Old/crappy pc/laptop users, come chat and share here!

[jjex22]

I love this thread. As it has evolved, it is amazing to see how the definition of "old and crappy" has changed.

Spot on! I was at my parents back in october clearing out their garage when I found my old orange Imac - packed lovingly away, me and my brother dusted it off and it still ran! no attempt to linux it - it ran OS9! But it did still run Tony Hawks Pro Skater okay! I have an Emac at mine that's 3 times better in all the numbers areas, so it's back in it's box... but it was the prettiest computer I ever had - remember all those adverts of the multi coloured imac G3's dancing around the screen? I was chuffed to bits when I got it!

[wb8nbs]

I would like to report a successful install of 10.04 on a 1999 Thinkpad 770Z. Install was from a magazine DVD. I used the Netbook Remix option, it was the only one that would start from the DVD, probably due to limited memory. At the time of install, the 770 had 320 megs of memory, I have since changed out the 64 meg DIMM on the motherboard for a 128 meg part so it now has 384 meg. Browsing with Firefox 3.6 is slow but acceptable.

I also experimented with Puppy linux and Vector. 10.04 NBR seemed to work the best. I did trial installs using a couple of spare hard drives. The final install was on a 40G fujitsu drive. I had a difficult time getting the 40G drive to boot, Grub2 did not like the partition alignment.

I had trouble getting the video to go to the native 1280x1024, copied in the xorg.conf from the previous Suse 10.3 install and video was then OK.

Tried 3 wireless G pcmcia cards, a Cisco which worked immediately, a Netgear and a COMPUSA card both of which worked after Ndiswrapper install using the Windows Wireless Drivers tool

Got sound to work using the directions at http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Instal..._ThinkPad_600E The NBR boot was loading an AC97 module and there ain't one in this machine. The thinkwiki directions may work for other Thinkpads that have similar sound chips, 770X, 770Z, and most 600s.

I use this computer for web stuff. I love the screen and keyboard. Also installed the Arduino 1.0 IDE and will be using that in the future.

I moved the test hard drive (14G) to a Thinkpad 770E I own and looks like the NBR will work there also. It has 100 megs less memory though, and may be too slow to use.

[SLEEPER_V]

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Porteg.../dp/B00008KA8U

I have one of these that i've spruced up using lubuntu with a mix of awesome window manager.

I use sylpheed mail client, mplayer, quassel irc client, midori web browser (sometimes epiphany if the mood strikes)

[ranch hand]

I would like to report a successful install of 10.04 on a 1999 Thinkpad 770Z. Install was from a magazine DVD. I used the Netbook Remix option, it was the only one that would start from the DVD, probably due to limited memory. At the time of install, the 770 had 320 megs of memory, I have since changed out the 64 meg DIMM on the motherboard for a 128 meg part so it now has 384 meg. Browsing with Firefox 3.6 is slow but acceptable.

I also experimented with Puppy linux and Vector. 10.04 NBR seemed to work the best. I did trial installs using a couple of spare hard drives. The final install was on a 40G fujitsu drive. I had a difficult time getting the 40G drive to boot, Grub2 did not like the partition alignment.

I had trouble getting the video to go to the native 1280x1024, copied in the xorg.conf from the previous Suse 10.3 install and video was then OK.

Tried 3 wireless G pcmcia cards, a Cisco which worked immediately, a Netgear and a COMPUSA card both of which worked after Ndiswrapper install using the Windows Wireless Drivers tool

Got sound to work using the directions at http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Instal..._ThinkPad_600E The NBR boot was loading an AC97 module and there ain't one in this machine. The thinkwiki directions may work for other Thinkpads that have similar sound chips, 770X, 770Z, and most 600s.

I use this computer for web stuff. I love the screen and keyboard. Also installed the Arduino 1.0 IDE and will be using that in the future.

I moved the test hard drive (14G) to a Thinkpad 770E I own and looks like the NBR will work there also. It has 100 megs less memory though, and may be too slow to use.

That is pretty impressive.

[ranch hand]

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Porteg.../dp/B00008KA8U

I have one of these that i've spruced up using lubuntu with a mix of awesome window manager.

I use sylpheed mail client, mplayer, quassel irc client, midori web browser (sometimes epiphany if the mood strikes)

Wow, a lot of really crappy computers today. This is FUN stuff.

[wb8nbs]

I would like to report a successful install of 10.04 on a 1999 Thinkpad 770Z. Install was from a magazine DVD. I used the Netbook Remix option, it was the only one that would start from the DVD, probably due to limited memory. At the time of install, the 770 had 320 megs of memory, I have since changed out the 64 meg DIMM on the motherboard for a 128 meg part so it now has 384 meg. Browsing with Firefox 3.6 is slow but acceptable.
.

Update: Installed the xubuntu-desktop this morning on the 770Z. Top reported 336 megs in use on a cold boot with Gnome, down to 248 megs used with the XFCE desktop. Firefox is significantly faster. The install used an additional 300 megs or so of disk but installed a bunch of programs that Gnome didn't have (gimp, abiword). It's a keeper.

[amjjawad]

Update: Installed the xubuntu-desktop this morning on the 770Z. Top reported 336 megs in use on a cold boot with Gnome, down to 248 megs used with the XFCE desktop. Firefox is significantly faster. The install used an additional 300 megs or so of disk but installed a bunch of programs that Gnome didn't have (gimp, abiword). It's a keeper.

Installing the desktop package (xubuntu-desktop) is NOT like install the system (Xubuntu). You can try that yourself. Install Ubuntu then install the desktop package then install Xubuntu on new partitions and check the overall performance.

I'm not saying "don't do that", I'm just sharing an observation which I'm not the only one who has noticed/observed that


By the way, I've done some test on P4 with 242MB RAM and SWAP OFF (so I force the system to use whatever RAM the PC has) and ... Ubuntu 10.04 was working BETTER than ... Xubuntu 11.04. I know what some of you may thing but I'm not a hater of other variant, I'm yet again sharing a real test I have done myself.
Xubuntu is NOT the lightest. Lubuntu is light but still NOT the lightest. Lubuntu vs Xubuntu? no doubt Lubuntu is lighter than Xubuntu.

After all, if your system is capable of running both or even Unity then go for it but some people prefer simplicity over 3D stuff.

P.S.
Welcome to Ubuntu Forum

[coldraven]

I read this somewhere......... A definition of computer terms

State of the Art - The hardware that you cannot afford
Obsolete - The hardware that you own
Microsecond - The time it takes for the former to become the latter

I have Ubuntu running on a Dell Inspiron 7500 but I might get around to make it a server one day as one hinge has snapped. You can pick up a dock cheaply which gives it a network port and two extra USB ports.

[mrreality13]

any 1 see this yet?lol

http://hackaday.com/2012/03/28/building-the-worst-linux-pc-ever/

Linux is generally considered the go-to OS for under powered computers. Wanting to challenge the preconceived notion that Linux requires ‘a computer made in the last 20 years,’ [Dmitry] built the worst Linux PC ever around a simple 8-bit microcontroller.

The ATMega1284p [Dmitry] used doesn’t have a lot to offer as far as RAM and storage goes; just 16 kilobytes of SRAM and a paltry 128 kilobytes of Flash storage. While this may be voluminous in the embedded world, it’s peanuts compared to the gigabytes of RAM and hard drive space on even a low-end netbook. To solve this problem, [Dmitry] threw an antique 30-pin RAM SIMM at the problem. It’s wired up directly to the microcontroller, as is the 1 Gigabyte SD card that serves as the PC’s hard drive.

Linux requires a 32-bit CPU and a memory management unit, something the puny microcontroller doesn’t have. For [Dmitry], the best course of action was emulating an ARM processor on an AVR. We’re not sure if we’re dealing with genius or madness here, but it did prove to be a valuable learning exercise in writing a modular ARM emulator.

How fast is it? [Dmitry] tells us it takes two hours to boot up to a bash prompt, and four more to load up Ubuntu and login. If you want a Megahertz rating, good luck; the effective clock speed is about 6.5 kilohertz. While the worst Linux PC ever won’t win any races, its simple construction puts it within the reach of even the klutziest of hardware builders; the entire device is just a microcontroller, RAM, SD card, a few resistors, and some wire.

[Fraoch]

Seeing that this old thread isn't quite dead...

I got a new processor and motherboard recently and have been moving the old hardware down to secondary uses. The oldest hardware I'm working on right now is:

ECS K7SOM+

It's got a 1.2 GHz AMD Duron soldered into it. I got it because I was looking for a secondary computer and didn't want to spend much - it was only $60 at the time and came with a CPU soldered in. I currently have maxed it out with 1 GB of DDR RAM.

It's borderline whether it will run Ubuntu so I tried Xubuntu. Problem is the installer fails at the same spot every time, I think an application being installed doesn't like the hardware. Repeatable on both USB and DVD, repeatable even with the alternate installer. I tried Lubuntu, same problem. I was about to try Linux Mint but I notice it uses the same installer so I didn't waste my time.

I then tried Debian and it works! It's kind of slow but it does seem to be functional. I'm using it to write this post.

I have even older hardware but no case for it now - an AMD K6-II 400 MHz with 192 MB of RAM. I did have an old version of Xubuntu running (very slowly) on it. Most likely that wouldn't work now. I would try Lubuntu maybe, but that might be a stretch. Puppy Linux? That works fairly well on my wife's old 366 MHz Celeron laptop.

I did an experiment about a year ago using a VM to see which distro combination would run nicely on that 192 MB of RAM. I built several distros from base installations and monitored memory usage. The winner was Gentoo with Openbox and fbpanel...only 35 MB of RAM! A close second was Arch Linux with Openbox and fbpanel. It might be nice to try Gentoo on this hardware (the Duron) but it would take ages to compile everything. An Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 with Gentoo in a VM took days to do it. The Duron might take weeks...the K6-II I would have no idea. My only hope would be to use distcc to move heavy compilation to more powerful machines on the network.

I like old computers. They can still be pretty useful. My oldest hardware is a Pentium 100! I think it's got 60 MB of EDO RAM. I ran a ClarkConnect firewall on it for a while, then SmoothWall. Looks like SmoothWall might still run on it, or perhaps m0n0wall. It's a noisy Baby AT case though, I couldn't stand it after a while.