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Linux On Older Hardware
Joe Barr writes "Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier has put together a substantive report on how well Linux runs on older hardware. Are you surprised to learn that the belch of smoke and FUD out of Redmond on the topic last month isn't true? As Zonker shows, 'The bottom line: Linux is still quite suitable for older hardware. It might not turn your aging PC into a powerhouse, but it will extend its lifespan considerably.' NewsForge, like Slashdot, is part of OSTG."
Do us a favour: post the link to TFA at linux.com, not just the link to a single paragraph at "News"forge.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Windows 98, I've always felt, was a drastically underrated version of Windows. It was only a 200MB install, in comparison to the 500MB of Windows ME and gigabyte plus of Windows XP. And its workings, by comparison, were simple. For example, Windows 98 had the option to completely turn off the usage of the swap file until memory is filled. Doing so made the entire system run from memory, vastly speeding up the system. As far as I know this is impossible in Windows XP. If you have an old system and toss a bunch of extra memory in it (pennies for older systems) you can make it run incredibly fast using Windows 98. I have an older laptop that I recently "inherited" from a friend. It took about 5 minutes to boot up and 30 seconds to even open a folder. I wiped it, installed Windows 98, tweaked it a bit, and installed Firefox. It now runs beautifully, as fast as my main computer. When I use Windows 98, it almost seems to me as if XP was designed to slow down your computer. Too bad most modern software no longer supports it.
That's the most important reason why to install Server 2003 or XP. Once you start using it, it changes the way you work with Windows machines.
Hopefully Vista will really get a decent shell interface, *and* all of the important system functionality will become available through that interface (I'm not holding my breath on that last, though), and then you'll *really* change the way you work with Windows machines. The remote GUI access is okay, but it only works when you have a high-bandwidth connection, and scriptability is very poor.
(Now we get to the *real* point of this post, which is just to share a little Linux anecdote and do a little chest thumping ;-) ). As an example of what you can do with a good remote shell, consider my experience from yesterday:
I'm in a hotel room in Paris, France. My wife was at her mother's house in Morgan, Utah, USA and sent me a message via Jabber. She had to get some pictures off of her nephew's digital camera so that she can incorporate them into a slideshow she's putting together for his wedding. He brought the CD that came with the camera, and she installed the software (on her iBook) and tried to download the pictures. Nothing happened. The computer didn't even seem to see that attached camera. We IMed back and forth for a while, trying to troubleshoot the problem, but it was no good. Looking at the camera's support web site, it appears that maybe my wife needs to download a newer version of the software, but it's 40MB and she's on a slow dialup line (my father in law is out in the sticks and even his telephone service isn't very good -- he rarely gets connected at better than 26Kbps). Actually, as it turned out, even after she upgraded the software (at home on a cable modem connection), she still couldn't talk to the camera. Dunno.
Now, a while back, I gave my father in law a computer... an old AMD K6 300Mhz running Ubuntu Linux (Hoary, as I recall). It lets him browse e-Bay, send and receive e-mail and write the occasional letter and I don't have to support it at all -- it just works. So, I told my wife to go attach the camera to the Linux box. One little complication was that both the Linux box and my wife's iBook are connected via WiFi to a little AP/router with a dialup modem in it. That's because my father-in-law had no way to get a phone line into the room where he wanted to keep the computer (it's an old house). The AP/router, of course, does NAT. Not a major problem... I just told my wife to type "ssh -R5000:localhost:22 ..." on the Ubuntu box to connect to my server at home and set up a tunnel back to the Ubuntu box.
Then, from my hotel room in France, I connected first to my home server, then logged into the Ubuntu box. Damn... gphoto2 wasn't installed. "aptitude install gphoto2", plus a three-minute wait for the 233KB download to finish (yes, barely over 1KB per second -- it's a *slow* dialup) and I had the software. "gphoto2 -P" detected the camera, identified it, connected to it with the correct protocol and downloaded all of the pictures from the camera. "nmap" found the IP address of my wife's iBook and "scp" quickly copied all of the pictures into her home directory.
That's it. Problem solved... I looked like some kind of a wizard for being able to do this from 1/3 of the way around the planet, but the truth is that it's no different than doing it from the console. I suppose perhaps someday all Internet connections will be fast enough that you can always use a remote GUI, but that day has not yet arrived, and won't for some years yet.
A good CLI rocks.
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