I have a 2008 HP-2133 laptop machine running 32-bit Ubuntu 16.04. The machine has been running satisfactorily for several years, the only chronic glitch being a loss of speaker sound sometime after the 16.04 installation. Also, Unity no longer ran and I have been running Xfce. I have delayed upgrading to 18.04 because I have always had difficulties with OS upgrades as support for my hardware dwindled. Of course, 16.04 reached end of life in April 2021, meaning no further support for that version....

BACKGROUND:

A few days ago (04/05/21), my AT&T email account, which I access through Thunderbird 78.9.0 (64-bit), stopped downloading emails. Thunderbird showed a message box with the message

"Sending of password for user ******@att.net did not succeed. Mail server inbound.att.net responded: Server error - Please try again later."

After many tries with no change in 24 hours, I recalled a vaguely similar situation last November on our iMac...

This blog entry refers to Debian 10.3 and Xfce 4.12 on a desktop machine.

On a whim, I decided to reset my default browser from Chromium (Version 80.0.3987.132) to Firefox (version 68.6.0esr). Shortly thereafter, I decided to go back to Chromium and reset the default at Xfce menu item

Then I clicked on a link in a daily email in Thunderbird for my local newspaper. The link opened...

This post is a summary of two anomalous results from upgrading to Debian 10 on my primary desktop computer Pogo2011. The machine was purchased new from Pogo Linux in 2011 with Ubuntu 11.04 pre-installed. It is now set up for dual booting from either Ubuntu or Debian, each OS booting from a separate hard drive and each with its own Grub installation. Prior to the Debian 10 upgrade, the OS was Debian 9.11. At the end of this post is a machine hardware summary.

I spent considerable time...

Background:

I have a 2008 HP 2133 Mini-note PC laptop running Ubuntu 14.04.5 with the Gnome Flashback desktop environment. A hardware summary is given below. In normal useage, I run the machine with an external display, external keyboard, and external mouse via a Netgear GCS1724 KVM switch.

I have been delaying the upgrade to 16.04 because of previous upgrade difficulties and because of the age of the machine (~11 years). The upgrade software for 14.04 would not run...