Well computer no.4 is not going to be “ministrypc”, it is going to be a computer for displaying pictures on with the maps project. I just decided this is the best way to do things, because its screen resolution of 1600×900 is higher than mediapc. But also, because I want to keep mediapc just for music playback and stuff and have a computer that does work just for the mapping specifically.
It had Buster running on it but I have had a few problems with this alpha release so last evening I rolled out Stretch 9.5 onto it because I couldn’t get Synaptics Package Manager to run and some other updates wouldn’t install. The other thing I am doing with it is testing other desktop environments because, although XFCE has been pretty good, I am just keeping my options open as their development seems to be slow. XFCE version 4 was released way way way back in 2003 and they don’t seem to have any ambition to move to a version 5 any time soon. There is a 4.14 coming out soon but 15 years is an awfully long time to have software that hasn’t had a major new release.
I am deciding to evaluate KDE on it even though this has a resource hog kind of reputation. The latest version of KDE Plasma (5.13) is being optimised to make it much leaner than previous releases, so it will be interesting to see how I get on with this.
For doing stuff that requires me to use the cellphone tethered, I already have another computer (bedroompc) that can do that and with x11vnc updates I can vnc to that computer quite easily and reliably when I need to do stuff like that and it doesn’t require the separate wireless bridge because that computer has built in wireless.