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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 While this laptop might seem old and out-of-date now, it is small and light.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...
You're correct that native Linux support for WiFi NICs is limited, but fortunately, you don't need native support if the laptop is ix86. ndiswrapper will allow your Linux kernel to use a Windows driver for virtually any NIC you care to name. I use it myself for a card with a Broadcom chipset, works like a charm.