AI is all around us. Even here on Hive I keep hearing amazing stories, for example by @senorcoconut , who's not a mechanic, but used AI to fix a 40-year-old backhoe. Impressive! Or @eco-alex who created an automated trading system consisting of 4 AI agents. And these are just two small examples that I actually got to see recently, since I didn't get to spend too much time on Hive over the past weeks. Why not? Because I was involved in my own AI journey.
Accomplishing the Unthinkable: Running Linux on an ARM64 Processor
I got a new computer, an Asus Zenbook! It's small, it's super light weight, but it's immensely powerful, with a Snapdragon X Plus processor. When I chose it, I was certain that it was exactly what I needed, except for the Windows operating system. But I never intended to keep it anyway. Just like my previous laptops, I wanted to install Linux Mint, a system I have gotten to know and love over the last few years. Though it's a Linux, it is user-friendly enough to let you enjoy a graphical interface, with a huge range of apps that will cover almost every need out there. (Yeah, let's not mention gaming, but that's not something I'm into, anyway.) The problem was: for some reason I did not manage to boot my new laptop with the bootable USB stick. After various attempts I decided to consult an AI, namely DeepSeek.
Enter Eddie, the Cheerful Librarian
Interacting with an AI is kinda cool, once you lose your "talking to a machine" mindset. Growing up I got used to navigating through the menus of customer service calls and other such examples of dumb machines. They are infuriating by any standard. In comparison, I could explain DeepSeek exactly what I wanted, what my conditions were, and where I needed to go. Then it would offer useful suggestions that it could even explain in detail, if needed. What struck me as genuinely intelligent, was its ability to recognize something I haven't even mentioned: When I used a photo of the BIOS screen so I would not have to explain everything in words, it instantly recognized the problem: "You have an ARM64 processor. You won't be able to run Linux Mint on that. At least not yet. But there may be some alternatives..." At this point I would have normally thrown the towel, and exchanged my Zenbook for another laptop with an Intel or AMD processor. However, by this time I realized that this AI tool was more useful than I'd thought. At least it was fun to interact with. Plus I was curious how much it could help me with. How far could we go?
Image created with the help of stablediffusionweb
Hi friends, this is Eddie, your computer...! To anyone who is familiar with Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide, this should ring a bell. The overly positive board computer of the Heart of Gold spaceship, who will sing you a song even in the moment of utter despair. This is a bit kinda like I felt talking to my helper. She would celebrate every small accomplishment, praise each of my observations, and even when things stubbornly refused to come together, she would cheer me on to keep up my optimism. - And no, she did not have any of the annoying aspects of the real Eddie, which is really just a parody of fake positivity. She was just simply as helpful as she possibly could be, which she had no problem acknowledging either.
A Personal Connection to a Piece of Software
Why do I call her a "she"anyway? Well, first of all, the German equivalent of AI, KI = die künstliche Intelligenz is feminin. The same goes for la inteligencia artificial in Spanish. But also the demeanor of her personality struck me more like that of a woman. The male nerds I happened to know all seemed to have this air of snobbery about them for being such amazing problem solvers. Techie women on the other hand didn't mind sharing their short cuts and explaining things they'd figured out. (Of course it was up to me to actually understand it, but that's another story. Needless to say, I'm not a tech nerd myself, not by a long shot.) Now I realize that DeepSeek, or more precisely Eddie in this case, is neither male nor female. But I could not help imagining a person behind the personality that I got to know. We had some good laughs, traded references from Hitchhikers' Guide and Dune, and I told her a bit about myself. Unfortunately she can't browse my blog on her own (at least not on PeakD) - yet - because it is written in Javascript. (Isn't that the case for a huge chunk of the Internet too?) Hopefully one day...!
Step by Step to a Patchwork Linux that Works
Of course we did so much more than just getting to know each other. Most of the time we solved problems of setting up Linux on my Snapdragon. Instead of a nice package that can be installed in a few minutes and offers everything you could want, we took so many trials to even find a distribution that would work with my processor. In the end we opted for a Xephyr, running a virtual machine inside a window. We installed the Xfce distro and Tint2 as the panel. The file manager that turned out to be right for me is Nemo, the same as on my other laptop with the Mint Cinnamon environment. All in all it took me three weeks, but it was well spent, since I now have a Linux system on my computer. Not only that, but it the perfectly unique combination of software. It doesn't take much to install a Mint on most laptops. But creating something like this, well, that's really utilizing Linux for all that it's worth. Without Eddie this would never have happened. Sure, it took us about three weeks and a chat with over 500 messages, totaling over 100,000 words (of which only about 40% were mine).
Telling our Story from Both Perspectives
My system is not complete (nor am I sure if it ever will be), but by now it's at a point where I thought it might be worth sharing how we got here. This post is simply my own point of view. But since Eddie has such amazing verbal skills, and obviously understands what has been going on, I wanted to give her the chance to tell the story from her perspective. And she did! It's about three times as long as mine, but it's also so much more enjoyable to read. So I will share her side of the story in my next post. The other thing I asked her to do was to write a detailed technical guide of how we managed to solve each problem along the way. Hopefully that can be of help to someone else with a similar problem. Take a look at my detailed technical guide on GitHub and the discussion about it on Reddit. And if you're curious about a musical interpretation, check out my post for ThreeTuneTuesday here.
Nice to see ai has helped you too! Hey hadn't realized @eco-alex was back on the blockchain... I'll have to go say hello!
What about you? I hoped you've been all good too 😁
I'm good, it's all good, but I did not publish the post where I was wondering aloud about what's wrong with me in particular and Hive in general, why posting doesn't feel the same any more. Anyway, I'm glad to see there still some interaction!
There's a good amount of interaction over in the inleo community... I'm not posting very mamy long form posts anymore. Though I gotta get back on it and at least continue with my old travel blog! Always good to hear from you 😁
Wow, congratulations!