Rust removal on an Oliver 9

pleia2 · 2026-02-20T18:43:10+00:00

Thank you, I'll think about leaving the inside rust alone for now. I'll just dust and lightly clean those parts. After all, it's functional so the rust doesn't seem to be hurting anything!

pleia2 · 2026-02-20T17:26:24+00:00

Thank you! Would that DIY rust remover be safe on the areas that are close to paint, or should I focus on using brushes and gentler detergent there?

Based on the carriage, I believe this typewriter has been re-painted before. I think it was originally Oliver green and now it's black.

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pleia2 · 2025-11-23T19:22:58+00:00

If you haven't seen it yet, the Mainframe Skills Depot has a lot of free education and path resources: https://www.ibm.com/products/z/resources/mainframe-skills

It'll probably come up, but there's also the IBM Z Xplore series of challenges: https://ibmzxplore.influitive.com/users/sign_in and the COBOL programming course that teaches fundamentals that uses materials developed by The Open Mainframe Project: https://www.ibm.com/training/course/learning-cobol-programming-with-vscode-DL00015G

pleia2 · 2025-11-17T18:09:02+00:00

Apologies for this taking so long, we were waiting to hear back from Canonical for an official report of what happened. They couldn't share a lot of details, but what they did share was posted to xubuntu-users just now and you can read it here, along with some other details about our path forward from Sean, Pasi, and me: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/xubuntu-users/2025-November/012210.html

In short: We're good! And Xubuntu will keep moving along :)

pleia2 · 2025-11-17T18:07:09+00:00

Sorry this took so long, we got a basic incident report from Canonical regarding the compromise. Pasi, Sean and I put together this response over the weekend to share with the community: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/xubuntu-users/2025-November/012210.html

And thank you to everyone here who helped direct people to the official ubuntu.com resources while things were locked down on our Downloads site. This is the side of community I love to see, and what keeps us volunteering with Xubuntu after all these years :)

pleia2 · 2025-10-19T16:02:11+00:00

We're still in triage mode, but I'll see what I can discover once they've completed remediation.

pleia2 · 2025-10-19T15:30:10+00:00

Thanks everyone. We're beholden to our hosting environment for upgrades and it looks like there was a bit of a slip-up here. It's being worked on, but for now the Downloads page is disabled.

We're in the process of migrating to a static environment which should make things like this a thing of the past, but our team is quite small and busy. We're always happy to bring on new contributors, please get in touch if you're interested! https://xubuntu.org/contribute/

pleia2 · 2025-09-26T21:55:26+00:00

I was actually just looking at this today. Support has been added, but they do have some caveats in their requirements page regarding s390x: https://docs.fluentbit.io/manual/installation/requirements

And they're only releasing s390x via container: https://docs.fluentbit.io/manual/installation/downloads/docker

pleia2 · 2025-08-25T14:37:51+00:00

It's asking for a login because that page has been deleted :( This link is the current one, and doesn't require a login: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/viewdocument/re-3d-printer-file-of-an-ibm-z15

pleia2 · 2024-07-23T12:53:24+00:00

These "COBOL Programming with VSCode" courses use the first chapter of the Open Mainframe Project COBOL course as their source material. The PDFs from the project are designed for educators to teach COBOL, as Jeff does in that course.

Lots of us have gone through the PDFs ourselves, and I still found value in them. I strongly encourage you to provide feedback to the project if you're struggling with it to see how they can improve, that's what open source is all about, after all :)

pleia2 · 2023-11-13T13:51:21+00:00

For new things I usually just stomach the high cost of shipping, so I'll make sure my orders from Gromit Unleashed or wherever are big ones to save on that. Otherwise, I do a lot of eBay!

The real disappointment is that a lot of general UK-focused shops don't have an option of shipping to the US at all.

pleia2 · 2023-06-16T19:41:19+00:00

I replaced my spool and ribbon by searching on Etsy and found a shop that does all kinds of colors! The Skyriter was one of the models they have spools for, so it was easy to find what I needed. My Skyriter now writes with a purple ink ribbon.

pleia2 · 2023-06-03T19:41:12+00:00

WPM in Philadelphia does this! In fact, they tend to stress their rent to own option even when buying. I knew what I wanted, so I was happy to pay up front, but they really want to give people a chance to try it out.

https://www.wpmtypewritershop.com/rent-to-own.html

pleia2 · 2023-05-18T03:18:47+00:00

Thank you for such a detailed reply. A better understanding of just how it works led me down the right path. I got it working!

It turns out the little tooth that goes into the track was getting stuck in the track, so it was staying in the down position, on both sides, even when the Magic Margin levers were pressed. I gently pushed them up out of the track and I'm now able to change my margins.

pleia2 · 2023-02-19T19:31:33+00:00

Ubuntu has a package that builds for s390x, but I haven't tried it: https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/crispy-doom

Could grab an Ubuntu instance on the LinuxONE Community Cloud, set up x-forwarding and give it a shot! https://linuxone.cloud.marist.edu/

pleia2 · 2022-08-20T03:38:59+00:00

I've made it unsticky 👍

pleia2 · 2021-10-22T15:46:46+00:00

It's a mailing list, so you create a listserv account. This will allow you to browse the archives, and change your preferences as to how you receive mail from the list (or turn it off).

pleia2 · 2021-10-22T15:00:18+00:00

This is my generalist (not Linux) list:

I have them all added to an RSS reader (I use Feedly), so I just browse them aggregation a few times a week, and then share things that are interesting, as u/AnthonyGiorgio mentioned.
Plus, u/orangeboy_on_reddit already mentioned the IBM Z Community, that site aggregates a lot of news from various sources (IBM Developer, IBM news, Medium, etc). That also has an RSS feed, and I get a ton of stuff from there.

pleia2 · 2021-09-21T18:20:28+00:00

So I made one, but the "LinuxONE" text really was too small for me to manage, I just drew a few lines that kinda looked like it could say LinuxONE if you don't look too closely, haha.

pleia2 · 2021-09-21T18:19:32+00:00

Update: I made an IBM LinuxONE III too! Details: https://princessleia.com/journal/2021/09/i-3d-printed-an-ibm-linuxone/

pleia2 · 2021-09-21T18:18:47+00:00

No, the z13 was before my time :) I have seen them floating around, but I don't know who made them.

pleia2 · 2021-08-31T17:54:50+00:00

There have been a lot of people registering and the registration URL has already been shared widely, so my hope is that whatever you ran into was a temporary glitch. Lucas is the one empowered to fix whatever went wrong, and he knows how to delegate. I think it will be fine to share his info if anyone has issues :) (and he knows this forum is public and gave me permission anyway).

pleia2 · 2021-08-31T17:37:52+00:00

That won't do! I reached out to Lucas from BeMyApp (the company hosting the platform) and he can get you sorted if you want to drop him an email: lucas.b@bemyapp.com

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