Post by mikkh on Oct 24, 2009 9:59:59 GMT
Lots of people have older machines lying around gathering dust because they don't know what to do with them and feel a nostalgic attachment to them because they cost an absolute fortune at the time
What do you do with a machine like that? Leave it gathering dust and hope it will be an antique in the future? Linux can help of course, but it can't perform miracles - so if you have a real ancient beast with the old chunky 5 pin keyboard fitting that probably ran Windows 3.11 the last it was used, give it a quick wipe down and leave it where it is !
There are many 'mini distros' like Puppy, DSL and TinyMe you could try, and I would definitely try Puppy first because it's so full featured for a mini distribution. Another alternative is Slitaz which comes as a very small 30 MB ISO
mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/slitaz/iso/2.0/slitaz-2.0.iso
TinyMe is about 200 MB, Puppy just over a 100 and DSL (d**n small linux) tries to keep to a 50 MB size.
I've just resurrected an old socket 7 AMD 550 with 256 MB RAM, so I gave Slitaz a try. I just cobbled it together from a base unit I rescued from a skip. The case was a mess, so I removed the board and PSU and slung it back in the skip!
Back at home I assembled it on my workbench, stuck a couple of sticks of 128 MB RAM in it and attached a CD ROM with Slitaz in the drive.
It booted in a minute or so and if I'd attached a network card, I could have been on the internet immediately. So from a pile of a scrap to an 'internet ready' PC in about 5 minutes - very impressive
You don't need a hard drive because it runs in memory which is another plus for that old PC that is maybe missing it's original hard drive because it got swapped to the next PC.
Go on, revive an old PC today, you'll be surprised what that old beast can still do
What do you do with a machine like that? Leave it gathering dust and hope it will be an antique in the future? Linux can help of course, but it can't perform miracles - so if you have a real ancient beast with the old chunky 5 pin keyboard fitting that probably ran Windows 3.11 the last it was used, give it a quick wipe down and leave it where it is !
There are many 'mini distros' like Puppy, DSL and TinyMe you could try, and I would definitely try Puppy first because it's so full featured for a mini distribution. Another alternative is Slitaz which comes as a very small 30 MB ISO
mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/slitaz/iso/2.0/slitaz-2.0.iso
TinyMe is about 200 MB, Puppy just over a 100 and DSL (d**n small linux) tries to keep to a 50 MB size.
I've just resurrected an old socket 7 AMD 550 with 256 MB RAM, so I gave Slitaz a try. I just cobbled it together from a base unit I rescued from a skip. The case was a mess, so I removed the board and PSU and slung it back in the skip!
Back at home I assembled it on my workbench, stuck a couple of sticks of 128 MB RAM in it and attached a CD ROM with Slitaz in the drive.
It booted in a minute or so and if I'd attached a network card, I could have been on the internet immediately. So from a pile of a scrap to an 'internet ready' PC in about 5 minutes - very impressive
You don't need a hard drive because it runs in memory which is another plus for that old PC that is maybe missing it's original hard drive because it got swapped to the next PC.
Go on, revive an old PC today, you'll be surprised what that old beast can still do