cleaning up my mint messes

whbeebe1 Comment
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I’ve spent yesterday evening and today performing a clean installation of Linux Mint 22 and then moving my content over to it. I’ve been grumbling about abandoning Mint because of its atrocious update tool. I’d spoken about moving back to either Fedora (41) or Ubuntu (24.10). So I swapped a blank SSD into my system, downloaded an ISO of each distribution and installed them one by one onto my system to give them both a quick spin. They’re both excellent, but my personal preferences are still towards Linux Mint, regardless of its flaws. In the end I installed Mint 22 and I’ve been tuning it to my liking since late this morning.

Performing a clean install of any operating system allows you to start a-fresh with just the applications and setup you want. By the time I’d reached a point of operational parity with my older Mint installation, my SSD usage with Mint 22 was 10%, compared to 30% with Mint 21.3. And that Mint 22 usage includes all the tool and development folders I copied over from the older Mint system to new system. I don’t know where all the extra cruft came from on the older Mint 21 installation, except perhaps the applications I installed over the years left behind a lot of cache and configuration data when the application was uninstalled.

The newly installed system is performing much better than before. The desktop is snappier and it appears that running tasks finish faster as well. Desktop graphics, especially text, is clearer and cleaner. This is due in no small part to being based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and advances in the Cinnamon desktop, although the absolute latest Cinnamon desktop won’t show up until Mint 22.1 officially arrives with Cinnamon 6.4 in tow. It will be interesting to see if the next Mint release updates without any issues on my newish Mint system.

raspberry pi 2 risc-v cores and micropython

whbeebe

The photo above is a plugboard that contains a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 connected to an OLED display, an 8×16 LED Matrix Feather, and a four line by twenty column LCD backlit character display. The OLED display and the 8×16 LED Matrix Feather were purchased from Adafruit (links below), while the LCD character display came from a collection of parts given to me when their owner passed away back in 2023. Barely visible is a single white LED in the upper left corner. It has a long orange wire connecting it to pin 29 (GPIO22) on the Pico 2.

The highly simplified schematic only shows direct connections. Those direct connections are the LCD display and the single LED. There’s a STEMMA QT connector off to the very left which is used, with proper cabling, to electrically connect the OLED and 8×16 LED matrix feather to the Pico 2. I chose to go this route because it keeps the schematic simple and easy to put into a blog post.

Right now I have the RISC-V version of MicroPython 1.24.1 flashed onto the Pico 2. My code behaves exactly on the RISC-V cores as it does on the ARM Cortex M33 cores, which I find amazing. I’m working with the RISC-V cores because I don’t have a use case for using the M33 cores, especially their security features. I’m not quite the fan of ARM I used to be. If there’s any opportunity where I can use and support RISC-V-based devices then I will, and this is one of those opportunities.

Links