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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 While this laptop might seem old and out-of-date now, it is small and light.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.""
Well, yes, Win98 runs on old hardware, but I'll wager any attempt to run Win98, on say, a Pentium Classic 233 with 128mb of RAM as a firewall for a network of about twenty machines, or as a Postfix mail proxy filtering out distributed dictionary attacks that count in the hundreds of thousands a day, would end in madness. However, I have two old machines in that power range doing these things right now, one running Slackware 10 and one which I'm experimenting with Ubuntu.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As long as you've got harddrive space, most older distro's work fine on hardware down to 100mhz. I've got a number of 300mhz boxes running Red Hat 7.3, and they do fine as firewalls and low end FTP servers. Got an old BSD box running named that I don't even know the stats on, and I'm afraid to reboot it, for fear it'll never come back up.
Fedora Core IV was the first distro that wouldn't run on my old PIII 700, so it got refurbed and passed off as a firewall to a friend of mine running FCII with no gui. I could have recompiled the kernel to support the old coppermine architecture, but it was worth the 120.00 dollars to me to upgrade to a much faster AMD processor.
I'm all in favor of keeping the older boxes running and useful, but after a point you have to consider diminishing returns. Recompiling a kernel (and then recompiling it again to put in the junk I forgot the first time) on my home network would have taken more of my life than I was willing to spend on a hopelessly obsolecent box.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I like it too, but each has its place.
Puppy is designed to be small, attractive and usable. A normal person might chafe slightly at not having his favorite application represented, but most day to day things will be adequately supported.
DSL is designd to be small as possible, no trade-offs or nods towards sanity at all. A normal person will want to gouge his eyeballs out with a ball point pen after using it for any length of time.
I'd say if you can run Puppy rather than DSL, do it. But DSL serves an important purpose when even Puppy is too big.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
My #2 everyday machine is a lowly P233/128mb RAM; it has Win95 and an assload of large apps (Corel Office 8, CorelDraw 8, Photoshop 5.5, assorted internet apps, etc.) It runs well even with heavy multitasking, works fine for everything expected of it, and *never* crashes. You couldn't pry this machine outta my hands with a crowbar. :) -- At one time it had RH6 on it, and KDE was usable (tho sluggish) but Gnome was like watching paint dry :(
The oldest machine here that still has a Real Job is a P120/64mb/Win95 in a luggable case, mainly used to leech off a friend's cable modem. It's perfectly competent for that simple task.
I've just rehabbed a stack of P150/32mb/Win95 boxen, to give to a teacher who has no funds for PCs in her classrooms. They're good enough for the simple apps she uses there.
There's no reason one HAS to install the latest and greatest on every machine. Let old systems run the stuff that was current in their day (whether Windows, linux, or whatever), and remain both useful and performing adequately to their tasks. Every job doesn't need a P4-3GHz screamer.
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!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?