Reflecting
"Time waits for no one", or so I'm told. And this is a significant factor in my recent work with the "Straight" Debian 9.
I rely on Oracle/VirtualBox to support certain apps that I have to run in Windows: TurboTax, Epson V500/V700 scanners, Photoshop/Elements, Canon DPP
LMDE/2 is Jessie related. Last time I tried to apply the update to OracleBox it rejected: wrong version. On checking: the downloaded update was for Stretch. Not applicable to the Jessie based OS
no activity on the MINT board.
This is when I downloaded the Debian 9.30+non-free option and updated my "Straight" Debian system. This all went rather well and I continued working with it. Yesterday I completed the update to the Oracle/VirtualBox package. As usual, I forgot to add myself to Vboxusers and couldn't connect a USB device (Epson V500) until I rectified my Error of Omission. And, of course, install the Epson driver package. Packages, actually, for the V500 and V700 scanners and also the WF-4630 printer. Epson is good about providing Linux drivers. What's that command we are supposed to issue after installing a driver ? CRS. I just re-booted the box; after that the Linux scanner software kicked in and then when I got myself added to vboxusers the Windows Epson Scanner package connected.
The Epson scanner package is necessary if you want to scan negs. or slides. Just plain flat-bed scanning doesn't work when the source is transparencies.
after this little run I went back and switched the default drive in the MoBo boot options list.
I'm a Debian 9 user now.
Elsewhere I see some posts fussing over teething troubles with the new RYZEN chips and related MoBo chipsets. Looks to me like these systems are really needing kernel 4.14 or better.
By this time next year I hope to be putting Debian 10 on the Research box and moving on to kernel 4.14. At some point we will all want to move on to the next generation of chips. We need to put the troubles with speculative execution behind us. While we're at it we need a little added transparency: we need to be able to read the status of the "Management Engine" -- and apply control to same. Hopefully that's "in the cards" for us, too.