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Breathing Life Into Older Computers
Aron writes "ASE Labs has written an article on using a light distribution of Linux, Damn Small Linux, to power an older computer. With Linux, older computers can be useful once again for many people. From the article: "The oldest computer I have is a Pentium 266 MMX laptop with 64MB of RAM. Most people would just consider this to be garbage and junk it, and if you brought this in for service where I work, I would agree with you. While this laptop might seem old and out-of-date now, it is small and light. I needed something I could easily carry around, so I figured I would see what I could salvage out of this dinosaur. Windows would have a hard time running on this low-spec laptop, but there are many distributions of Linux that will work exceptionally well.""
Damn Small Linux would probably run just fine on it. I was running Linux on a 233 AMD, back in 99 or so, and it ran much nicer than my Celly 450.
If you need a windowing system, try fluxbox. Its use of tabs make it much more powerful than other equivalent WMs.
I don't see why this is such a big question. Hasn't it already been done to death here and elsewhere?
If nothing else, you could use it as an X terminal to a much more powerful machine. I have a 700mhz Vaio that I'm using for that purpose.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Why mess with junk?
One geek's junk is a layman's treasure.
My church could use a few PCs. My local teen center could as well. I don't have $5000 in my budget to purchase them 10 PCs, but I probably have 15 PCs worth of hardware that could run Firefox and a basic word processor just perfectly with Damn Small Linux or another distro.
It will run Win98 happily, or (with a bit of extra RAM, perhaps) any Linux distribution with the services turned off should be fine, if you use WindowMaker or Fluxbox. You don't need to mess with boutique Linuxes for something like this. (Personally, I'd just throw on Red Hat 5.2..)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I had a great system about 4 years ago with the Mandrake or Redhat du jour (I can't remember which) on a P133 w/ 64MB. With KDE it was impossibly slow, but it ran great with IceWM -- better than Win98, which was also installed. It was solid as a rock, too.
I tried the following :
Pentium-233mhz 64MB
Windows XP vs. RedHat7 Gnome
I was very dissapointed with the sluggish Linux performance. WindowsXP is actually more responsive. Stories like this one are very misleading. All of you who are declaring otherwise must have some sort of tweaks and tricks. I do not see it.
This would be great if there was considerable WiFi support for Linux. This is especially true for older laptops. It just seems like if you buy an off-the-shelf WiFi card you have a 90% chance of not getting it to work consistently if you own it. It's odd because you'll find thousands of posts about how if you had just bought the v.2.9 of that same card with a S/N ending in an even number you'd have a slew of driver options thanks to a guy named Sven in Sweden who's reversed engineered that card and posted his driver on the net under the Creative Commons License. Look, the only reason to have a laptop is portability. When I had my old Toshiba, Dell, and Thinkpad laptops (MMX266's and such) I ALWAYS had to give up either Wifi, decent Video, or sound. Seems you could pick any 2.
Let the responses regarding Sven's support for every WiFi card on earth (as long as it's Oronoco) follow!
but i think the problem is you're running win98, an undeniably out-dated operating system. if you run linux, everything is up-to-date and still being supported. even the 2.4 kernel is still maintained (which is what DSL uses i think). so there really isn't a comparison here.
At least in the laptop world, one problem is that many older laptops have low resolution screens. 640x480 is not comfortable anymore no matter what window manager you use.
> I have is a Pentium 266 MMX laptop with 64MB of RAM. ...
> Most people would just consider this to be garbage and
> junk it,
> Windows would have a hard time running on this low-spec
> laptop...
The only computers I own are both AMD K6-2 233Mhz machines
which run Windows 98. And do so pretty well. There are a
few web sites that load a tad slow(er) but still very
peppy. One thing I would recommend to anybody who is
developing software... Run your software on older machines
such as I have. It is a lot easier to spot bottle-necks
on an older and slower machine that on your 4Ghz box. I
have come across a number of packages where it is painfully
obvious where the bottle-necks in the code are simply
because my slower machine exposes them.
FYI, don't junk your older computer, donate it. Somebody
somewhere would love to have a 266Mhz with 64MB of RAM.
On a similar note, I've always wondered why some bright spark doesn't do a tiny linux distro that simply boots up X with bare networking and remote desktop services (like RDP, VNC, X, et cetera). With this in mind, you could get the distro down to a few megs.
More
I don't get this. I consider anything that is ATX based acceptable fast. I've mostly scrapped my AT based machines, as it's quite hard to find replacement components these days.
A P266, if I remember correctly, was never produced as an AT product. Thus, for my use, it's acceptable fast.
I do have to add that I've scrapped (or are scrapping) most of my older hardware. The only reason for that, though, is power consumption. I don't see why I should use a P100 when I can have a mini-itx machine with a hell of a lot more raw power -- using the same or less watts.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
I've been looking for exactly this for a while. I have looked at LTSP, but it uses PXE, which will not work for the machines I have (Gateway Touchpad).
I'm thinking of rolling my own system that boots remotely from lilo or something -- but I haven't found an elegant solution.
Hell, for years I did all my internet stuff on a 486... after all, a dialup machine doesn't need to be any faster than the modem!
I've found that's not really the case. Web pages have gotten compicated enough that and old CPU takes more time to render the page than the modem takes to bring in the data. My parents for several years had a 160MHz PowerPC 603ev Mac clone, and I could notice the difference on how much worse it was than any of the various laptop's I'd use when I was visitng, all via dialup: PowerBook 3400, 466MHz and 500MHz G3 iBooks, and a Celeron 900 running Win2k.
Incidentally, the machine is now my webserver running Gentoo.
End of Line.
LTSP does look pretty close to what I was talking about, it is a pity though that it won't work for your architecture. I'll have to read into their docs/wiki a little and see if it does what I'm hoping for. The Achilles heel of many projects that I've checked out is that they're very insecure: not only is the x-windows client/server communication unencrypted, but it requires a large number of ports left open on the client machines in some cases. Although I understand that a lot of people are going to use these on internal/dedicated subnets and behind firewalls, it just seems like a dangerous practice in general to build a system without regard to security these days. (Suppose you want to use one client wirelessly, and your wifi hub is located outside your firewall?) Hopefully LTSP isn't like that.
The OpenMosix system is something I was not aware of at all -- at least not in the way they're using it. (In short they're taking a thin-client/server combination and using it as a cluster, so that it "load balances" computationally across the various machines. Pretty slick, if it works.)
Anyway, thanks for the link.
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