xubuntu and not full Ubuntu?

Well, Ubuntu's quite a big beast these days and given that the machine only had a 128GB SSD and 4MB of RAM, I thought a lighter weight distro might be a better choice, and anyway, I havn't played with Xubuntu for a few years. 

In fact not seriously since the 2000's when, for a couple of years I used it on an old PPC based iMac, although I did use it on and off as a lighter weight alternative to Ubuntu, before switching almost exclusively to Crunchbang as a preferred lightweight distro sometime around 2020.

So, download the image. Only available as a torrent but I did have µtorrent installed, so that wasn't an issue, just a little tedious.

I then ran Rufus to make myself an install USB.

As always I chose to write it using dd format rather than Rufus's default hybrid iso format, as over the years I've found that the dd format USB's boot and install more reliably.

Well not this time.

After it booted from the USB it sat there saying GRUB with a blinking cursor.

Basically it didn't work.

Googling produced all sorts of absurdly technical suggestions that I was not going to pursue, so I wiped the USB using diskpart and rewrote it using Rufus's hybrid ISO default.

This time it booted into the live environment and allowed me to install Xubuntu from there.

Once installed it rebooted cleanly.

I'm going to guess that the firmware had some strange mismatch with the bootable dd format USB but I don't really know.

I'm putting this down to experience. 

As I said, I've had trouble with hybrid format volumes not booting and always used to go for dd as the more reliable choice, but I've learned now to always try the hybrid volume if the other one fails...

Distraction free writing

 Back in August last year, I took an old Chromebook which had turned out not to be as useful as I hoped and installed Crunchbang++ Linux on it.

Inadvertantly, I seem to have made myself a distraction free writing machine.

Why? How?

Well, when it starts up there are no background programs running. No mail client, no virus checker, nothing. That and a very sparse interface - the OpenBox window manager in its default configuration reminds me of one of these eighties hacker games, where you started with a blank screen and had to guess the correct magic sequence of keys to get it to do anything.

So, want a text editor to knock out some dot points?

Right click and select 'text editor'. Being venerable, and having started before wysiwyg screen displays happened, I'm comfortable with markup and happily knock out dot pointers with Markdown style markup.

(if you prefer something a bit more wysiwyg focuswriter works well

giving you a distraction free editing experience and can produce .odt and .docx files as well as plain text if required)

If you want something a little less minimalist to produce a document with a bit of inline formatting I use Abiword - not the best or greatest word processor on the planet, but good enough for drafting a document, a blog post of whatever, and with the great benefit of being able to reliably save files as either .odt or .docx.

All these applications are small and light, and don't need an internet connection to work - offline working is fine. 

And needless to say, this solution is AI free, and the data stays in local storage until you actually decide to save it to some online storage solution.

That said, these days it's useless to pretend the internet doesn't exist, so I have firefox installed to let me check wikipedia etc, and having firefox installed means it's easy to upload the draft to somewhere cloudy, from where I usually finish it off on an Ubutu or Windows based device as appropriate.

The other reason it has turned out to be useful, is that the machine itself is small and light, but despite that, having been built for classroom use it's robustly made, and has a decent screen and a keyboard that's easy and comfortable to type on

even on your knees - not the most ergonomic way of working, but unlike using a bulkier or heavier device it's perfectly usable, even if cramped in a bus.

There's nothing special here, it's just a combination of form factor and operating environment, and as such, it's a recipe, not a design.

Any smaller laptop will do, for example a Lenovo Ideapad 1, or similar. If you're going to try going down this path, be aware that some older laptops, for example Dell Latitudes, can be a bit bulkier and heavier, and really need to be used on a desk or a fold out table on a train or bus.

And of course, the operating environment is important. The minimalism of the default setup of the OpenBox window manager means that it's distraction free out of the box...