So, like I needed any more projects or any more computers, but I bought a receipt printer and two POS terminals. Both are Celeron J1900 I think at 3Ghz, 128G hard drive and I’m not sure of the memory. All that cost me a whopping $45, so how could I resist? Right now we’ve got the POSBANK unit working, you can see me updating LMDE 6 on it, and the touch screen does work fine. That was something that worried me and led to me originally trying unsuccessfully to get Endeavour on it, I figured the vast Arch repository would surely have drivers, but that didn’t work, so I went with LMDE. Originally the Bank wouldn’t boot from USB, so that led to a little bit of creativity to get it installed, but that worked. And then I realized that I’d installed LMDE 5, so I decided to re-install with 6…
And borked something. That’s when I figured out how to boot from USB, had to tweak something in the BIOS. It works fairly well except for an issue with GRUB I’ve never seen before, it not only doesn’t indicate what’s selected, it seems to refresh the screen every time I press one of the arrow keys. Well, it all works now aside from some minor ACPI errors on boot, weird ones, but it works, so I’ll prolly use it for a few days to see how well it works in basic use, and decide after that what I want to do with it.
Weirdly the other unit, a POSIFLEX doesn’t work, while it was my installing unit originally as it happily booted from a USB stick, it’s failing with an error that there’s no operating system once installed. I don’t think GRUB is launching, but I’m not sure why, and it has an odd and very simplistic BIOS, fixing it may mean finding how to launch the real BIOS. One of these units will likely wind up taking over running my laser engraver, while the computer I have on that is better specced, there’s something wrong with it and always has been, so might as well replace it.
Lastly the printer… Not sure what to do with this, any suggestions?
EDIT Wound up with a block of text, put a couple extra lines in to break it up
The POSIFLEX issue might have to do with MBR. On your final linux installation, your partition table should NOT be using gpt but mbr and that might solve the issues.
It has to do with older BIOS not recognising gpt and henceforth being unable to boot from the disk.
N.B. you might have to configure your GRUB/systemd loader accordingly.
I sorta understood that, but nothing research can’t answer. I know just enough extra about computers to really bork things. 😜
Attached is a pic of the BIOS, and I think you can see what I mean about it not being the real BIOS
Lastly the printer… Not sure what to do with this, any suggestions?
Try to build an equivalent to the GameBoy Camera? It used receipt paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Camera#Functionality
You might have to search for a low-resolution black & white camera, though, to really make it work.
Anyway, that would be my dumb project for a receipt printer.
Hmmm, interesting idea, I’ll think about it, thanks.
Could you potentially not just use a regular camera and use software to squish the picture and make it b/w?
Usually I just take a screenshot, I have no idea why I did a photo this time.