December 2012 – Page 2 – Richy's Random Ramblings

For just over the past year, I have been running Linux Mint 12 (“Lisa”) 64bit on my HP Pavilion dv7-6103ea laptop. The only problems I’ve had are the graphics drivers (installing and upgrading the drivers for the AMD Radeon 6545G2 card gives me a black screen and I have to somehow boot Linx, remove the Catalyst drivers, reboot, try and install them and hope), the AVerMedia USB TV card not working at first (it’s working now and I don’t think I changed anything: although the remote doesn’t seem to work) and the fingerprint scanner not working.

Anyway – it’s time for me to upgrade my Operating System, but what to? The choices for the OS I have are:
* Stay on Linux Mint 12 and slowly get out of date and be disappointed that Steam (for Linux) and World of Warcraft (under Wine) won’t work. It’ll become obsolete in April 2013.
* Upgrade to the latest version of Linux Mint : 14 “Nadia” which only be supported until April 2014, but was only released in November 2012. Will require entire reinstall, but a new upgrade will be available in around April.
* Upgrade to the latest “long term support” version of Linux Mint: 13 “Maya” which will be supported until April 2017, but was released in July 2012. Will require entire reinstall, but a new upgrade will be available sometime before 2017.
* Switch to Linux Mint Debian edition which has “rolling updates” (so no need to reinstall on updates), however might not be so stable as the “Ubuntu based Mint”. Meant to be more responsive/faster, but less desktop ready. Will require entire reinstall, but just once.

But then I’ve also got the choice:
* Reinstall over the existing Linux Mint install – giving me “no way back”
* Make a new partition on either my “Linux hard drive” or “Windows hard drive” and put the new OS there
* Replace an existing hard drive with an SSD card (I’m currently using 83G of space on my Linux drive). A 128Gb card will cost £70+vat, 256Gb, £125+vat and 512Gb £253+vat.
* Get a new internal hard drive. For a straight-replacement of the 750Gb HD, it’ll be £65+vat

Any suggestions?

Full machine specification for the record

Want to know which of your Magento e-commerce shopping cart customers have ordered the most this year? Well, I’ve written the following SQL query to help:

SELECT SUM(sales_flat_order.base_total_invoiced) AS totalvalue,sales_flat_order.customer_firstname,sales_flat_order.customer_lastname,sales_flat_order.customer_email,sales_flat_order_address.street,sales_flat_order_address.city,sales_flat_order_address.region,sales_flat_order_address.postcode FROM sales_flat_order,sales_flat_order_address WHERE sales_flat_order.state='complete' AND sales_flat_order.created_at>'2012-01-01' AND sales_flat_order_address.entity_id=sales_flat_order.billing_address_id GROUP BY sales_flat_order.customer_email ORDER BY totalvalue DESC

Month: December 2012

Techy: Linux Mint: Where now?

Magento: Get customers ordered by order value