PDA

View Full Version : Old/crappy pc/laptop users, come chat and share here!



Pages : [1] 2 3 4 5 6

raul_
June 19th, 2007, 10:56 AM
Hey!

All of you who own one of those pc's or laptops that came with a sticker saying "Designed for Windows 95", (ok that's pushing it, mine says Windows 98 ) this is the place for you!

I actually own a pretty recent Desktop (two years) that supports Beryl and such..but the darn monitor died on me, and I had to run for my until now hobby 8 year old laptop. I started recovering it for the fun of it, I actually spent a little too much money on it buying a new battery and RAM chip (you wouldn't believe how expensive old parts can be) and right now it's running surprisingly fast!

I can do all of the basic stuff, I can even play media from my ipod! (My music is stuck in my desktop) Of course that doesn't make much sense, since I can use my headphones...Anyway, the only thing this baby can't do well is watching videos (Youtube videos get choppy) but I even got to enable some transparency for show off ;) it's only for the screenshots though...

Here are my specs:

8 year old Toshiba Satellite 4060CDT
128MB RAM
333Mhz
3,7GB HD
Trident Graphics card
Ubuntu Feisty Server running Fluxbox (i had 3 WM installed at once, last week ;) )

This is supposed to be a place where we share applications/solutions meant to be light and responsive on an old computer. This is one of the many reasons why I love Linux: your computer doesn't have to be top notch to run a fully up to date system.

You can also share Window Managers, Distributions, anything you want :)


Right now I'm using Galeon/Seamonkey as the Web Browser, and they are really responsive. Galeon spends a little more RAM, but it renders pages much faster, and it's very responsive, and it uses my GTK theme, so that's a bonus.

As a file manager I chose PCManFM, and I just love it. It's very very responsive, and the interface is very intuitive, it's a bit like Thunar.

MSN Client: Pidgin. It's hard to find light graphical MSN clients. Now or then I use centericq though, but I actually don't need to. Since i trim down in everything else, at least I can spend something in my messenger, and Pidgin is not a hog at all.

Media Player: every once in a while someone will send me videos in msn, and I use xine to watch them (xine-ui package), and I use XMMS for my music, but I don't use them much.

Right now, conky marks 57% RAM used with a web browser, a file manager, and a messenger client running, and my system is not laggy at all!


Cheers

fyllekajan
June 19th, 2007, 11:45 AM
I have an old 286 laptop with 1024K ram and 30M hdd with no math processor but a monochrome screen with the colors brown and orange even more so than ubuntu itself. It's capable of running Windows 3.0 with the right drivers, but only has dos. It's capable of formatting floppy disks. It's also heavy so maybe it could be used as a weapon if someone breaks into my home. :)

raul_
June 19th, 2007, 11:49 AM
It's capable of formatting floppy disks.

:D aha! you hold on to that one!

Golyadkin
June 19th, 2007, 11:55 AM
I ran xubuntu on a pentium 350MHz with 64MB of RAM and an ATi Rage Pro 8MB graphics card (w0000t). It actually was really responsive once booted, and worked fine. I gave the computer away though to some kid I know, who could use it more than I can.

dizee
June 19th, 2007, 12:37 PM
Just wondering - are you on dialup on these old computers cos I have one which could be used for the internet but it lacks a lan connector. Wireless USB is an option but the support for that isn't great in linux.

Other than that it should do well with xubuntu by the sounds of it, it's a pII 350 mHz with 128 MB RAM and a whopping 6 GB of hard drive space :D

raul_
June 19th, 2007, 12:49 PM
I bought an Ethernet pcmcia card and it worked out of the box :)

Depending on your USB adapter, you could get it working with ndiswrapper. I have a ralink based USB adapter that works fine with WEP, but i still couldn't get it to connect with 802.11 wpa authentication

cunawarit
June 19th, 2007, 12:56 PM
I have a Compaq iPaq 700 Celeron

Like this one:

http://images.ciao.com/iuk/images/products/normal/268/Compaq_iPAQ_Legacy_Light__5362268.jpg

A whole £20 from Ebay, plus some cheap memory, a whole 512MB! And a couple of free CD drives from work that were going to go in the bin... Not bad, it is still a fairly usable little PC for light web browsing, word processins, emailing, and managing remote servers.

Currently running Debian Etch with Fluxbox on it. Will give Puppy a try sometime though.

PS: Or was it £15? I can't remember...

dizee
June 19th, 2007, 12:57 PM
I bought an Ethernet pcmcia card and it worked out of the box

Depending on your USB adapter, you could get it working with ndiswrapper. I have a ralink based USB adapter that works fine with WEP, but i still couldn't get it to connect with 802.11 wpa authentication
I see, I'll look into it anyway. Would be very handy to have as a net box.

notwen
June 19th, 2007, 01:11 PM
i run Ubuntu Server+flux on a 400mhz 256mb ram iBook. It's a beast. I comfortably run pcmanfm, sea monkey and pidgin w/o any slowdown on system performance. I can't however watch youtube or streaming video in general w/o it beginning to become choppy after 5-6 seconds. Other than that it's great for couch surfing, which is it's primary use. Hopefully I'll have enough cash lying around by the end of the year to invest into a better laptop.

DalekClock
June 19th, 2007, 01:13 PM
I have a Compaq iPaq 700 Celeron

Like this one:

http://images.ciao.com/iuk/images/products/normal/268/Compaq_iPAQ_Legacy_Light__5362268.jpg


Tha's one big PDA.

Dragonbite
June 19th, 2007, 02:09 PM
Wow! Finally people who may see my computer as a POWERHOUSE!!


http://img505.imageshack.us/img505/4721/pcvrseries2c867fje7.th.jpg (http://img505.imageshack.us/img505/4721/pcvrseries2c867fje7.jpg)
Sony Viao PCV-R545DS
P3 500MHz
maxed out with 256MB Ram
8MB video
originally a 20GB HD, but I've upped it to 80GB

Edubuntu 6.10 (I share it with the kids, will update after I backup the system and .deb packages).
Gnome for Desktop (installed and used, but not lately, Xfce)
Removed OpenOffice and replaced with Abiword and Gnumeric (also trying KOffice)
Firefox for browsing (Opera is bloated and crashed, Epiphany is nothing spectacular, if there is any speed benefit, which I don't see, it is overshadowed by Firefox's solid, stable feel)
Thunderbird for email
Kino for Digital Video editing (sort-of works)
I have Blender, but haven't fooled with it yet

It does fine for the usual stuff/activities


kid's games (gCompris, Childsplay, etc.)
Web browsing and Email (dial-up a bigger slow-down)
mild Image manipulation (Gimp, Krita, etc.)
Video watching (downloaded only, nothing streaming or online)
iPod management (Banshee and gtkpod)
Website design/management (do not have Apache running on system though)
I have Monodevelop installed with this grand idea of fooling around with Mono at home since I work with .NET at work.. but Monodevelop has not enticed me enough and now I'm thinking of switching to NetBeans and try developing/teaching myself Java


If everything works out and I get a system from work that is powerful enough, I would like to install Edubuntu server on the new system and use this one as a thin client! We'll see.

BTW.. it's sad when my maxed out RAM is what a friend of mine has on his Video Card alone! Or when somebody pulls out a PDA with specs better than this desktop (someday my kids will pull out their PHONE more powerful than this system!!!)

cunawarit
June 19th, 2007, 02:25 PM
Tha's one big PDA.

The iPaq name is not just reserved for PDAs, they also made iPaq desktops: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ_%28desktop_computer%29

bchaffin72
June 19th, 2007, 03:55 PM
I have an HP OmniBook 4100
233 Mhz PII MMX with 96 MB RAM and 4 GB HD
Currently runs a workstation installation of Edubuntu 6.10

Persianelfster
June 19th, 2007, 03:59 PM
Pentium II 400MHz, 192kb of RAM, and 8GB hard drive....worse part: running XP on it DEAR GOD it was slow. Now I put linux on it, runs much better =D

Bungo Pony
June 19th, 2007, 04:46 PM
I love pushing old PCs to their max. It's a fantastic challenge. Here's what I've got for old PCs that stand out:

Acer 386 SX25 laptop
- 4M of RAM
- 360M hard drive
- Running Win95
- 300 baud internal modem

This is my only laptop which I bought for $20 a few years ago. I could care less if it connects to the internet. It's great because it's portable, and I can work on text documents or read e-books on it. For moving software around, I connect via the serial port and transfer files with Telix (I still have yet to find a good Linux comm program.)

Compaq Pentium II
- 48M RAM
- 1.2G hard drive
- Running DSL (Damn Small Linux
- DVD ROM drive

This is my garage computer. It doesn't even have a keyboard - only a mouse. Currently, it's only purpose is to play MP3s. The 50M distro of Linux leaves lots of room for MP3s, even for a 1.2G hard drive. For what I can't put on the hard drive, the DVD ROM drive takes care of. I had trouble filling one DVD full of rock & metal MP3s. There's over 500 songs on that one disc (over 30 hours of music). To make things easier, I made desktop icons which will load xmms with MP3s from the hard drive, or play audio CDs. DSL is a little more tricky to use than Ubuntu, but as a former DOS user, I'm not having much trouble with it.

information_entropy
June 19th, 2007, 06:37 PM
Bungo Pony

I love pushing old PCs to their max. It's a fantastic challenge. ...
This is my garage computer. ...


WOW, I am really impressed with your garage system.
That really is pushing it to the limit. :o

I have several old slot 1 Tyan motherboards that I am currently putting in cases and testing with Ubuntu.
They all have PIII's and my intent was to build a (not exactly portable) MP3 player for my workshop with one of them.

Hopefully, all of you realize that your use of these old systems anti-capitalism and harmful to the WINTEL business model. You all need to go buy a new computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo Quad CPU and Microsoft Vista Media Center or they will not have the financial resources to develop the next generation of Trusted Computing and Digital Rights Management. The really do have your best interest in their hearts.;)

Bungo Pony
June 19th, 2007, 06:55 PM
The really do have your best interest in their hearts.


Yeah, and because I have a non-genuine version of WinXP, I'm a VICTIM of software piracy. I think I need more therapy before I become a SURVIVOR of software piracy.

timzak
June 20th, 2007, 06:25 PM
Compaq Pentium II
- 48M RAM
- 1.2G hard drive
- Running DSL (Damn Small Linux
- DVD ROM drive

This is my garage computer. It doesn't even have a keyboard - only a mouse. Currently, it's only purpose is to play MP3s. The 50M distro of Linux leaves lots of room for MP3s, even for a 1.2G hard drive. For what I can't put on the hard drive, the DVD ROM drive takes care of. I had trouble filling one DVD full of rock & metal MP3s. There's over 500 songs on that one disc (over 30 hours of music). To make things easier, I made desktop icons which will load xmms with MP3s from the hard drive, or play audio CDs. DSL is a little more tricky to use than Ubuntu, but as a former DOS user, I'm not having much trouble with it.

How funny. I have a garage computer strictly for playing MP3s and I was surfing this thread to get ideas for a good distro to run on it. Currently using Win2k, which is pretty clunky (HP Pavilion, 466Mhz Celeron, 256MB ram, integrated Intel graphics, 15GB 5400rpm hdd). I've already tried Feisty on a 750Mhz P3 and it doesn't run as nice as I'd like. In fact, it seems to idle at around 10% cpu usage and immediately pegs 100% whenever I do anything outside of web browsing (PCI LAN card) or 3D graphics.. What's funny is the Geforce3 video card is so overkill for this computer that Beryl runs faster than Metacity. So I figured Feisty wouldn't work well on the garage computer if it's struggling on a P3 750. I've downloaded DSL, but it's a little non-user friendly for a noob like me. I've downloaded MepisLite and have been reading up on AntiX. Have you tried either of those?

PatrickMay16
June 20th, 2007, 06:41 PM
I've played with linux on old and slow machines a fair deal through the times. I find that a Celeron 733MHz can be as usable for many tasks as a modern computer, if you set it up with IceWM, Rox filer, Firefox (from the official website rather than the version included in the repositories), and Pidgin, and using leafpad rather than gedit... and disabling a bunch of unneeded services from starting at boot.

blah blah blah
June 20th, 2007, 06:49 PM
I feel left out. :(

weresheep
June 20th, 2007, 07:09 PM
My computers aren't crappy :(

I must have lower expectations than most people because, IMHO, both my computers run Ubuntu Dapper really well.

My main computer runs Dapper with GNOME desktop.

Intel Pentium III 733MHz (Coppermine)
512MiB SDRAM
120GB Seagate Barracuda 2MiB cache hard disk
Plextor CD-RW drive
Onboard Intel 810e 8MiB (shared RAM)
Onboard 3Com 10/100Base-TX
Creative Labs Soundblaster Live!
D-Link 5 port USB 2.0 controller
USB 2.0 external card reader


My other computer runs Dapper without a GUI as a headless box.

Intel Pentium (P54C) 133MHz
256MiB SDRAM
120GB Seagate Barracuda 2MiB cache hard disk
Intel Pro 100 S 10/100Base-TX
Matrox Millennium II 4MiB WRAM
Createive Labs Soundblaster AWE64 Value


Both of these computers perform everything I need.

-weresheep

Sunflower1970
June 20th, 2007, 07:20 PM
I have an old Compaq 5630 which I've maxed out. Was given to us a few years ago. It originally had Windows 98 on it before I got ahold of it (lol)

· Pentium II 400 Mhz
· I've maxed it out with a whopping 384 MB RAM
· 2 hard drives: a 16GB 5400RPM (my test side) and a 120GB 7200RPM hard drive (husband's side)
· A hand-me-down nVidia Geforce3 Ti 500 video card
· 1 DVD+RW & 1 CD-ROM (It originally had a zip drive but I removed it to put in the DVD+RW in it instead--another hand-me-down)
· Wireless card. (I'm amazed it worked!)

It is currently using Xubuntu 7.04 on each hard drive. Although my testing side also has IceWM, FVWM-Crystal, Open/Black/Flux-Box, E17 for me to play around with. The computer sits in our kitchen, and not only for testing stuff out, I use it for music, internet radio, surfing, recipes, etc, etc.

This thing amazes me every day. With 98 it was slow, took at least 5-7 minutes to load up, and a BSOD appeared if I had more than 2-3 programs opened. But, now, for its age, it takes only about 2+ minutes to boot up (yay!) and is actually pretty responsive once the desktop comes up. And more impressive, when I get Beryl working on it I swear, the response time of programs opening up decreases by quite a bit. (I'm sure the graphics card is overkill, but the ATI card it originally came with was crap, and the only other card I had available, which was free, was the Geforce3.)

This went from a computer we were going to give away to Good Will to one that is now used just about every day...(when I tell some people about it...they laugh and really think I'm crazy for using it as often as I do)

iqag1060
June 20th, 2007, 07:36 PM
I have a number of old machines doing various purposes, most of them running Dapper without X. One 350 MHz iMac with 128 MB RAM is quite successfully running Dapper with KDE. Video playback over the network is shaky, and you have all the PPC lack of support to deal with, but everything that works, works fine. Another 200 MHz Pentium with 160 MB RAM is my main file server. I had a 650 MHz Presario running as a set-top box until recently, with Xfce. It was great.

I had a bunch of kids games (all from around 1999-2000) waiting to be installed.They are all installable on both Mac and Windows. I would have installed them on the iMac, which is dual boot, but my daughter jammed something into the CD slot. So I fired up a mid-90s Compaq which had been sitting around awaiting repurposing or scavenging. It has 16 MB RAM, not sure of the processor speed right now. It runs Win95. What amazed me was that there seems to have been so little actual progress in what desktop computers can do, from then to now. Especially when you consider the dramatic increase in resources.

nightfire117
June 20th, 2007, 07:42 PM
Tha's one big PDA.

Hahaha!

Umm, I have, hmm, nothing too ancient. Well, fine. I don't use what I have that is ancient. Erm, I classify my PC in terms of its clunkiness as "ancient," but if I could use Linux full-time I'm sure my mind would change.

AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 256 MB RAM, 128 MB GeForce FX 5200, ancient Yamaha soundcard from, erm, who knows when - I think it was in a Win98 PC, and 6x internal CD drive, external Sony DVD burner + 10 GB HDD for Ubuntu and 80 - actually 74 - GB HDD for Windows and all my stuff. Display at 1600x1200. (This notebook: P4 M 2.00 GHz, 512 RAM, 32 MB VRAM Radeon Mobile m6 or something like that, internal CD - no DVD - and a 13.5 inch display at 1024x768, Hitachi 20 GB HDD.)

Another laptop: Fujitsu (muahahaha), "Designed for Windows 95," has Win95 + a bunch of apps, internal CD-ROM + floppy, Pentium I 133 MHz and 16 MB of RAM, and the CROWN JEWEL: 1.6 GB INTERNAL HDD!!! At, who knows, 5400 RPM? (...) 800x600 display - the laptop still runs great and looks as good as any new laptop (except the display), actually, but its hardware is so old.

Compaq Presario (forgot the model) - 10 GB Fujitsu HDD (hehe, guess where the 10 GB HDD for my Linux in my PC came from?), 450 MHz, 128 MB RAM (2x64 MB), 3 EDO slots and 1 or 2 PCI. Windows XP - I pushed that thing with Windows XP for a while.

850 MHz AMD Athlon, 128 MB RAM, onboard video, 20 GB HD, Windows 2000 Pro.

Dells from the early 90's, two of them: one at 200 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 8 MB VRAM Trident, internal sound, 1.33 GB HD, the only difference with the second was it was 233 MHz. I remember using these with Windows 98 until... 2000 or 2001, upgraded from Win95.

A 486 with 4 MB RAM and probably 320x240 display, about 2.5 inches thick, don't remember the HDD - probably 80 MB or something - it had... I forgot the name of the OS, but it wasn't even DOS.

Erm, have a 3-inch thick 500 MB HDD with DOS 5.0 on it or something like that, as well as a PC with 1.3 GB HDD and Win3.11 on DOS 6.2 (actually I think this HDD failed finally a year or two ago). Man, if only I had known about DSL and other Linux distros then. Hehe.

(By the way, what ever happened to Packard Bell? Just a thought that occurred to me.)

I also love pushing old computers to their max, I have been considering putting Damn Small Linux on that Fujitsu laptop.

I have a feeling those without the latest and greatest are posting here as well. Heh.... I think anything above 256 MB RAM is not "ancient"/"crappy." After all, "640K [is] enough for anyone," right?

~Nightfire

Kzap333
June 20th, 2007, 07:42 PM
I have a Compaq iPaq 700 Celeron

Like this one:

http://images.ciao.com/iuk/images/products/normal/268/Compaq_iPAQ_Legacy_Light__5362268.jpg

A whole £20 from Ebay, plus some cheap memory, a whole 512MB! And a couple of free CD drives from work that were going to go in the bin... Not bad, it is still a fairly usable little PC for light web browsing, word processins, emailing, and managing remote servers.

Currently running Debian Etch with Fluxbox on it. Will give Puppy a try sometime though.

PS: Or was it £15? I can't remember...

I remember having something like that afew years back I was trailing it before it came out I thought it was so cool. Mine did not have a HDD it was ment to be a dumb terminal or something I don't know I was only aroung ten at the time.

NJC
June 20th, 2007, 07:43 PM
Wow, I saw "crappy pc" and KNEW this thread was for me:

HP Vectra Vl6/400 series 8
PIII/500MHz
512mb mem
Matrox MGA200 8 megs video
40gb win drive
6.4gb win backup drive
5.1gb Linux drive
USR External modem

-----------------
This machine was dated 1998. Even at that time it had USB and 3 mem slots x 256mb for a total of 768mb. It was a good piece of hardware for its day. I have a 2001 GX110 crapola Dell and that only held 512mb max mem.

I'm running Dapper 6.06 and recently installed Xubuntu desktop. A noticeable increase in speed and X.org takes at least 25% less CPU (according to top).

nightfire117
June 20th, 2007, 07:46 PM
Wow, I saw "crappy pc" and KNEW this thread was for me:

HP Vectra Vl6/400 series 8
PIII/500MHz
512mb mem
Matrox MGA200 8 megs video
40gb win drive
6.4gb win backup drive
5.1gb Linux drive
USR External modem

-----------------
This machine was dated 1998. Even at that time it had USB and 3 mem slots x 256mb for a total of 768mb. It was a good piece of hardware for its day. I got a 2001 GX110 crapola Dell and that only held 512mb max mem.

I and running Dapper 6.06 and recently installed Xubuntu desktop. A noticeable increase in speed and X.org takes at least 25% less CPU (according to top).

Haha, "I knew this thread was for me."

Are you kidding me? 768 RAM in 1998? Haha, no one needed that much back then. Okay, maybe... Hollywood.

~Nightfire

[EDIT]: I just noticed something: we all seem to be proud of our old PCs. Maybe it's because we have restored them with Linux and put such things to practical and good use. Hehe.

~Nightfire

jgrabham
June 20th, 2007, 07:55 PM
Working on my "new build"

P3 700mhz
256mb RAM
Graphics - whatever I have that works
Win 95 - to play my DOS through 98 games without emulators or "compatibility modes"
3GB HDD
DVD ROM drive

Ultra Magnus
June 20th, 2007, 07:55 PM
I only just got a new computer yesterday to replace my 6 year old, physically falling apart laptop - I had been working without a "d", "l", "e", "F2" or "esc" keys for quite a while - to some extent I credit this with teaching me how to touch type! - The casing on the screen fell off whenever I tried to open/close it! - It has 256 M ram - 20G hdd and 1.7Ghz processor (When I got it, I was quite chuffed!) - Despite this It actually ran beryl (quite well) - I am still quite attached to it so I think I'll do something with it although I am well pleased with my new laptop - currently have a duel boot between ubuntu and vista!

Sunflower1970
June 20th, 2007, 07:56 PM
[EDIT]: I just noticed something: we all seem to be proud of our old PCs. Maybe it's because we have restored them with Linux and put such things to practical and good use. Hehe.

~Nightfire

Lol. I admit to being very, very, very proud of my old machine. I did put a bit of work into it, and it was my first real experience with Linux...I even painted the case of it from this weird grey-ish purple color to black.

cunawarit
June 20th, 2007, 08:05 PM
I remember having something like that afew years back I was trailing it before it came out I thought it was so cool.

To be honest, I think it is cool, it may be slow... But the little form factor case looks great (IMHO), it isn't exactly Mac Mini tiny, or Linutop cool... But it looks better than an anonymous mini tower.

A guy at work bought a couple from Ebay, and when I found out you could get them for peanuts I got myself one too :)

My other PC is still acceptable :) A Celeron D 2.53, 1GB RAM... Not exactly the lovely Xeons and Opterons I use for work, but hey... Good enough for home development, and running a virtual machine or two :)

Dragonbite
June 20th, 2007, 08:11 PM
Ubuntu has so far been the first distro to recognize all of my hardware INCLUDING my winmodem!

I tried updating to the 586 (or is it 686) kernel and I lost modem, so I returned to the base (386) kernel and the modem works fine (a requirement since I'm running on dial-up)

joe.turion64x2
July 1st, 2007, 02:28 AM
Haha, "I knew this thread was for me."

Are you kidding me? 768 RAM in 1998? Haha, no one needed that much back then. Okay, maybe... Hollywood.

~Nightfire

[EDIT]: I just noticed something: we all seem to be proud of our old PCs. Maybe it's because we have restored them with Linux and put such things to practical and good use. Hehe.

~Nightfire
I am really proud of my old AMD K6-2 @533MHz with 256MB PC100, 40GB HD, 8MB Trident video card, ESS Maestro sound. Even though I used to ran it with Windows 98 SE, it was pretty usable (behind a router security flaws don't matter). I have not used it from a while due to lack of space.

Joe.

kerry_s
July 1st, 2007, 03:48 AM
I call this old beast a crapper, but i've got it to do just about everything. it took me alot of installs to find all the quirks and special settings to make it work just right. i can now even multi task on all 4 desk's without it freezing, i watch movies, no problems with flash on youtube as well as other sites, but i had to switch back to firefox from opera. opera just sucks at plugins. it may look bare, but under neath it all i'm running a full install, i just don't put it in my menu when most of the time it's acessed through my file manager or firefox or fbrun.

some of the special settings i use.
debian minimal+fluxbox

added to boot> vga=791 noapic nolapic pci=routeirq elevator=deadline

for xorg.conf, i also can only run at 1024x768x16 color.

Section "Device"
Identifier "Generic Video Card"
Driver "neomagic"
Option "StrangeLockups" "false"
Option "BackingStore" "true"
Option "OverlayMem" "829440"
Option "XaaNoScanlineImageWriteRect"
Option "XaaNoScanlineCPUToScreenColorExpandFill"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AIGLX" "off"
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection



there's like next to zero info for my vaio pcg-f430 when it comes to linux so everything was trial and error. i tried alot of distro's and alot of different setups and settings before i found what was exceptable to me. ;)

PS: i don't know why vlc show's a blue screen, i had a movie playing. :(

Stew2
July 1st, 2007, 04:18 AM
I don't know why but I just love the old stuff :D. Could be because it was shiny and new and treasured at one time and is now cast off and considered garbage when it is still perfectly useful. Or else it's cause I'm cheap :D. Actually its because I like making broken things work again, particularly old computers :D

Sorry 'bout the smileys, I get carried away!

pseudonym
July 1st, 2007, 06:47 AM
If I'd seen this thread, I would have posted this here first -

My second PC is a business cast-off - an IBM PC 300PL desktop which I picked up for a song. It only came with a 300MHz CPU and 128MB PC100 RAM, and no hard drive or optical drive. I'd just built a new main rig so I had some hand-me-down parts to put in this old thing - a CD-RW drive, an 80GB HDD on a ATA-133 PCI controller card, a 4-port PCI USB 2.0 card, and a 300W PSU (which necessitated taking a hacksaw to the chassis due to the different form factor).

Then I hit ebay and picked up the fastest CPU the mobo would support (550MHz, fanless), 2 extra 128MB sticks of PC100 (max 384MB), a fanless 32MB RIVA TNT2 AGP video card, a dirt cheap Ensoniq AudioPCI sound card, and an even dirtier cheap 3Com ISA network card (the machine already had an onboard 10/100 LAN, but I wanted to use that for the internal interface).

A custom install of Ubuntu using the Minimal CD (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD) and running the Openbox (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Openbox) window manager was what this machine was screaming out for. And it runs beautifully. I even have it plugged into the VGA port on my 20" widescreen LCD, at 1680x1050 resolution (towards the outer limits of the TNT2 video card). I'm finding that I use it almost as much as my main rig, and it consumes about one-third the power! No DVDs, digital TV, or recent games, of course, but that's what the main rig is for (although an mpeg decoder card would make DVD/DTV a possibility, if I had a spare PCI slot). Everything else runs just as well.

Of course, this is most definitely a false economy. For not much more than I spent in total on this old IBM, I could have bought say, a 4-year old P4 with a much faster CPU. But where's the fun in that? ;) There's just something cool about plugging my cable modem into an ISA ethernet card, and playing Quake 3 on a TNT2 AGP 2x (which still looks good at non-native 1024x768 ) . I guess it's just the kind of guy I am. :)

As for software, I use the following -

Terminal: rxvt-unicode
File Browser: rox-filer (takes some getting used to, but it's superfast)
Email: Sylpheed (probably the lightest GUI mail client out there)
Web Browser: Swiftox, with Dillo as local html viewer
Chat: XChat
Text Editor: nano for system files, leafpad for everything else
Word Processing: Abiword, but Openoffice also runs reasonably well on this machine
Spreadsheet/Presentations: Openoffice (GNUmeric has too much GNOME in it)
Images: gqview (really fast and versatile) and GIMP (is there any other which works on Linux?)
Music: XMMS (still can't go past it. Audacious is still buggy for me)
Video: VLC (plays just about everything)
Torrent: rtorrent (console-app, but the GUI torrent apps cost too much in CPU)
Podcast/Radio: hpodder (see 'Torrent')
Burning: Graveman (light, but a bit buggy, so I use mp3cd to create music CDs in the console)
Package Manager: aptitude/apt-get via console (Synaptic runs OK but is slow to read the cache)
Print Manager: CUPS web interface

That's probably enough :)

btw, for those with Flash problems on these old PCs, it's almost certainly due to its insanely high system requirments (http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/productinfo/systemreqs/) versus those for Windows. I'm no expert, but I suspect it's due to slack coding on the part of the Adobe developers. I can get away with Flash on my machine, but a YouTube video costs 90% CPU :(

Kowalski_GT-R
July 2nd, 2007, 10:25 AM
mmmmmhhh... very interesting thread.Lots of like-minded people here...8)

I have a 166MMX Pentium with 64 Megs sitting there.......

I was wondering what to do with it.

Keep win98 for old games or throw Xubuntu alternate at it?
Will it be capable of running it fine?

ciao,
Andre

LookTJ
July 2nd, 2007, 10:31 AM
A 3 1/2 years laptop
Dell I600M
Intel 1.6GHz(forgot the model)
512MB RAM(soon getting 2GB RAM
ATI Mobiltiy Radeon 9000
OS: Ubuntu 7.04


those are the specs of my laptop.

LookTJ
July 2nd, 2007, 10:32 AM
mmmmmhhh... very interesting thread.Lots of like-minded people here...8)

I have a 166MMX Pentium with 64 Megs sitting there.......

I was wondering what to do with it.

Keep win98 for old games or throw Xubuntu alternate at it?
Will it be capable of running it fine?

ciao,
Andre


Throw Puppy on it.

laxmanb
July 2nd, 2007, 10:36 AM
PIII 933 Mhz
256 MB RAM
40 GB HDD (the old one plunked out... that was 20 GB)
CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive (this was a CD ROM drive which didn't work anymore)
3.5" Floppy Disk Drive
Windows ME/Ubuntu 6.06

I actually like it... the old Windows versions (98, ME) are quite responsive even on computers like this...

Kowalski_GT-R
July 2nd, 2007, 11:35 AM
I did search a bit on this forum and on you tube,

has anybody succeded in running Xubuntu alternate on something similar to a 166MMX pentium w. 64 MBs?

Secondly: are Puppy and Damn Small friendly to Linux-inexperienced users?

Warpnow
July 2nd, 2007, 12:38 PM
Up until 2 years ago I ran an celeron 500mhz with 256mb ram(maxed out). Faulty PS meant it didn't turn off right, and turned off randomly. Half the onboard ports were broken. The emachine case was not meant to be taken apart, so when I opened it a few times it wouldn't go back together.

Then...I built my P4 3ghz w/2gb ram and I' much happier :D

pseudonym
July 2nd, 2007, 01:19 PM
has anybody succeded in running Xubuntu alternate on something similar to a 166MMX pentium w. 64 MBs?
I would forget Xubuntu on that machine. It runs slowly on the P3 machine I mentioned above, which is 4 times faster. Puppy is a good choice, or Fluxbuntu (http://fluxbuntu.org/de) if you want to stay with Ubuntu.


Secondly: are Puppy and Damn Small friendly to Linux-inexperienced users?
Puppy more so, since it's aimed at 'windows refugees' as much as linux users. But it's been a while since I tried Damn Small.

Whichever you try, a few bucks/euros/whatever spent on another stick of RAM will make a world of difference.

Kowalski_GT-R
July 2nd, 2007, 01:44 PM
Whichever you try, a few bucks/euros/whatever spent on another stick of RAM will make a world of difference.

Thankyou. Opinions very much appreciated here.
Old Windows file system could make use of only 64 Mbytes if I'm correct.I suppose this is not a limitation with Linux lightweight distros....

I have lots of 16 megs sticks, but no 32 ones. They happen to be very rare where I live....
time to search around a bit.

Shazaam
July 2nd, 2007, 02:55 PM
Crappy? I think not. Retail price when new was $5200US (I aquired laptop by marriage).
Compaq LTE5000
75mhz proc
16mb ram
500mb hard drive
pc card 33k dialup modem
It runs damnsmalllinux quite nicely. Of course I have to use dillo as a web browser as Firefox won't load up.:D

Warpnow
July 2nd, 2007, 03:17 PM
Crappy? I think not. Retail price when new was $5200US (I aquired laptop by marriage).
Compaq LTE5000
75mhz proc
16mb ram
500mb hard drive
pc card 33k dialup modem
It runs damnsmalllinux quite nicely. Of course I have to use dillo as a web browser as Firefox won't load up.:D


Wow...I'd love to benchmark that cpu against a TI-83...

Shazaam
July 2nd, 2007, 03:27 PM
Wow...I'd love to benchmark that cpu against a TI-83...

My old Handspring Visor would probably outrun the LTE:D

celsofaf
July 2nd, 2007, 04:25 PM
A 3 1/2 years laptop
Dell I600M
Intel 1.6GHz(forgot the model)
512MB RAM(soon getting 2GB RAM
ATI Mobiltiy Radeon 9000
OS: Ubuntu 7.04


those are the specs of my laptop.

By no means I would call that old or crappy..

joker
July 2nd, 2007, 05:38 PM
I just decommissioned a HP 400Mhz Celeron and an e-machine 533Mhz celeron this weekend. Both ran Ubuntu without issue, although they were a little slow (no worse than win2k). The sad part is no one I knew wanted them, too old they say, oh well, off to the recycler.

Warpnow
July 2nd, 2007, 05:43 PM
Post them on craigslist for free. I bet someone will want them.

xdarkxanarchyx
July 3rd, 2007, 07:06 AM
I would take it.

Used to have a
PII 333MHz
192MB ram
10GB HDD
CD-ROM
I think it was a ATI rage video card, i can't remember
no idea what the sound card was called
it an pretty nicely, I had Ubuntu 6.10 on it but I left (most of) it at someones house. *shrugs*

Mimou
July 3rd, 2007, 08:59 AM
I use an old Dell laptop :)

Dell Latitude C600:
-PIII 650MHz.
-384Mb of RAM.
-HDD : 40Go (5400 RPM), I change the hard drive
-Graphic Card : ATI Mobility M3 (8Mb of memory)

That's ROCKS on Debian Testing netinstall with Fluxbox :)
I can watch video with VLC.
For music I use MPD/ncmpc (the lighter than I know :))
For Internet, Firefox, Pidgin, xChat.
For Programming I use Scite.

Everything works without problems :D

raul_
July 3rd, 2007, 12:10 PM
Right now I have Arch installed, with E17, and my laptop is blazing fast. I installed the XFCE desktop, but then changed to E17, but kept the applications installed (Mousepad and such). Here's a screenshot:

http://ubuntuforums.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=37146&d=1183415859


I think it's amazing how an old computer can be so fast and pretty at the same time :)

kerry_s
July 3rd, 2007, 01:15 PM
I use an old Dell laptop :)

Dell Latitude C600:
-PIII 650MHz.
-384Mb of RAM.
-HDD : 40Go (5400 RPM), I change the hard drive
-Graphic Card : ATI Mobility M3 (8Mb of memory)

That's ROCKS on Debian Testing netinstall with Fluxbox :)
I can watch video with VLC.
For music I use MPD/ncmpc (the lighter than I know :))
For Internet, Firefox, Pidgin, xChat.
For Programming I use Scite.

Everything works without problems :D


never mind miss read it. :)

Kowalski_GT-R
July 3rd, 2007, 01:50 PM
I think it's amazing how an old computer can be so fast and pretty at the same time :)

great desktop there,

do you mind giving me an opinion here?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=491010

Big_Croc7
July 4th, 2007, 05:56 PM
Really... what's the title of this thread?? Some of the PCs people are posting here are faster than my *newest* one! ;)

My day-to-day machine: Athlon 1 (socket A), 850MHz, 512RAM 60Gb+250Gb HD. Has Ubuntu on and runs like a charm; OOo takes about 10 seconds to load up.

A machine I had before that: a 333MHz P2, originally with 64Mb RAM, now with about 224 (umm... whatever 128+64+32 adds up to I think, can't remember exactly if that's right tho)

An older one, that's currently got Win98 on it, but isn't used much at all, which I think is a Pentium 133 with 32Mb RAM.

What I call my old machine: a 486 DX, 66MHz, with 4Mb RAM and a 180Mb-ish HD. Currently awaiting a fresh lease of life with linux, if I can get something to run an X server I might use it as a terminal.

Now for the _really_ old machine: an Amstrad 1640, with a 5 1/4" floppy, a whopping 20Mb HD and... wait for it... 640kB of RAM. Currently has some version of DOS (DOS 1 maybe???) and GEM installed.

Now, can anyone suggest a use for that last one?? It's too old now to even give it away, besides, I probably wouldn't want to now. It has plenty of games on it! (Pacman, blocks, chess - which can beat me :( oh well)

xdarkxanarchyx
July 4th, 2007, 06:14 PM
I just remembered I have something sitting in the attic
It's a MultiMedia by Packard Bell that I pulled off of the curb.
Processor type: 80486
Reserved memory: 384KB
Extended memory: 19712KB
128K shadow RAM area
5.25" 360KB floppy
3.25" floppy
CD-rom -it has a case that pops out, confused me at first
214MB hard drive

rajeev1204
July 4th, 2007, 06:26 PM
Sinclair ZX spectrum +2
128 K RAM No hard drive but tape backup .

Still use it to play some classic games . Extremely high quality machine .


It still works :)



Beat that :p


P.S -- Forgot to mention , full function qwerty keyboard :)

Big_Croc7
July 4th, 2007, 09:43 PM
Lol... I guess that beats mine... thought I was doing quite well though! 128K... ah the good old days!

and yes mine has a keyboard :p , it even has a mouse as well (one button, and a connector I can't name)

weresheep
July 4th, 2007, 11:27 PM
Sinclair ZX spectrum +2
128 K RAM No hard drive but tape backup .

Still use it to play some classic games . Extremely high quality machine .


It still works :)



Beat that :p


P.S -- Forgot to mention , full function qwerty keyboard :)

Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ 48K :p

Oh, by the way, the +2 was made by Amstrad, not Sinclair ;)

-weresheep

celsofaf
July 5th, 2007, 03:30 AM
Now for the _really_ old machine: an Amstrad 1640, with a 5 1/4" floppy, a whopping 20Mb HD and... wait for it... 640kB of RAM.

"Your RAM should be enough for anybody."

:popcorn: :KS

wersdaluv
July 5th, 2007, 04:00 AM
All along, I thought my laptop was crappy until I saw your machines' specs.

LOL

Big_Croc7
July 5th, 2007, 08:51 AM
"Your RAM should be enough for anybody."

Indeed it is - I can word process on it, what more do you need? ;) I could possibly even run an old spreadsheet, if I could find one. Somebody said before about how little the use of computers seems to have advanced compared to their hardware - granted, the graphics on this machine may not be quite so pretty, and it might not have a spellchecker, but it does do most things in some way (ok... so video processing is probably not on the cards!).

I've even got an old modem for it I think - I think it was 2400bps, when 9600 was thought to be the fastest a telephone cable could possibly support!

:D

scragar
July 5th, 2007, 09:00 AM
Mine was built for 95, then I tried to supe it up a little(don't want to spend too much money, but wanted it use-able)so I gave it more ram, upgraded the hard-drive and installed XP, unfortunately it was as fast a snail in treacle.

I now have Ubuntu on it an although I need to get back onto 6.06 from 6.10(it's gone all buggy sinceI upgraded, and I can't fix it, so I'm gonna wipe it and re-install) and it runs much faster, although I still think it needs replacing when I can afford it...

Dragonbite
July 5th, 2007, 01:44 PM
I'm suddenly feeling good about getting rid of the Pentium I, 100MHz Hewlett Packard with 32MB of Ram (or was it 32 + original 8 = 40?) my Dad "gave" me (rather when he and Mom came to visit, he had it in the trunk and I got the feeling I would find it in front of my garage door if I didn't take it.). Oh, and it ran Windows95 (poorly).

dizee
July 5th, 2007, 03:21 PM
Typing this from my old PII PC, I installed a PCI adapter in the end and it works great.Running Puppy at the moment as the machine actually has less RAM than I thought (96 MB :/) so I don't think it'd be great with Xubuntu.

I kinda feel like Dr Frankenstein right now :D

irv.butler
July 6th, 2007, 12:00 AM
ok this one might not be a challenge for some of you guys but it is for me lol. I have a Compaq Armada 4131T
pentium3
1.3 hhd
64k mem
3.5 floppy

what should I run on it and how do I get linux in to it?

Warpnow
July 6th, 2007, 02:52 AM
I assume you mean 64mb of ram on a pentium 3?

Puppy linux or Damn Small Linux are probably your best bet.

Big_Croc7
July 6th, 2007, 09:21 AM
Vector linux might be worth a shot, certainly an older version than the current one I think would work fine. I haven't used it myself yet, and I've heard it's not the easiest to use - it does have a live CD though. DSL is probably the best to try first (live CD there too).

megamania
July 6th, 2007, 09:36 AM
Sinclair ZX spectrum +2
128 K RAM No hard drive but tape backup .

Still use it to play some classic games . Extremely high quality machine .

It still works :)

Beat that :p

Atari 400 ;-)

stoodleysnow
July 6th, 2007, 10:50 AM
rajeev1204, megamania, eat your hearts out:
Amstard CPC 464, 64k RAM, Colour monitor (a luxury at time of purchase) and cassette tape data recorder for all those games (we have 100 plus including such memorable favourites as Chuckie Egg, Dizzy and Sultan's Maze)
Still works like new, the only repairs it's had are a resoldered loose monitor signal connector and the power connector. Simply from wear and tear.

megamania
July 6th, 2007, 11:36 AM
rajeev1204, megamania, eat your hearts out:
Amstard CPC 464, 64k RAM, Colour monitor (a luxury at time of purchase) and cassette tape data recorder for all those games (we have 100 plus including such memorable favourites as Chuckie Egg, Dizzy and Sultan's Maze)
Still works like new, the only repairs it's had are a resoldered loose monitor signal connector and the power connector. Simply from wear and tear.
hmmm. I'm pretty sure the Atari 400 is older...

anyway, it has 8kb ram, no monitor output (only TV out) and "bubble" keyboard... :-)

It's just one piece of my Atari collection (any Falcon lovers out there?)

GerryB
July 6th, 2007, 11:54 AM
I have a Compaq iPaq 700 Celeron

Like this one:

http://images.ciao.com/iuk/images/products/normal/268/Compaq_iPAQ_Legacy_Light__5362268.jpg

A whole £20 from Ebay, plus some cheap memory, a whole 512MB! And a couple of free CD drives from work that were going to go in the bin... Not bad, it is still a fairly usable little PC for light web browsing, word processins, emailing, and managing remote servers.

Currently running Debian Etch with Fluxbox on it. Will give Puppy a try sometime though.

PS: Or was it £15? I can't remember...
Hi! I get a lot of old computers given to me mostly because people know I like to tinker with them and transform them into very useful Linux computers. I see you have Compaq. That's the one kind of computer I can't boot from the CD drive, not yet anyway. Can you from yours? if so, how? Do you know you can put Damn Small Linux 100% into RAM on that old computer of yours if you can boot from CD? Great work!

rajeev1204
July 6th, 2007, 12:29 PM
Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ 48K :p

Oh, by the way, the +2 was made by Amstrad, not Sinclair ;)

-weresheep



D A M N :p:p:p

AndyCooll
July 6th, 2007, 12:46 PM
We use a couple of "blazing fast" (by the standards of this thread) Toshiba Satellite S2800-200's. PIII 700 with 192mb RAM.

Installation requires the Alternate CD but apart from that they're great.They quite happily run the full version of Feisty. Not fast, but steady. Certainly perfectly ok for FF, Evolution, oOo, Amarok and other such general purpose uses of a laptop.

They each have a Belkin PCMCIA card. These use a Ralink driver that almost" work out of the box. Just require a little bit of manual configuration to get WPA encryption working.

:cool:

zach12
July 6th, 2007, 02:43 PM
i have a win98 and win2000 laptop and they work fine!

Bungo Pony
July 6th, 2007, 04:29 PM
I had to downgrade my garage computer to a pentium 133 with 32M RAM. Still runs DSL quite well. I needed the Pentium II for something else, and I wanted to put a couple more DVD ROMs into the machine (once I find them) so I can load 1000 more songs into it. Same hard drive: 1.2G.

For those of you talking about "classic" computers, here's my current pleasure:

http://oldcomputers.net/pics/trs80pc3.jpg

A whopping 1.2K RAM for me to play with, and one line of text (24 characters I believe). I still know how to program in BASIC and have made some cool little programs for it. And tape for storage, although I've been saving files to .wav and will be burning them onto an audio CD. I'll have to find a nice discman to use as a CD drive for this thing :)

I also have one of these:
http://www.ntrautanen.fi/computers/other/images/sharp_pc-1261.jpg

This one has 9k of RAM for me to play with, and two lines of text. But the real challenge lies in how much you can do with 1.2k :)

I built an adapter for these computers so I can write the program in a text editor on my PC and then upload to these computers via Telix over a serial port. It's easier than typing on that tiny keyboard.

rajeev1204
July 6th, 2007, 05:30 PM
I had to downgrade my garage computer to a pentium 133 with 32M RAM. Still runs DSL quite well. I needed the Pentium II for something else, and I wanted to put a couple more DVD ROMs into the machine (once I find them) so I can load 1000 more songs into it. Same hard drive: 1.2G.

For those of you talking about "classic" computers, here's my current pleasure:

http://oldcomputers.net/pics/trs80pc3.jpg

A whopping 1.2K RAM for me to play with, and one line of text (24 characters I believe). I still know how to program in BASIC and have made some cool little programs for it. And tape for storage, although I've been saving files to .wav and will be burning them onto an audio CD. I'll have to find a nice discman to use as a CD drive for this thing :)

I also have one of these:
http://www.ntrautanen.fi/computers/other/images/sharp_pc-1261.jpg

This one has 9k of RAM for me to play with, and two lines of text. But the real challenge lies in how much you can do with 1.2k :)

I built an adapter for these computers so I can write the program in a text editor on my PC and then upload to these computers via Telix over a serial port. It's easier than typing on that tiny keyboard.


wow cool

xpod
July 6th, 2007, 06:06 PM
well, i`ll never win any prizes for the oldest pc`s in the house but i should come close in the "cost" side of things i think.

We only have the three machines just now but i`ve had another 3 or 4 go through my hands this last 16 months or so that i`ve been using a pc.Other than the £50 i gave the lass for that very first one though i have`nt paid a penny for any of the hardware/software in this house ....not as far as computers go anyway.

Oops...i`m telling a lie.I spent £3 on the 5 meter svideo cable so we could watch movies on the TV without having to do all that encoding/burning lark.
Bar that though i`ve not paid a penny for anything since i sat down at that first old ME last March.:p

The pc`s we have just now
TIME case with 1.81Ghz,512Mb,64Mb,MX4000 & 2x 40G drives with feisty & gutsy.
Compaq Presario with 1.41Ghz,360Mb,onboard savage gfx 2x 20G drives with fesity & XP(never ued)

My girls use that 2nd machine as their own too although it sits side by side with mine so i can keep an eye on things and share the net & files etc with it(no router at home yet)

My lad has another Compaq Presario with 5-600Mhz(?) 256Mb ATI gfx 20g & 10g drives with Puppy and X/Ubuntu.
He & my oldest girl are getting new laptops at some point but we have other more important things to spend our cash on right now.....well,the wife does apparently:(
Our initial plan last year when deciding to get a computer was just to use the friends old one till VIsta came along then buy the nice shiney new one............phew:twisted:

I`ve even got the cost of our 20Meg broadband package down to less than half of what it`s supposed to be, thats as well as having a free 1Mb Set Top Box with a separate IP address flung in for good measure.

Spot the Scotsman:biggrin:

EDIT: I forgot to add the Dell Latitude someone has just gave me too.....tch tch

amadeus266
July 6th, 2007, 08:52 PM
I actually got an older version of DSL to install from floppies on an ancient Apple/Macintosh with a whopping 64k ram, 25mhz processor and 20MB hard drive (absolute minimal install of course). The install finished successfully after about 6 hours but unfortunately the power supply failed before I could really test it out. I've heard they make great boat anchors. LOL

BornToBeGeek
July 7th, 2007, 04:34 PM
It's good to know I'm not the only salvager out there ;)

I have an AMD K6/II 350MHz with a whopping 192Mb RAM and 4.3G HDD, running DSL just fine. It's just a backup computer though. First it had Kubuntu, now DSL and I'm thinking about putting Xubuntu on it (need to stay in the ?ubuntu family ;).

Right now I'm trying to transplant my home server from an Athlon XP1700 into a Celeron 677MHz. The Cely is sitting in a rare Cognac micro motherboard that's maxed out at 128Mb RAM (very temperamental motherboard, only accepts certain single sided RAMsticks...), it has an 8GB HDD with Kubuntu 6.06 on it. Had to chuck a network card in and it's burning up the tarmac apart from the PCI PATA card issue I'm having with it :p

I'm also building a media PC (that's why I need the Athlon XP1700 procy :D) that will have 256Mb RAM and 200Mb HDD. Not sure about the distro yet... Still have to look into MythTV.

My desktop PC is a new dual-boot AMD 64 - I love PC games so I sadly need XP... but find myself spending 90% of the time in my new shiny Kubuntu Feisty Fawn.

Sometimes I still boot up my old Amiga500, C64 or Cplus4. Nothing beats some good old-fashioned gaming :D Also I'm always on the lookout for my all-time dream computer, a ZX81 (probably won't put any OS on it, 1K RAM would be a tight fit even for Puppy, although I'm sure someone will try (or have tried?) to build a Linux box based on a Z80 processor)

vwbeamer
July 7th, 2007, 08:46 PM
Lol. I admit to being very, very, very proud of my old machine. I did put a bit of work into it, and it was my first real experience with Linux...I even painted the case of it from this weird grey-ish purple color to black.


LOL, I painted one of mine also. Black just gives it a more modern look, but I Painted accents with silver "hammer" paint. Thats the pant that doesn't dry smooth, but has a hammered metal texture.

I have Dell Pentium II 350mhz, 256 ram, 4.3 HD . I found this jewel beside the road where someone had placed it for trash pickup.. The windows 98 was corrupted and it wouldn't boot up.

I loaded Ubuntu 7.04 on it to see what would happen. I little slow, but completely usable. I'm down loading Xubuntu as we speak.

I plan on using this system to run my Christmas lights.

xdarkxanarchyx
July 7th, 2007, 10:05 PM
I plan on using this system to run my Christmas lights.

To run your Christmas lights?
Interesting..

OrbJinzo
July 7th, 2007, 10:15 PM
I think ill win this battle. I got an old old apple II the original apple 2 and it still runs on it. I play orgen trail on it alot.

Stew2
July 7th, 2007, 11:23 PM
I think ill win this battle. I got an old old apple II the original apple 2 and it still runs on it. I play orgen trail on it alot.

lol, my friends family had one of those when they first came out. I played Castle Wolfenstein on it for so many hours one night that my vision went all blurry/weird :D. Had to love those old monochrome monitors!

vwbeamer
July 8th, 2007, 03:09 AM
I just loaded Xubuntu on my Dell P2 350 mhz 256mb 4 gig hdd.

Works pretty good, posting from it now!

Free hardware and free software!!!!

Xubuntu is pretty cool, even has some cool effects for the desktop under settings>settings manager>window manger tweaks>compositor.

If you have two windows open on your desk, you can make the one behind be translucent
and the one on top will have shadows so it looks like it's floating. Wish they had this in the reg Ubuntu.

Darkcloud
July 8th, 2007, 03:41 AM
I had to laugh on seeing this post currently I have a mixture of about 15 old laptops I am repairing laying around my apartment ranging from 233 to 1000 MHz pentiums with a lacking range of ram call me nuts but I believe I can make the little suckers work and some of them I have my own machines are this one a Dell c610 laptop a Compaq EvO D500 Desktop and my number one is one I built myself from new parts ( got enough of the old stuff here to build a few ) which for the current moment still has XP on ( but not for very much longer!) Ubuntu feisty and Fedora 7 on the Evo and Feisty on my laptop I have noticed on the older Compaq (armada) that I had trouble with installing Ubuntu but Xubuntu went along well one I have here an old Northstar had xp on it amazing the damn thing even ran...

obrient
July 8th, 2007, 04:18 AM
I really enjoyed reading this thread. It is funny that the original laptop that started it is similar to one that I am running now.

I have an Toshiba Satelite 2590 CDT with 128MB RAM.

I scavenged the hard drive for putting in into a portable enclosure (5 GB) and decided to simply run SLAX linux live CD on it. I have to say that it has been great reading the posts on this topic. I will definitely continue to look for old hand me downs knowing that there are a lot of others doing the same.

GerryB
July 8th, 2007, 01:30 PM
I did search a bit on this forum and on you tube,

has anybody succeded in running Xubuntu alternate on something similar to a 166MMX pentium w. 64 MBs?

Secondly: are Puppy and Damn Small friendly to Linux-inexperienced users?

I run DSL 100% in RAM - no installation yet.
I installed Puppy on a USB flash drive (2 GB). Using "Install", I dowloaded OpenOffice Cutdown and OpenOffice Missing. Everything worked like a charm.
They are both extremely friendly - no terminal use required.
DSL has an automatic installation icon for hard drives - it would certainly work on your computer.
I don't think you can install Puppy on a hard drive easily - you would have to google it and follow instructions. It does have different booting parameters though and you can save your personal settings to a hard drive and continue to boot from CD. This is what I did for a 1 GB hard drive. Your Puppy-save file can be enlarged with time, so start small - maybe 300 MB and leave room for copying files for a faster boot time. Later, if your save file is too small, the system will ask you if you want to enlarge it providing you have room left (but you can't make it smaller!) or you can enlarge it at any time before powering off. (Go to "Utilities"...)
These two distro's are perfect for computers with less than 256 MB of RAM.

Atreus12
July 8th, 2007, 02:19 PM
I had been meaning to post in this thread, but hadn't gotten around to it until now.

I received a hand-me-down laptop, that was my sisters.

System specs:
-Pentium III 600Mhz
-64 Mb Ram
-6GB hard drive
-8 MB video card
-2 usb ports
-Swapable DVD-Rom and Floppy
-1024x768 screen

When I initially got it (before I got into linux) It was SO slow on win 98 that it just went under the bed for about a year. I got it back out recently and loaded DSL on it, and it ran pretty well.

Then my friends laptop mobo died, and he gave me 2x256mb sticks of ram. :evil:

So the laptop is now running Debian Etch with fluxbox, and has a 48 second boot up time (without X). The laptop shares a USB wireless card with my desktop.

After using the laptop, I liked Etch+fluxbox so much that I installed it on my (not crappy) desktop
-P4 3.0 Ghz
-1GB RAM

The installations are basically mirrors of each other:
Internet Browser - Iceweasel+Dillo
Email - Sylpheed
Word Processor - Openoffice
MP3 Player - Orpheus+MOCP
Chat - Centericq+Irssi
Terminal - Aterm
File manager - Emelfm+PCmanfm
Image editing - Xpaint+Gimp+imagemagick
Calculator - Qalculate
Bittorrent - rtorrent
Misc - Conky+htop

My favorite feature is that I can pick a directory to randomly set a background on each boot. It's nice to have variety.

I have been so impressed with this laptop, it's really unbelievable. I think it's funny that I've mirrored by laptop setup on my desktop, as now they are nearly identical.

My only complaints are that Youtube videos are really too much for this system :(
In fact, according to conky, Youtube videos account for 30% of 3Ghz (on my desktop). :o

Also, if anyone knows how to disable 'find' from running every day, I would like to set it to run once per week. I don't have *that* many cpu cycles to spare.

Here is a screenshot of aterm and conky in action:

Happy_Man
July 8th, 2007, 04:16 PM
A-hem..... my computer is (IMO) better specs-wise than a lot of the ones here..... I'm just amazed I can have it run the stuff it runs:

Intel Pentium 4/ 2.4 GHz
256 MB RAM
120 GB HDD
Nvidia Geforce4 MX 420

This thing runs Kubuntu, Compiz Fusion, I use Opera as my web browser, it serves as a server for the rest of the house besides, and I generally run Windows in a VM at the same time as Ubuntu. On 24/7. I am so proud of this computer. *sniffles*

joe.turion64x2
July 8th, 2007, 05:12 PM
A-hem..... my computer is (IMO) better specs-wise than a lot of the ones here..... I'm just amazed I can have it run the stuff it runs:

Intel Pentium 4/ 2.4 GHz
256 MB RAM
120 GB HDD
Nvidia Geforce4 MX 420

This thing runs Kubuntu, Compiz Fusion, I use Opera as my web browser, it serves as a server for the rest of the house besides, and I generally run Windows in a VM at the same time as Ubuntu. On 24/7. I am so proud of this computer. *sniffles*
With a little more RAM it could do even more. It does not use RIMM memory, does it?

Happy_Man
July 8th, 2007, 05:34 PM
With a little more RAM it could do even more. It does not use RIMM memory, does it?
I don't know. This computer is really old, here's the website for it: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim8250/index.htm

joe.turion64x2
July 8th, 2007, 10:55 PM
I don't know. This computer is really old, here's the website for it: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim8250/index.htm
Yes it is. Probably one of the formers Pentium 4's out there, with 400MHz FSB and RIMM memory.

vwbeamer
July 8th, 2007, 11:52 PM
P2 350mhz 256 ram machine plays youtube fine with Xubuntu. Matter of fact, I'm starting to like Xubuntu better then Ubuntu.




I had been meaning to post in this thread, but hadn't gotten around to it until now.

I received a hand-me-down laptop, that was my sisters.

System specs:
-Pentium III 600Mhz
-64 Mb Ram
-6GB hard drive
-8 MB video card
-2 usb ports
-Swapable DVD-Rom and Floppy
-1024x768 screen

When I initially got it (before I got into linux) It was SO slow on win 98 that it just went under the bed for about a year. I got it back out recently and loaded DSL on it, and it ran pretty well.

Then my friends laptop mobo died, and he gave me 2x256mb sticks of ram. :evil:

So the laptop is now running Debian Etch with fluxbox, and has a 48 second boot up time (without X). The laptop shares a USB wireless card with my desktop.

After using the laptop, I liked Etch+fluxbox so much that I installed it on my (not crappy) desktop
-P4 3.0 Ghz
-1GB RAM

The installations are basically mirrors of each other:
Internet Browser - Iceweasel+Dillo
Email - Sylpheed
Word Processor - Openoffice
MP3 Player - Orpheus+MOCP
Chat - Centericq+Irssi
Terminal - Aterm
File manager - Emelfm+PCmanfm
Image editing - Xpaint+Gimp+imagemagick
Calculator - Qalculate
Bittorrent - rtorrent
Misc - Conky+htop

My favorite feature is that I can pick a directory to randomly set a background on each boot. It's nice to have variety.

I have been so impressed with this laptop, it's really unbelievable. I think it's funny that I've mirrored by laptop setup on my desktop, as now they are nearly identical.

My only complaints are that Youtube videos are really too much for this system :(
In fact, according to conky, Youtube videos account for 30% of 3Ghz (on my desktop). :o

Also, if anyone knows how to disable 'find' from running every day, I would like to set it to run once per week. I don't have *that* many cpu cycles to spare.

Here is a screenshot of aterm and conky in action:

Tyche
July 9th, 2007, 12:08 AM
Start with this:
Packard Bell (Pachard Hell?) computer that was 5 years old.

Add this:
A son who felt that it should be upgraded for me, and gave me a Christmas present of
1. New case
2. AllInOne (all in wonder?) motherboard
3. Pentium III, 750 Mgz processor

Then do this after 2 years:
1. Add Nvidia GForce 4 video board (Some graphics programs wouldn't work on the onboard video)
2. Replace AllInOne mother board with a Tyan motherboard, because the on-board video wouldn't disengage.
3. Replace the power supply, because the Tyan motherboard and Nvidia card required a minimum of 300 watts.
4. Replace the hard drive with an 80 gig drive, because the 13 gig Maxtor drive finally gave out.
5. Add 256M RAM to make a total of 512M.
6. Add CD-RW Burner
7. Replace CD-RW burner with Sony DVD burner.
8. Replace Sony DVD burner with Liteon DVD-R dual layer burner when the Sony crapped out.
9. Chang monitor to a Samsung 17" flat panel

After 2 years, get rid of Microsoft and move to Linux (first as dual boot from 2 partitions, and finally totally Ubuntu).
The computer is only off when the power fails or we move (twice, so far).

Now running Feisty Faun - Gnome - FireFox and ThunderBird - etc. but NOT running Compiz (I'll have to wait for the new machine to be able to run it. I'm getting a Dell.) :)

_____
Craig
Tyche

regomodo
July 9th, 2007, 12:28 AM
mine isn't that old (1998 i think) but it comes with P3 450MHz, 64MB pc100 ram, 4GB HDD, 2MB vram (!). A Thinkpad 570e

I've pimped it out by adding 256MB of ram, a 40GB hdd, wifi g card, and a higher cap battery. In total cost me around £200 (i had to buy the dock & ultrabay drive to install os). Possibly a bit too much but it's such a well made laptop and soo small without feeling it. The size of a pad of A4 paper.

Running Ubuntu Feisty Server with icewm, rox, kazehakase, pidgin, rhythmbox, vlc, and wine. Not that impressed with kazehakase so i'm going to install firefox from it's site, not the repo's.

Just have to figure out how to automount, autologin without a DM ( i.e. without the $ startx command), figure out a kinit error, monitor the battery somehow, cpu scale (could do it in windows but seems impossible in linux), solve a "caught signal 11" error, browse network shares, and figure out how to use this wifi card in roaming mode.

Quiet a lot to sort out tbh but intend on doing fup all this summer. Tired of working 6days a week through sunshine.

regomodo
July 9th, 2007, 12:32 AM
P2 350mhz 256 ram machine plays youtube fine with Xubuntu. Matter of fact, I'm starting to like Xubuntu better then Ubuntu.

How? mine (see above) is better spec (possibly not for vram) but i get ~3fps with youtube. I can play xvid, x264, and iso'd dvd's perfectly.

vwbeamer
July 9th, 2007, 12:48 AM
Not sure why or how, it just does. Have you tried Xubuntu?


How? mine (see above) is better spec (possibly not for vram) but i get ~3fps with youtube. I can play xvid, x264, and iso'd dvd's perfectly.

regomodo
July 9th, 2007, 12:49 AM
I`ve even got the cost of our 20Meg broadband package down to less than half of what it`s supposed to be, thats as well as having a free 1Mb Set Top Box with a separate IP address flung in for good measure.



I'd like to know how you did that? Mainly because i'm a student and Telewest raped us this year. Paid a fair bit for 10Mb internet and it's average is more like 1Mb.

I regularly did a pathping and every time i was getting around packet 97% failure at the 2nd hop (the streets router i guess). Always felt like trashing it with petrol just so they'd do something about it and fix it. Oh well, got a few weeks left of internet before i have to go isp shopping again.

regomodo
July 9th, 2007, 12:52 AM
Not sure why or how, it just does. Have you tried Xubuntu?

Yeah. I've done a lot of os shopping. Started with xubuntu. Also tried Ubuntu too but even after installing all the codecs suggested at the ubuntu guide, i always get crappy youtube performance

kerry_s
July 9th, 2007, 01:17 AM
Yeah. I've done a lot of os shopping. Started with xubuntu. Also tried Ubuntu too but even after installing all the codecs suggested at the ubuntu guide, i always get crappy youtube performance

Have you tried straight debian?
http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian-cd/4.0_r0/i386/iso-cd/debian-40r0-i386-xfce-CD-1.iso

*ubuntu likes to cut out alot code for older systems, some that make old systems run better. Debian leaves everthing stock.

i use debian+base+fluxbox on a 450mhz 256ram vaio pcg-f430, this thing flies with debian, when i ran *ubuntu it was really slow with everything from booting to vids.
http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian-cd/4.0_r0/i386/iso-cd/debian-40r0-i386-businesscard.iso

base install
apt-get install xorg gdm synaptic fluxbox
reboot(ctrl+alt+delete)
select fluxbox in session(important) and login
open synaptic and continue installing

that's how i usually start off.

if you want speed go custom, you cant beat a custom install with only what you need. if you put some thought in it you will have more than enough resources to do youtube or any vids for that matter.

pic, yes i can even multi-task with out freezing.

regomodo
July 9th, 2007, 01:23 AM
@ kerrys

Yeah, i had thought of trying debian etch recently. Just was a miffed the last time i tried to get an iso from a uk mirror. It was so slow i gave up. Ha, i went and downloaded Gentoo instead. God knows why.

I do currently have a custom setup (see above). I was going to ask to see if there was anything i could cut out i.e pointless packages etc. It's currently at 28MB used once logged into X. 17MB with no X

I'll give a debain download another shot. BTW, i'm trying to stay in cli and not use gui's when i can. I don't use synaptic, gdebi, ark and i'm not a fan of the 'boxes.

Also, i doubt the businesscard will work with me. This laptop only has wifi (no ethernet) and an rt61 at that. I doubt a 32mb base install will configure it correctly for wpa. I'll try but i guess it'll take a whole lot of work to get packages needed to install drivers.

Cheers

{EDIT} Just realised who you are. 1 of those errors was caused by following your autologin guide i tried several hours ago. Cheers for the effort but i guess i'll have to keep looking.

regomodo
July 9th, 2007, 01:35 AM
double post.

I had to wait 5mins for my internet come back online and the edit must have accidentally been thought to be a new post. They must be doing servicing, that or the whole lot is playing up again

Compucore
July 9th, 2007, 01:51 AM
I wish I could get my Silicon Graphics machine to work properly. over here. Its the O2 from SGI. And I am having a bugger of a time in getting it to boot into the debian version of linux. I don't even know where I could pick up a version of Iriix So I could work with it porperly.

:D

Compucore

kerry_s
July 9th, 2007, 02:27 AM
@ kerrys

Yeah, i had thought of trying debian etch recently. Just was a miffed the last time i tried to get an iso from a uk mirror. It was so slow i gave up. Ha, i went and downloaded Gentoo instead. God knows why.

I do currently have a custom setup (see above). I was going to ask to see if there was anything i could cut out i.e pointless packages etc. It's currently at 28MB used once logged into X. 17MB with no X

I'll give a debain download another shot. BTW, i'm trying to stay in cli and not use gui's when i can. I don't use synaptic, gdebi, ark and i'm not a fan of the 'boxes.

Also, i doubt the businesscard will work with me. This laptop only has wifi (no ethernet) and an rt61 at that. I doubt a 32mb base install will configure it correctly for wpa. I'll try but i guess it'll take a whole lot of work to get packages needed to install drivers.

Cheers

{EDIT} Just realised who you are. 1 of those errors was caused by following your autologin guide i tried several hours ago. Cheers for the effort but i guess i'll have to keep looking.


yeah i replied to that, that "how to" was from the early edgy days, now a days i always recommend gdm, it just makes no sense when the gdm uses less resources than regular startx, the only thing you would save is the size of gdm, but i gladly spare the space for less headaches elsewhere. less errors=better performance.

regomodo
July 9th, 2007, 08:09 PM
hmm, i tried what you suggested. Caused more problems than it solved, if any. I didn't get the kinit errors. Managed to compile and install the rt61 drivers but i could not get it configured. None of my usual iwconfig, iwlist commands worked as it didn't understand what they meant.

I only briefly tried it so i'll have another bash later as it's on a spare hdd.

[edit] I installed the default debian etch. not bad. my wifi issues were because you have to use almost any command as root. In ubuntu you don't even have to sudo those. At least i know now. One thing i have noticed with debian is that it's package repo's are slow (x7 slower) when compared to ubuntu.

xdarkxanarchyx
July 11th, 2007, 06:11 AM
I don't know. This computer is really old, here's the website for it: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim8250/index.htm

I have a Dimension 2350. Got it from a friend, she had managed to put over a thousand viruses on the thing. Amazing. Came with a Celeron 2GHz w/ 128KB L2 cache, I now upped it to a P4 2.6GHz @ 533MHz FSB, I believe with 512KB L2 cache -Northwood- and put another 128MB stick of ram in to it totally 384MB. Soon I plan on maxing it out at 1GB though and making it a server ^_^ It does have some pretty decent onboard Intel graphics I must add. Can handle WoW and stuff fine. Oh and it's running Debian Testing/Unstable with Fluxbox as the WM.

Happy_Man
July 11th, 2007, 01:33 PM
I have a Dimension 2350. Got it from a friend, she had managed to put over a thousand viruses on the thing. Amazing. Came with a Celeron 2GHz w/ 128KB L2 cache, I now upped it to a P4 2.6GHz @ 533MHz FSB, I believe with 512KB L2 cache -Northwood- and put another 128MB stick of ram in to it totally 384MB. Soon I plan on maxing it out at 1GB though and making it a server ^_^ It does have some pretty decent onboard Intel graphics I must add. Can handle WoW and stuff fine. Oh and it's running Debian Testing/Unstable with Fluxbox as the WM.
Really, that's pretty cool. Mine came with 256 MB RAM, and a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor. Haven't done anything to it, because I can't find compatible memory for it. I'm so sad....... :(

And how do you get over a thousand viruses on one computer? I would think it would either blow up or refuse to start up.....

raul_
July 11th, 2007, 01:46 PM
I have a Dimension 2350. Got it from a friend, she had managed to put over a thousand viruses on the thing. Amazing. Came with a Celeron 2GHz w/ 128KB L2 cache, I now upped it to a P4 2.6GHz @ 533MHz FSB, I believe with 512KB L2 cache -Northwood- and put another 128MB stick of ram in to it totally 384MB. Soon I plan on maxing it out at 1GB though and making it a server ^_^ It does have some pretty decent onboard Intel graphics I must add. Can handle WoW and stuff fine. Oh and it's running Debian Testing/Unstable with Fluxbox as the WM.

I think that 1GB for a server is kind of a waste. 512 or even 384 would do

xdarkxanarchyx
July 11th, 2007, 09:38 PM
Really, that's pretty cool. Mine came with 256 MB RAM, and a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor. Haven't done anything to it, because I can't find compatible memory for it. I'm so sad....... :(

And how do you get over a thousand viruses on one computer? I would think it would either blow up or refuse to start up.....
That's weird. I put a few different types of RAM in mine and it works fine. Try SuperTalent maybe? I bought a 512MB stick (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609047) at one point and it ran nicely.
I have no idea. My friend did it, it basically stopped working that's why I got it. I let it start up.. for like 10 minutes lol then half ran I think it was either Clamwin or Spybot and just gave up. Removed a few things that I wanted an reinstalled. Windows XP unfortunately. Later it got Ubuntu & now Debian =)


I think that 1GB for a server is kind of a waste. 512 or even 384 would do

Yeah, I might end using it for other things at the same time. It's all just an idea at the moment.

Happy_Man
July 12th, 2007, 02:00 PM
That's weird. I put a few different types of RAM in mine and it works fine. Try SuperTalent maybe? I bought a 512MB stick (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609047) at one point and it ran nicely.
I have no idea. My friend did it, it basically stopped working that's why I got it. I let it start up.. for like 10 minutes lol then half ran I think it was either Clamwin or Spybot and just gave up. Removed a few things that I wanted an reinstalled. Windows XP unfortunately. Later it got Ubuntu & now Debian =)



Yeah, I might end using it for other things at the same time. It's all just an idea at the moment.
Lucky you. According to that website I posted says it takes RDRAM. I did a search for it.... it's old, and expensive by the looks of it. Like, $100 for one 128 MB stick. That's crazy......

xdarkxanarchyx
July 12th, 2007, 02:05 PM
Lucky you. According to that website I posted says it takes RDRAM. I did a search for it.... it's old, and expensive by the looks of it. Like, $100 for one 128 MB stick. That's crazy......

Ouch, that sucks.
I just remembered.... That processor is in my other machine. I have a Celeron 2.60GHz in that one. :oops:

xpod
July 12th, 2007, 10:29 PM
I'd like to know how you did that? Mainly because i'm a student and Telewest raped us this year. Paid a fair bit for 10Mb internet and it's average is more like 1Mb.

I regularly did a pathping and every time i was getting around packet 97% failure at the 2nd hop (the streets router i guess). Always felt like trashing it with petrol just so they'd do something about it and fix it. Oh well, got a few weeks left of internet before i have to go isp shopping again.
__________________

Another disgruntled VM customer.

I wont list all the problems we`ve had in the 16 months or so we`ve had the services but suffice to say theres been a few.If your own bb service is as bad as that though then you should have been on the phone to them months ago:???:

They charge for support calls now so always make sure it`s not your own hardware before you call.If it turns out to be a genuine problem then you`ll get the cost refunded.The best thing to do before calling is plug your modem directly into a Windows machine....they might also try and blame it on spyware and stuff though so just tell them it`s a fresh install to shut them up.

No point even calling up if your using Linux(it`s not in the script) and if your using a router they`ll only try and blame that.
By rights if your 10Mb service is as low as 1Mb then something should be done about it but if you let them fob you off on the phone then your as well just sacking them right now.

Loads of people are having problems since VM upgraded the 10Mb to a 20Mb service and many of us would rather just have the relatively stable 10Mb connections again.This obviously is`nt an option though.

Most of our own problems were long before any upgrades and were mainly down to "Billing issues".Every month there would be some sort of **** up on their part but the final straw was when they took two lots of the £129 bill out of our bank last November....then denied it(at first)
That got us our first free upgrade from the 1Mb stb to the 4Mb sacm but they also left the stb connection on as part of the deal ... i`d told them i needed to add more pc`s and could probably get a free router with other isp`s as well as less problems.

My most recent call was in connection with the latest speed problems.When we signed up last year it was our first computer/internet connection and i didn`t have the slightest idea about broadband speeds and all that stuff so as long as it was ON back then i was happy enough.

Of course,that was then and this is now:).
We have the infamous NTL120 modem which in itself has caused enough debate since the so-called upgrade.Although i`ve seen 2000Kb/s out of it i`ve never seen the full 20Mb and like many others it`s more often than not down at 5-6Mb......and thats without the stm thats also part of the deal now.
Anyway,the latest guy run through his scripts & tests and after 45 Minutes of changing setups and swapping pc`s etc he concluded that i did indeed have a problem but he admitted that VM were still in the process of upgrading the network blah blah blah.
I then allowed him to talk me into staying at half price for the next 3 months:)

My XL bb bill this month is only £13 so it seems they cant even half the bill without making a mess of it.I mean half of £37 is £18.50 is it not??

If we hadn`t had the problems we did then i might well still be using the 1Mb Set Top Box connection.
Problems have actually been very beificial to us since sitting down with our first computer/internet connection
last year.....the more we have the better things get for some strange reason:biggrin:

EDIT..S**T...i rambled a bit there...sorry

sugarland2k
July 12th, 2007, 11:02 PM
I have a tough but aged...

Panasonic CF-72 Toughbook, Pentium 3 at a speedy 700 Mhz
A high 20 Gig HD and 256MB of ram.

However it runs Ubuntu 7.04 well dual booting with (yuk) Windows 2000. I know I need to just do it and dump windows 2000 ;)

Friends do not let friends run Vista !

xpod
July 12th, 2007, 11:45 PM
Friends do not let friends run Vista !

Too late:)

Pitbull11188
July 12th, 2007, 11:46 PM
I'm rocking a dell dimension 4300s.

p4 @ 1.6ghz (not ******)
128mb (kills me)
40gb hd
ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra TF @ 64mb


Overall it's unusable in my experience using any 'buntu distro including xubuntu. So I always do a CLI install and then install X and Fluxbox. Using fluxbox allows me to comfortably use kazehakase, gaim, abiword, thunar, and a couple terminals. Xmms kills my system's ram so I can only use it by itself, same for vlc.

I enjoy building my system from the base up because it's quite easy and allows you to trim alot of the excess.

xdarkxanarchyx
July 13th, 2007, 04:00 AM
I'm rocking a dell dimension 4300s.

p4 @ 1.6ghz (not ******)
128mb (kills me)
40gb hd
ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra TF @ 64mb


Overall it's unusable in my experience using any 'buntu distro including xubuntu. So I always do a CLI install and then install X and Fluxbox. Using fluxbox allows me to comfortably use kazehakase, gaim, abiword, thunar, and a couple terminals. Xmms kills my system's ram so I can only use it by itself, same for vlc.

I enjoy building my system from the base up because it's quite easy and allows you to trim alot of the excess.

Have you tried any of the command line players? Since I have a large collection i find that randomplay works nicely, but there's a bunch of others. You can just use like mpg321

mpg321 /music/A*/Arch*/*/*
Same with using ogg123

ogg123 /music/D/Depeche*/*/*

byrdmeln
July 16th, 2007, 09:12 PM
I have an old ibm thinkpad i1200

500 mhz Celeron
196 megs ram (which is maxed out)
6 gig hard-drive
cd-rom drive about to give up the ghost

The biggest pain about the computer is the monitor which can only display 800x600 max, and a lot of ubuntu´s windows barely fit on the screen (I have to turn auto hiding on the task bars so i can click ok on most option windows). I´ve run ubuntu, kubuntu, mint, pclinox, mephis and fedora successfully though they were a little on the /cough slow side. DSL and Puppy fly on the machine, making it almost new-like, but had to install onto hard-drive cause of the failing cd-rom drive and they can become a pain then. Tinyme worked very well on the machine, but still buggy and it had no usb-stick support making ndiswrapper a pain. So I´m using Xubuntu. It´s not the fastest, or the prettiest, but it´s stable--no worst then windows 98 in speed--and it just works.

jgrabham
July 16th, 2007, 09:18 PM
Currently installing xubuntu on my IBM stinkpad 600.

I have a bad feeling I'll have no sound, as I never did in puppy or DSL, but I live in hope. (any Ideas)

P.S.
300Mhz P2
2MB Graphics
2.2GB HDD
228MB RAM
Battery which never lasts more than 30mins!(in XP)
CDROM drive

edd07
July 16th, 2007, 09:54 PM
I have a Clamshell g3 iBook, wich I bought from a friend. It came with Mac OS 9, and only has 3GB of storage, which sucks, but it runs Xubuntu just fine, even with the transparency effects stuff, and I only upgraded its RAM from 128 to 256 megs. It's Awsome :D

byrdmeln
July 17th, 2007, 02:54 AM
Jgrapham ...good luck!

With DSL i had to mess around a lot with sound, usually got it working but it was tough.

Ubuntu can be slow, and bloated and it doesn´t include ndiswrapper or any codecs, but it´s stable and it has dang good hardware detection. And there are many many forums threads and ubuntu wiki articles on getting sound to work so I´m hoping you´ll be ok :)

jgrabham
July 17th, 2007, 08:05 PM
Jgrapham ...good luck!

With DSL i had to mess around a lot with sound, usually got it working but it was tough.

Ubuntu can be slow, and bloated and it doesn´t include ndiswrapper or any codecs, but it´s stable and it has dang good hardware detection. And there are many many forums threads and ubuntu wiki articles on getting sound to work so I´m hoping you´ll be ok :)

Thanks, no sound (despite editing three files like some web page told me too) and now the programme which makes my USB modem work wont start! oh well, back to my desktop for 3 weeks untill I can be bothered to have a go at it again :] (still, what do you expect from an 8 year old laptop)

aristotlewilde
July 18th, 2007, 05:33 AM
I recently picked up an old Armada 100s Laptop. 550mhz AMD K6 w/ 192mb RAM.

I got it for a song and gave it a new paint job.

I have been installing Ubuntu 7.04 and Automatix for the last 4 hours. Once it is all installed/configued, she'll be a solid little machine.

I am using a PC Card for Ethernet right now. Plan on picking up a cheapo wifi card tomorrow...

Check out the pic. It is much slower than it looks!

http://i185.photobucket.com/albums/x255/maxinflixion/slower001.jpg

joe.turion64x2
July 18th, 2007, 06:35 AM
I recently picked up an old Armada 100s Laptop. 550mhz AMD K6 w/ 192mb RAM.

I got it for a song and gave it a new paint job.

I have been installing Ubuntu 7.04 and Automatix for the last 4 hours. Once it is all installed/configued, she'll be a solid little machine.

I am using a PC Card for Ethernet right now. Plan on picking up a cheapo wifi card tomorrow...

Check out the pic. It is much slower than it looks!

http://i185.photobucket.com/albums/x255/maxinflixion/slower001.jpg
That's a nice machine. I can imagine how slow it is because my first computer had very similar specs, however it is a desktop. You could boost performance a bit by adding a new hard drive (a 5400RPM drive makes a difference when compared to a 4200RPM).

Just a suggestion.

Joe.

Frak
July 18th, 2007, 06:53 AM
Dell Inspiron 2500
256MB of RAM
10 HD
Intel 24-bit SVG
16x CD
Floppy
PIII 973MHz Processor
Battery that doesn't last more than about 45 seconds.

aristotlewilde
July 18th, 2007, 12:58 PM
That's a nice machine. I can imagine how slow it is because my first computer had very similar specs, however it is a desktop. You could boost performance a bit by adding a new hard drive (a 5400RPM drive makes a difference when compared to a 4200RPM).

Just a suggestion.

Joe.

You speak the truth! I'll add a new drive eventually. It took me literally 5 hours to get through Ubuntu Install and Automatix (part way thru Automatix that is). I plan to run XFCE, but installed Ubuntu for easier Samba Support.

joe.turion64x2
July 18th, 2007, 08:18 PM
You speak the truth! I'll add a new drive eventually. It took me literally 5 hours to get through Ubuntu Install and Automatix (part way thru Automatix that is). I plan to run XFCE, but installed Ubuntu for easier Samba Support.
You monitored it! You've got patience. When I installed something 'fancy' to the machine I used to leave it alone and go out for a long while (in that time I didn't have the laptop so I had anything else computer-related to do meanwhile.

Joe.

aristotlewilde
July 18th, 2007, 09:03 PM
Ok, so I definitely want to use GNOME, but what can I disable to gain a little speed?

joe.turion64x2
July 18th, 2007, 09:21 PM
Ok, so I definitely want to use GNOME, but what can I disable to gain a little speed?
I don't know why but most distros I have tried (Ubuntu included) run useless/unnecessary daemons by default (WTF is a bluetooth daemon doing in my machine when it does not have bluetooth?). You can check in Desktop -> Administration -> Services.

Perhaps XFCE fits well on that lappy though (it is Gnome based but much more lightweight).

Joe.

Kowalski_GT-R
July 18th, 2007, 11:48 PM
It's done!

I had Xubuntu 7.04 Alternate run (well crawl) on a 233 Pentium with 64Mbs

I think it's an achievement in itself, an enormous one for a beginner like me!

I am proud of my old PC!

Only problem, serial port mouse isn't working.....

lisati
July 19th, 2007, 12:01 AM
Just flicking through this thread while my old Win98 p133 64Mb ram 3Gb HD (upgraded from the 1Gb drive it came with), internal modem pulled out & replaced with USB - it is taking FOREVER to do a scan for viruses!

I must keep my eyes open for a suitable Linux distro to put on it & figure out how to get the silly thing to boot properly from CD without it locking up or going "nuts", even if it means fixing up and re-installing the CD drive it came with.

riven0
July 19th, 2007, 12:09 AM
Ah, nice thread. I've got an old PIII 750MHz with 384Mbs RAM and an old ATI 9000... And best of all, it's running Ubuntu 7.04 with Gnome. It's a little slower than my 2Ghz comp, but not that much. Must be ResierFS. :mrgreen:

urukrama
July 19th, 2007, 01:28 AM
If you want to have a lighter gnome setup, try a server install and then install gnome-core. It is very basic (no applications, no gui for admin tasks, etc.), but you can always add whatever else you like later on.

raul_
July 19th, 2007, 01:30 AM
If you want to have a lighter gnome setup, try a server install and then install gnome-core. It is very basic (no applications, no gui for admin tasks, etc.), but you can always add whatever else you like later on.

Not quite the same. Server still has some uneeded daemons

ameyer
July 19th, 2007, 01:45 AM
Dell Latitude CPx, 500 MHz P3, 128 MB of RAM, 6 GB HD, ATI graphics card that works surprisingly well, Debian Etch with fluxbox, Iceweasel (rebranded firefox) for web browsing (although I've increasingly been using elinks), Icedove (rebranded Thunderbird) for email. I used to have Ubuntu on it, but I decided that there are certain advantages to a long release cycle.

raul_
July 19th, 2007, 01:47 AM
What do you run then?

andrewpmk
July 19th, 2007, 03:38 AM
I only just got a new computer yesterday to replace my 6 year old, physically falling apart laptop - I had been working without a "d", "l", "e", "F2" or "esc" keys for quite a while - to some extent I credit this with teaching me how to touch type! - The casing on the screen fell off whenever I tried to open/close it! - It has 256 M ram - 20G hdd and 1.7Ghz processor (When I got it, I was quite chuffed!) - Despite this It actually ran beryl (quite well) - I am still quite attached to it so I think I'll do something with it although I am well pleased with my new laptop - currently have a duel boot between ubuntu and vista!

If you can figure out how to fix it, it's a perfectly good laptop.

joe.turion64x2
July 19th, 2007, 05:26 AM
I only just got a new computer yesterday to replace my 6 year old, physically falling apart laptop - I had been working without a "d", "l", "e", "F2" or "esc" keys for quite a while - to some extent I credit this with teaching me how to touch type! - The casing on the screen fell off whenever I tried to open/close it! - It has 256 M ram - 20G hdd and 1.7Ghz processor (When I got it, I was quite chuffed!) - Despite this It actually ran beryl (quite well) - I am still quite attached to it so I think I'll do something with it although I am well pleased with my new laptop - currently have a duel boot between ubuntu and vista!
Depending on the model you could pick a replacement case, perhaps from a PC repair shop.

Joe.

aristotlewilde
July 19th, 2007, 02:34 PM
I am selling my current craptop on craigslist today. I've decided that 550mhz is just TOO slow. I am set on full blown Ubuntu (ok, maybe no desktop effects), so I must have more power!!!

I will replace it with a NEW craptop by next week :guitar:

stalker145
July 20th, 2007, 03:16 AM
WOOT!!

I found an old PII-333 (have to check the jumpers, it's only running 275) at the Salvation Army for $7USD. It came with 128MB RAM, a 2.1GB HDD, and an S3 card that wouldn't work... I bumped the RAM to 384, put a spare NVIDIA 5200 in and loaded Fluxbuntu... well, eventually loaded it. I started out the day hard-headedly experimenting with everything from full-flown Ubuntu to Xubuntu to Ubuntu server (couldn't figure out how to load a GUI) before I came across my old Fluxbuntu disk.

And I still have a pair of old P1's (I think - maybe older) that I got for $6USD at the same place that I'm hoping to turn into firewalls or something.

I'm tellin' ya, Linux ROCKS!! :guitar:

joe.turion64x2
July 20th, 2007, 04:45 AM
WOOT!!

I found an old PII-333 (have to check the jumpers, it's only running 275) at the Salvation Army for $7USD. It came with 128MB RAM, a 2.1GB HDD, and an S3 card that wouldn't work... I bumped the RAM to 384, put a spare NVIDIA 5200 in and loaded Fluxbuntu... well, eventually loaded it. I started out the day hard-headedly experimenting with everything from full-flown Ubuntu to Xubuntu to Ubuntu server (couldn't figure out how to load a GUI) before I came across my old Fluxbuntu disk.

And I still have a pair of old P1's (I think - maybe older) that I got for $6USD at the same place that I'm hoping to turn into firewalls or something.

I'm tellin' ya, Linux ROCKS!! :guitar:
Do you know something about clusters?
Perhaps Beowulf will interest you.

Joe.

erikpiper
July 20th, 2007, 05:27 AM
I have a modern PC.. (Amd 3500+ at 2.63 Ghz..) But I have an old laptop I am getting to the point where it is my ultraportable.. Needs a battery first.. Sonj Z505J- 350 Mhz!

AND- On my desktop- My keyboard is a 1991 IBM Model M. I absoloutley LOVE this thing.. (Just bought it actually.) MUCH better than any modern keyboards I have used.. Problem: Buckling springs are LOUD....... So I cant quietly type too fast at all....

Keyboards that are old enough to be good should be saved and treasured! Im hoping this KB will last another 16 years easily. It sure seems to be in pristine condition..

Dragonbite
July 20th, 2007, 01:35 PM
Woo Hoo! I updated!
Now I've just gotten a 2GHz (512Ram) P4 Dell GX260!! So in a couple months, when everybody at home gets switched I should (hopefully) be ineligible to talk on this thread (until 1GHz becomes considered "Old/crappy pc" ;) )

Mike_Longbow
July 21st, 2007, 11:39 PM
Allow me to introduce the almighty "Longbow":

It's an old IBM Thinkpad 240x, a nice and slim 10.4 in. sub-notebook I got from my dad (he was about to throw it away when I saw it). It's specs:

Intel Celeron 450 Mhz.
Upgraded 128MB RAM (it's max is 192MB)
Upgraded 20GB HD (came with a 6GB one)
Silicon Motion Lynx EM+ 2MB graphics
It has no drives, only an external (and thanks God, bootable) floppy. It was a pain installing any distro in it for the first time :???:

When it was out it came preloaded with Win98, but now it's running Feisty with Fluxbox as WM and mostly Xubuntu apps (abiword, thunar, gnumeric, etc). I use it as my daily laptop, for browsing, email, word processing and such. It barely plays youtube vids, xvid's and the like. All around, it works great, for a machine like that... hehehe

Needless to say, I'm very proud of it :)

joe.turion64x2
July 22nd, 2007, 06:23 PM
Yesterday I brought back to life my old Compaq Presario 7476 (desktop), my very first computer. As I have already mentioned it has a legenday AMD K6-2 @533MHz, 256MB RAM PC100, 8MB onboard Trident Cyberblade, ESS Maestro audio (onboard), and until yesterday only a 40GB Seagate 7200RPM HD with stock Windows 98 SE (used restore disk). I added another HD to install Linux in (8.4GB Maxtor 5400RPM) because the other one is damaged (that's why I left Windows 98 SE on it, it does not seem to care).

I installed Debian 4.0 (Etch) on it and I must admit I am impressed with the results. Obviously Gnome runs rather slow if I open an app. Therefore I installed Window Maker and the machine became quite responsive (at least I can use it as an OGG player).

The thing that amazed me the most was how well OpenOffice.org 2.0 performed (I won't replace it after all). I hope to get a new 7200RPM HD to boots its performance even further. Right now I am posting from it, me very first machine.

Thanks.
Joe.

rotarymike
August 9th, 2007, 05:00 AM
I'm setting up a few older laptops for use as low-power-consumption net devices.

I've got an IBM 600E for a fileserver, looking at putting xubuntu feisty on it.
P2-300, 160mb ram, 12gb HD. No keyboard or monitor (or speakers or or or... just the bottom slice of laptop).
Using a cheap PCMCIA ethernet adapter (old etherlink 3 I think) and a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card - which isn't working 100% yet. I've got ubuntu server on it now, but I aren't so good at the command lines. And right now, I don't have the time to dedicate to learning :( This laptop will sit next to my router and share a bunch of USB hard drives.

Other laptop is a IBM 600. P2-266, same ram, same HD, same lack of supper half. Probably will use an old b-band wireless card on it (which, thank the FSM, I already know to work with ubuntu). That one will run two printers in my office.

Also have a 600X (P3-500 version of above) with more modern HD and memory, currently running XP for my wife. When I get her a new(er) laptop, it will get a stripped win2k light install - so as to run all my car tuning software (nice to have a laptop that still has a serial port). Maybe Xubuntu if I can find interface programs for haltec, the megasquirt, AEM, my DAQ, and my usb-oscilloscope.

Day-to-day is a IBM R51 dual booting feisty and XP. Yay choice!

Aldanga
August 11th, 2007, 03:12 AM
Reading this thread makes me feel like I've got a beast of a PC.

I used to consider myself pretty smart with computers. I'm great with Windows/GUI/Hardware problems, but not so much when it comes to command line/terminal stuff. Needless to say, I'm feeling a bit alone in this world.

I have been working with Ubuntu for almost two months now. (I tried to get some other distros, but couldn't get good images. 163kbps DSL, so no re-downloading for me. I have not the patience.)

I'll say what hardware I know I have. I don't know how to find out all my specs. Help with that would be appreciated. I pulled it out of my grandfather's garage.

An old Gateway. I've tried, but can't find the model number.
K6-2 500MHz
256 GB RAM
80GB Seagate HDD--upgraded from a 4.3GB WD HDD
Sound/Video: No Idea. Onboard, as far as I can tell.
RTL8185 Chipset Wireless Card--added this, obviously
Sony 52x/32x/52x CD-R/RW

That's about all I know.

I'm a poor high school senior who's just waiting to build a *more* decent PC for a better Linux experience... or should I say "more convenient"? This is my primary desktop for now, so I want to get as much out of it as possible.

I would appreciate some help with getting this thing running at a decent speed. GNOME is really sluggish. It's getting annoying. I tried to use Xubuntu, but got lost. I don't know enough about terminal stuff yet. I'm open to other distros, not merely Ubuntu. I just want this thing to work.

gecko94
August 11th, 2007, 03:31 AM
I have a 13 year old laptop that has a full 1/2 gig Hd and no usb and no cd-rom/floppy drives with a dead battery and a huge 8" by 8" screen with 256 possible colors to choose from. 8 megs of ram and a 100 Mhz ( At most ) proc. no way to get internet. runs Win 95 and overheats while idling or when posting and, oh get ready for this, weighs only 20Lbs. beat that bad a$$ muthrfuk'n speed demon. Oh thats right, YOU CAN'T!!! Mwahahahahahahahaha... crap it crashed again.

BTW I'm not kidding

*EDIT I just opened it up for the first time and it turns out the mother board is in 5 layers and it has a Japanese off brand (LOL) processor.

Frak
August 11th, 2007, 04:35 AM
@gecko94, I christen you the winner.:)

joe.turion64x2
August 13th, 2007, 01:35 AM
Reading this thread makes me feel like I've got a beast of a PC.

I used to consider myself pretty smart with computers. I'm great with Windows/GUI/Hardware problems, but not so much when it comes to command line/terminal stuff. Needless to say, I'm feeling a bit alone in this world.

I have been working with Ubuntu for almost two months now. (I tried to get some other distros, but couldn't get good images. 163kbps DSL, so no re-downloading for me. I have not the patience.)

I'll say what hardware I know I have. I don't know how to find out all my specs. Help with that would be appreciated. I pulled it out of my grandfather's garage.

An old Gateway. I've tried, but can't find the model number.
K6-2 500MHz
256 GB RAM
80GB Seagate HDD--upgraded from a 4.3GB WD HDD
Sound/Video: No Idea. Onboard, as far as I can tell.
RTL8185 Chipset Wireless Card--added this, obviously
Sony 52x/32x/52x CD-R/RW

That's about all I know.

I'm a poor high school senior who's just waiting to build a *more* decent PC for a better Linux experience... or should I say "more convenient"? This is my primary desktop for now, so I want to get as much out of it as possible.

I would appreciate some help with getting this thing running at a decent speed. GNOME is really sluggish. It's getting annoying. I tried to use Xubuntu, but got lost. I don't know enough about terminal stuff yet. I'm open to other distros, not merely Ubuntu. I just want this thing to work.
There are more Windows Managers out there, not as heavy as GNOME. You may want to try Enlightenment or WindowMakerfor example, I believe they are already in the repos (Synaptic).

Joe.

killphil
August 15th, 2007, 12:32 AM
aldanga,
try a mini install w/fluxbox. Then do some asking around and googling and you can find some very quick and responsive apps. I've got set up a couple old emachines with similar specs as yours with debian and fluxbox and they are very quick. I don't know about your wireless chipset though. Do some googling and see if it's supported. There is very good documentation on fluxbox and some very knowledgeable Fbox users on this forum. Also, there are gui tools for fluxbox menu creation and idesktools for icon creation. There are very detailed posts on this forum about FB menus and idesk though, so these tools are not really necessary. You could also look at fluxbuntu or mepis antix, but these are still a bit heavy for your machine. If I was in your position. I would definitely dump gnome though.
Mini install
apt-get install xorg fluxbox gdm synaptic

after install should get you started if you have a wired connection.

xdarkxanarchyx
August 15th, 2007, 01:15 AM
Mini install
apt-get install xorg fluxbox gdm synaptic

after install should get you started if you have a wired connection.

xdm would be even lighter, unless you need gdm for some reason.

Old Pink
August 15th, 2007, 01:31 AM
Dell Latitude L400 (http://www.mbhoy.com/21-07-2007/dell-latitude-l400-laptop), Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn:
700Mhz Pentium 3
256MB RAM
8MB ATI Graphics
12" LCD, tiny form factor
6GB Hard Drive
Came with Windows 98 installation, formatted upon arrival.
Price including postage? £70/$140

How it worked out: http://www.mbhoy.com/21-07-2007/dell-latitude-l400-laptop

dizee
August 15th, 2007, 03:36 AM
aldanga,
try a mini install w/fluxbox. Then do some asking around and googling and you can find some very quick and responsive apps. I've got set up a couple old emachines with similar specs as yours with debian and fluxbox and they are very quick. I don't know about your wireless chipset though. Do some googling and see if it's supported. There is very good documentation on fluxbox and some very knowledgeable Fbox users on this forum. Also, there are gui tools for fluxbox menu creation and idesktools for icon creation. There are very detailed posts on this forum about FB menus and idesk though, so these tools are not really necessary. You could also look at fluxbuntu or mepis antix, but these are still a bit heavy for your machine. If I was in your position. I would definitely dump gnome though.
Mini install
apt-get install xorg fluxbox gdm synaptic

after install should get you started if you have a wired connection.
I did this ubuntu minimal install on a Pentium II with 96MB of RAM, and it took about three hours. I installed xorg, fluxbox, wdm etc. but it was very bare, and had a fair few annoyances. So I decided to try Fluxbuntu which, amazingly enough, installed a graphical system far quicker than the original, command-line one (took about 40 minutes). Strange really. Probably the system was struggling trying to cache the downloaded files for installation.

Anyway, not much point to this post other than to say that Fluxbuntu is worth a look. It is not quite as blazing fast as Puppy but still fairly impressive, and as it's based on Dapper it's very solid and stable. Essentially it is like doing a minimal install with fluxbox without the configuration work.

Aldanga
August 15th, 2007, 11:20 PM
aldanga,
try a mini install w/fluxbox. Then do some asking around and googling and you can find some very quick and responsive apps. I've got set up a couple old emachines with similar specs as yours with debian and fluxbox and they are very quick. I don't know about your wireless chipset though. Do some googling and see if it's supported. There is very good documentation on fluxbox and some very knowledgeable Fbox users on this forum. Also, there are gui tools for fluxbox menu creation and idesktools for icon creation. There are very detailed posts on this forum about FB menus and idesk though, so these tools are not really necessary. You could also look at fluxbuntu or mepis antix, but these are still a bit heavy for your machine. If I was in your position. I would definitely dump gnome though.
Mini install
apt-get install xorg fluxbox gdm synaptic

after install should get you started if you have a wired connection.
I compiled the source for Fluxbox and it's up and running. I'm able to find my way around.

What is the "mini install"? I'm sorry to say I don't understand.

I got my wireless up with Ndiswrapper a while back. I've been working with that.

Someone said something about being able to watch videos with a decent framerate on an old system. I don't know how capable mine is of that, but I'm still curious. My system said my card is an ATI 3D Rage Pro AGP 1x/2x. Could I find an old video card somewhere? and would that make a difference?

I apologize for the jumbled mess this is. I've been looking around the Internet and can't find answers for myself, so they're splurting out here.

xpod
August 15th, 2007, 11:39 PM
Dell Latitude L400, Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn:
700Mhz Pentium 3
256MB RAM
8MB ATI Graphics
12" LCD, tiny form factor
6GB Hard Drive
Came with Windows 98 installation, formatted upon arrival.
Price including postage? £70/$140


I was just recently given a similar old thing for nothing really, although it only had the 128Mb ram it did have a 20g drive and XP, that was off within 5 minutes of course.

It has the same ram as yours now but still just has puppy and wolvix on it from the last bit of messing around i did with it.

My younger girls watch their videos(nfs share) and play their games on the thing without any problems at all.Watching my 6 year old chastise my 12Yr old for not knowing to type xorgwizard and startx to get into puppy when it has a hissy fit is really quite funny.

Little Madam:)

ErusGuleilmus
August 15th, 2007, 11:50 PM
I have a freind who got DSL running on a i486, 33 mhz, 20 mb ram, 700 mb hd.

iPower
August 16th, 2007, 01:20 AM
noname box

Celeron processor at 333Mhz
128MB RAM
6GB Harddrive
48x cdrom
dvdrom
zip 100 drive (click of death included)
8MB intel graphics card
Creative Audio PCI
10/100Mbit network card

cost me about 10 dollars (a new power supply)

awong
August 17th, 2007, 12:01 AM
Reading this thread makes me feel like I've got a beast of a PC.

I used to consider myself pretty smart with computers. I'm great with Windows/GUI/Hardware problems, but not so much when it comes to command line/terminal stuff. Needless to say, I'm feeling a bit alone in this world.

I have been working with Ubuntu for almost two months now. (I tried to get some other distros, but couldn't get good images. 163kbps DSL, so no re-downloading for me. I have not the patience.)

I'll say what hardware I know I have. I don't know how to find out all my specs. Help with that would be appreciated. I pulled it out of my grandfather's garage.

An old Gateway. I've tried, but can't find the model number.
K6-2 500MHz
256 GB RAM
80GB Seagate HDD--upgraded from a 4.3GB WD HDD
Sound/Video: No Idea. Onboard, as far as I can tell.
RTL8185 Chipset Wireless Card--added this, obviously
Sony 52x/32x/52x CD-R/RW

That's about all I know.

I'm a poor high school senior who's just waiting to build a *more* decent PC for a better Linux experience... or should I say "more convenient"? This is my primary desktop for now, so I want to get as much out of it as possible.

I would appreciate some help with getting this thing running at a decent speed. GNOME is really sluggish. It's getting annoying. I tried to use Xubuntu, but got lost. I don't know enough about terminal stuff yet. I'm open to other distros, not merely Ubuntu. I just want this thing to work.

my ubuntu desktop has a very similar sepcs as yours, and xubuntu runs good on it, I started off with an ubuntu install, then downloaded xubuntu through terminal, usually I suck at commands, but you can find most installation guides that show you step by step using terminal. but I could never get wireless to work on it, as it seems usb to be the problem and does not stay connected and my box doesnt support pci2.2 so most wireless cards wont work on it. Maybe you can add 512 megs of ram, it may make a difference with the sluggish performance on it.

gasolinehabit
August 17th, 2007, 03:10 PM
i know it's an ubuntu forum, but i installed puppy on my:
Cyrix II / 250Mhz / 308Mb RAM

last night.

runs great, drivers for my wireless usb card were already on the OS. i was up and running in like 20 minutes.

I used to have Xubuntu on this computer, but it was horribly slooooow.

raul_
August 17th, 2007, 06:11 PM
Arch with E17 is also a very good setup. I believe Arch with KDEmod (KDE on steroids) could also do the trick

killphil
August 17th, 2007, 09:44 PM
xdarkxanarchyx
I use gdm when I set up fluxbox for other people. I do this because it's easy for people who are cautious about using the command line a way to shutdown their system and also switch between other window managers easily.

dizee,
That's kind of strange, but not suprising. I have an older box that won't even think about loading pclinuxos and my laptop won't touch debian.

Aldanga,
mini install is basically the installer on a disc and then everything else is installed with your internet connection. here's the link
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD
you could also try arch. It's a little more complicated to install, but is extremely fast and has good documention and pacman, the arch package manager is awesome.
Here's a good install article on the arch install procedure.
http://www.raiden.net/?cat=2&aid=276
also, read the install wiki. There are some way's to streamline the xorg config and indepth explaination of pacman and good wireless documentation as well.

bodycoach2
August 18th, 2007, 05:15 AM
Love this thread!
I'm working on started a Free Geek (http://freegeek.org/) chapter here in Central Florida. Check out the Free Geek site (http://freegeek.org/), and the Free Geek Video (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3343196262291457240). We should have our site and organization up and running by October.

We take in old and/or broken equipment, rebuild and refurbish them, load Xubuntu or Ubuntu on them, and give them to people who need computers. At the moment, our Central Florida chapter is just getting underway, and we don't have a central location. We a few rag-tag geeks working in our homes.

Basically I started by telling people what I was doing, and the equipment came pouring in. The first three months I recieved over 30 computer donations, and recently I've recieved almost 20 17" CRT monitor donations. Most of the computers we get in are between 400 MHz - 1.5 GHz. We rarely get anything above 2 GHz. Like Free Geek Chicago (http://freegeekchicago.org/), Xubuntu is our primary distro. I've put Puppy Linux on a few older laptops with great success. It's great practical experience for students working toward their A+ exam, or wanting to get something to put on their resume. I've learned far more doing this than just books and websites alone.

So far, I've given out 32 computers. While some people might think these computers are out of date, people who can't afford a computer love them. I love seeing the faces of people who get one.

Like the ACCRC (http://www.accrc.org/) (Alameda County Computer Resource Center (http://www.accrc.org/)) motto:
Obsolescence is just a lack of imagination.

xdarkxanarchyx
August 20th, 2007, 12:45 AM
We take in old and/or broken equipment, rebuild and refurbish them, load Xubuntu or Ubuntu on them, and give them to people who need computers.

You just gave me a great idea for this computer 'business' I'm trying to start, thank you!

leedsdevil
August 20th, 2007, 01:42 AM
great to see people still using old and out dated computers i do myself as being bored i built a whole net work on older parts last one built was my wifes dell board 1gig 512 pc133 ram 40 gig 7200 Hd and im happy to say Ubuntu OS it runs better than new im sure if you ever want to trade parts pst me ill get back

monsieurdozier
August 20th, 2007, 01:56 AM
My Dad is the Computer and Phone Specialist for the company he works at, so when the time came for the entire place to update their computers, they had an auction. He wrote down on a bid sheet, "$1 on everything that doesn't sell."

So now sitting in our chicken shed, (I'm from backwoods middle of nowhere), are about 30+ computers dating from old 386's, or possibly early, up to some PIII's.

I am actually now running off of:

PIII 733MHz
256 Ram
16 Gig HDD
Trident 3DImage 9750 4MB
DVD CDRW Combo Drive

All of which I had to clean probably a quarter inch of dust and chicken poo off of.

I'm running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04, and I'm planning on seeing what nasty horrible things I can put this machine through.

Monsieur Dozier

ry4n
August 20th, 2007, 02:08 AM
I have a old dell

600mhz
94mgs ramm
12'' screen

it is pretty nice but i installed vector for while but no net becaues it could not find my card...then i put win2000 and it worked amazing...then i felt dumb using windows so I tried to put slack12 worked other than it said it could not put Lilo in the MBR for some reason so then i decided I might as well bight the bullet and just put windows back on but.....wouldn't you know it, windows says that there is not enough memory to install? why would this be when I have already put it on before?:confused:

I don't know it is a old piece of crap i guess i give up to have it do nothing.

m1r0
August 20th, 2007, 07:13 AM
hi to all "crappy" pc owners :)
use them as long as they can work ;)
when i saw this post i just couldnt resist to put my little baby on this place.
i bargained with ex owner for this laptop from 100 down to 60 euro and one cold beer.

Acer Travelmate 732TXV
PIII 500mhz
128 ram in original, upgraded later to 256 atm (seeking for 512)
5gb hdd , upgraded later to 40gb
DVD-rom
15 inch screen
ati mach 64 , still with no 3d deceleration :/ (but who needs it)

runing ubuntu feisty alternate install and nice collection of software.

-server-
apache
mysql
php
vsftpd
-eyecandy-
yakuake
gkrelm
-games-
wine - game: starcraft ; heroes of might and magic 3 complete
linux game - starfigther ; pang zero ; xalaga ; pacman ; x(space)invaders
-internet-
nxclient
evolution
firefox
galeon - 2nd browser
gaim
skype
gftp
rutilt wlan manager - for dlink g122 usb wlan adapter (dont buy this!)
wicd network manager - for siemens gigaset usb 54 wlan adapter and eth0
vodafone - for GPRS/3g internet connection
-accessories-
bluetooth manager - for mobile phone
-programing-
bluefish
-office-
openoffice
-multimedia-
gxine
totem
rythmbox

i think this baby gave out it's soul to ubuntu ;) it's preformance and bootup time is not fast, but once is up, it stays that way.
and just to mention special congrats to that garage system guy with 48mb ram

gecko94
August 23rd, 2007, 12:14 AM
I pass the crown to you Big_Croc7. thats so pathetic I almost cried after I stopped laughing.

-grubby
August 23rd, 2007, 05:27 AM
I run Ubuntu on a 500 mhz amd k6-2 with 440 MB of ram.It's surprisingly fast

EDIT: I've upgraded my computer....much better

gasolinehabit
September 4th, 2007, 07:39 PM
use Puppy Linux, 85 MB OS, runs from the RAM, fast enough on old machines

brn
September 4th, 2007, 10:10 PM
I have a 1987 Tandy Model 1200 laptop. 8 MHz 8086, 64 KB RAM, and not one but two 720 KB floppies (This was the high-end model). It's either out in the tool shed or the back of some closet right now; last used around 1995. .The 80x25 LCD screen measured about 10x4 inches yet I was able to do rudimentary CAD with just the arrow keys, although I eventually got a serial port mouse to speed that up a bit. Paired with a Hewlett-Packard "ThinkJet" 9x5 dot-matrix printer (about the size and weight of a cigar box) I probably got more useful work done with it than I have ever since.

cmnorton
September 4th, 2007, 10:53 PM
My Compal N38N2 laptop is still running strong. It's run W2K, the precursor to RH EL 3 WS, and now Windows XP.

It's configured with a Fujitsu 20GB HD, with 376 MB RAM and a PIII 700 MHz. I do not know how hard drive weights are these days, but the laptop became very heavy after I upgraded from a 12GB drive to a 20GB drive.

All in all I am impressed with the Compal. It's been running since Spring 2001 with few problems. I wrote an MS Access-based music selector system for a radio station using it. It has done well.

My Ubuntu laptop is newer, a P IV that whose memory will be upgraded to 750 MB RAM shortly. I have no doubt Ubuntu would do well on the Compal.

I've run W2K on a P1 desktop with SQL Server 2000. It was an excellent test machine. It ran W2K and MS SQL Server well, and it was slow enough I had to develop code to handle the slow connect speed.

In my current position, I ran SmartSoftUSA's Accumail on IIS on a PII maxed out at 256 MB RAM, and an RH 9 system on the same kind of box housing a CVS repository.

As long as these computers still work, I believe in keeping them busy.

Kratos
September 5th, 2007, 06:32 AM
It's funny I should find this thread just now. If you don't mind, I'd like to weave you a tale of windfall and good fortune, of triumph and very near defeat.

It all began nearly one week ago. I was riding along with my mother to the local Goodwill store. She makes soy-wax candles and sells them, and she wanted to look at glassware. While she perused the shelves of dusty old ashtrays and stemware, I satisfied my boredom by perusing the old software in bins nearby. I thought if I could find an old Windows game to attempt in WINE, it wouldn't be a lost cause after all. I had instead found a copy of the original Legend of Zelda cartoon series on VHS and was about to consider this just compensation when I saw it.

Tucked away in a small cardboard box almost completely behind a sofa marked down to $125, I saw a pathetic looking Dell Latitude LS, complete with external CD-RW, AC adapter and battery. The box had been marked in blue Sharpie "Lap top (sic) needs new battery. $25" I nearly dropped what I was carrying right there. There was no way I could find a deal as good as this. I picked up the box and inspected the laptop itself. I was in pristine condition; a few small smudges of what looked like dried printer ink, but this was nothing of major concern. Clutching the box, I hurried to the front counter.

Now, after many hours of cursing, confusion and near resignation to just give up and reinstall Windows again, the penguin prevails. I'm running Xubuntu Feisty on it without major complaint or issue, and am actually typing this message to your right now with this machine perched primly on my desk.

Now, for the particulars:

Hardware:
CPU: Intel Pentium III @ 497MHz
RAM: 256MB SDRAM
Video: NeoMagic MagicGraph256AV
Sound: (See Video)
Net: eth0: 3Com 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado]
wlan0: Realtek RTL8180L PC card(With ndiswrapper installed)
Storage: 10GB IBM HDD; External Dell 8x CD-RW Module

Software:
WM: XFCE
Browser: Firefox
IRC: XChat
IM: Gaim
Media: XMMS/mplayer-nogui
Games: WINE: Diablo II
Native: Quake, 2; Doom, II, Final + IWADs; Starfighter, LiquidWar, Nethack, Wesnoth
Others: Lemmings + DOSBox, ZSNES and Gens for console emulation.

For $25, I can say that I'm not at all unhappy. My only peeve about the machine is the lack of direct rendering on the graphics card. But, this is tolerable. The replacement battery only ran me another $40. An able Linux-laptop for only $65? Yes, please. :)


Kr4t05

urukrama
September 5th, 2007, 11:46 AM
How do you see how strong the processor of your computer is, without opening up your machine? Is there a terminal command that gives you all that info?

Iceni
September 5th, 2007, 12:13 PM
I have an old 1200mhz 256-mb compaq laptop they saw fit to ship with WIndows XP. The poor thing never had a chance, and its service ended after about a year. I picked it up recently and its now running Elive like lightning.

chrome307
September 5th, 2007, 04:20 PM
I came here expecting to find comments about why members continue to use old hardware with Ubuntu - so this was the complete opposite :)

After reading all 17 or 18 pages, I knew I had another old PC sitting in my basement and thought, hey why not .... these guys are getting them up and running.

Anyway I dug it out and it has the following specs:

MSI motherboard
PIII 500Mhz
229MB PC100 ( ..... must be 256 with some shared for video)
10 GB + 8 GB HDD
3Dfx AGP 8/16 mb
LiteON 48x CDRW or LG DVD/CDRW combo ( doubt it could manage DVD playback)
2x USB v1.0

No NIC .... can you get a wireless card for something with this spec ?? USB WiFi adapters would not work with USB v1 ??

What would it be used for ??

Surfing the net to check emails - browsing
Listening to music
Watching videos - Xvids ( realistically just clips on the net )
Burning CDR's would be welcome

Reading previous comments Puppy Linux seems a popular choice, but as I'm getting familiar with Ubuntu I would have liked to try Xubuntu.

Iceni
September 5th, 2007, 04:33 PM
I came here expecting to find comments about why members continue to use old hardware with Ubuntu - so this was the complete opposite :)

After reading all 17 or 18 pages, I knew I had another old PC sitting in my basement and thought, hey why not .... these guys are getting them up and running.

Anyway I dug it out and it has the following specs:

MSI motherboard
PIII 500Mhz
229MB PC100 ( ..... must be 256 with some shared for video)
10 GB + 8 GB HDD
3Dfx AGP 8/16 mb
LiteON 48x CDRW or LG DVD/CDRW combo ( doubt it could manage DVD playback)
2x USB v1.0

No NIC .... can you get a wireless card for something with this spec ?? USB WiFi adapters would not work with USB v1 ??

What would it be used for ??

Surfing the net to check emails - browsing
Listening to music
Watching videos - Xvids ( realistically just clips on the net )
Burning CDR's would be welcome

Reading previous comments Puppy Linux seems a popular choice, but as I'm getting familiar with Ubuntu I would have liked to try Xubuntu.


I don't have the widest experience, but I see a lot of people running ubuntu with openbox in the desktop threads. Why not install ubuntu server and openbox if you are comfortable, or xubuntu and swap xfce for openbox..

mips
September 5th, 2007, 04:35 PM
How do you see how strong the processor of your computer is, without opening up your machine? Is there a terminal command that gives you all that info?


Try these to get system information:


cat /proc/cpuinfo
cat /proc/meminfo
dmesg
lspci

The first one will tell you all about your CPU.

jruschme
September 5th, 2007, 06:31 PM
After reading all 17 or 18 pages, I knew I had another old PC sitting in my basement and thought, hey why not .... these guys are getting them up and running.

Anyway I dug it out and it has the following specs:

MSI motherboard
PIII 500Mhz
229MB PC100 ( ..... must be 256 with some shared for video)
10 GB + 8 GB HDD
3Dfx AGP 8/16 mb
LiteON 48x CDRW or LG DVD/CDRW combo ( doubt it could manage DVD playback)
2x USB v1.0

No NIC .... can you get a wireless card for something with this spec ?? USB WiFi adapters would not work with USB v1 ??

I used to run Hoary on a Dell Inspiron 3700 (PIII/450) until I replaced it with a ThinkPad T20 (PIII/850), so I think I can speak to this...

DVD playback should be possible, assuming the 3Dfx driver has decent xv support. (Actually, there is probably enough raw horsepower to do it anyway.)

As for wireless, I'd personally go PCI if you can. If not, a USB wireless adapter should work with the v1 ports, but be limited in throughput.

happysmileman
September 5th, 2007, 06:35 PM
I got Beryl installed on my 512MB RAM, 2.667Ghz PC (NVidia GeForce 440MX).

Tis kinda slow, but it's usable and since I mainly just use internet it's fine

Kowalski_GT-R
September 5th, 2007, 07:56 PM
I got Beryl installed on my 512MB RAM, 2.667Ghz PC (NVidia GeForce 440MX).



it's funny how the concept of "old and crappy" varies...
these specs are better than my main rig's

urukrama
September 5th, 2007, 11:14 PM
Thanks mips. Just found out I'm runing Ubuntu server install with Openbox (and xfce for when I feel like it) on a machine with an Intel Celeron 594 Mhz (cpu) and 418 MB of RAM. I used to have a full Ubuntu with Gnome on there, but one day saw the light and realised it was quite slow. :-) It is very fast now.

OttifantSir
September 6th, 2007, 12:52 AM
I started a thread of my own, similar to this, so I'll just give the link:Amazed at OLD laptop (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=320419)

Summary: Running Ubuntu 6.10 better than Windows XP on a machine easily 10-15 generations younger.

Sadly, I no longer have this computer. Sold it when I got a new laptop, a Dell Inspiron 9400, 1GB RAM, 120GB HDD, onboard sound and video (128MB shared memory), 16x/48X DVD-RW/CD-RW, memory card reader, Dell 1390 WLAN, Broadcom 4400 10/100 Ethernet, 17" Widescreen. A machine that doesn't belong in this thread;)

Always looking to get more, I am on the lookout for another desktop than the Dell 500SC I have in the bedroom. It's still running XP Pro SP2 due to its inability to boot from CD despite having two built-in CD-drives, and one USB-connected DVD-RW (go figure:()

Dragonbite
September 6th, 2007, 02:15 PM
At the our computer club we're looking at setting up a thin client environment and the guy may be able to get for us a number of Dell GX 110s.

He'd fit in here.. he can't stand seeing a usable computer go to waste, so in a way we are looking if thin client would help breath some life into the computers.

Otherwise I'll point him to this thread.

Calash
September 6th, 2007, 02:26 PM
iBook Blueberry (1999) running Xubuntu PPC version.

It is more of a toy than my main PC, but the wireless works great so I use it down stairs and on the deck.

joe.turion64x2
September 6th, 2007, 04:47 PM
I started a thread of my own, similar to this, so I'll just give the link:Amazed at OLD laptop (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=320419)

Summary: Running Ubuntu 6.10 better than Windows XP on a machine easily 10-15 generations younger.

Sadly, I no longer have this computer. Sold it when I got a new laptop, a Dell Inspiron 9400, 1GB RAM, 120GB HDD, onboard sound and video (128MB shared memory), 16x/48X DVD-RW/CD-RW, memory card reader, Dell 1390 WLAN, Broadcom 4400 10/100 Ethernet, 17" Widescreen. A machine that doesn't belong in this thread;)

Always looking to get more, I am on the lookout for another desktop than the Dell 500SC I have in the bedroom. It's still running XP Pro SP2 due to its inability to boot from CD despite having two built-in CD-drives, and one USB-connected DVD-RW (go figure:()
Do you mean you are running the stock Windows?

cobelloy
September 29th, 2007, 02:34 AM
i have only ever had crappy old computers until quite recently,

we had three p3 toshiba tecra 8100's one that we bought off ebay a while ago and two that were found in a dumpster more recently. The one from ebay was the best, 800mhz/385meg + a dvdrom and that ran anything reasonably well including movies and TV with a pcmcia tv card - I gave that one to my mum a while ago. The other two - not as good, the better one has been given away to a friend as a music server, but the really crap one is sitting next to me right now, it is a 500mhz celeron/128meg with no HDD and I have it fully functional with a 2gb USB key and puppy linux running live from the cd (it also has no CD - but I borrowed back the dvd from mum until a new one arrives from ebay) including working wireless with a usb dongle

also got a 350mhz imac that rocks, my daughters computer, and that has had ubuntu on it in the past and been great (sadly that one is to be shelved soon as I have a new dell, so my older p4 will be squeezed into a little case to go in her room with a brand new secondhand lcd off ebay)

I too hate the thought of good computers being trashed just because they are not p4's, there are so many ways that an old computer can be almost as good as a new one.

stalker145
October 9th, 2007, 03:28 PM
Please allow me to introduce the newest member of my family...


Dell Latitude CPi-A

366Mhz PII processor
128 MB PC100 RAM
2MB Neomagic video
30GB HDD

I found this gem on EBay for $40 USD delivered to my door. Yeah, it came without a power supply, HDD, HDD tray, CD-ROM, and battery, but what do you want for the price? Lucky for me, I had most of those things laying around in my scrounge pile and friends with piles of their own ;)

This baby loads Edubuntu in ~2.5 minutes (2:33 by my stopwatch) and will be given to my youngest to play and learn.

I only wish it had an ethernet port.

I had to pop the HDD into my Micron to load the OS (due to a bad CD-ROM that I had) and upon popping the HDD back into the CPi I needed to reconfigure the X-server. That's about it. Volume/mute Fn keys don't work but the rest (contrast, brightness, etc) seem to work fine. Suspend and hibernate work flawlessly.

Maybe down the road I'll work on getting a USB or PCMCIA network card of some sort.

GOD, I LOVE EBAY!!


EDIT: I thought I'd add a tidbit of information since I'm at work (using an NMCI desktop) and feel like using my blame thrower (see "Mystery Men" if you don't get it). I am using a Dell Optiplex GX270 with a P4 2.26Ghz processor, 512MB RAM, an Intel 82865G onboard graphics card (pulling 96 MB at the moment), and a 40 GB HDD running Win2K.

This "beast" boots to the login screen in a blazing 1:23 and goes from login to a fully loaded desktop in an astounding 2:05. Given, it's pulling updates across the network, verifying my identity through the LDAP (or whatever) server, and wasting taxpayer dollars along the way, but shouldn't this thing be faster than my ancient laptop? 3:30 compared to 2:30...

meh

markyb86
November 28th, 2007, 08:36 PM
Hey!

8 year old Toshiba Satellite 4060CDT
128MB RAM
333Mhz
3,7GB HD
Trident Graphics card
Ubuntu Feisty Server running Fluxbox (i had 3 WM installed at once, last week ;) )


I wish i could get ubuntu running on mine

I have the satellite 1625cdt which is a 475mhz amd with 128 mb ram and i cant seem to get anything past xubuntu 6.06 running on it. I think theres an issue with my 7.10 cd but it checks out ok and works fine in a VM. i dont know. right now im getting a new hard disk i gave away my 5gb when i fixed a clients computer :-(

Dragonbite
November 28th, 2007, 09:57 PM
I wish i could get ubuntu running on mine

I have the satellite 1625cdt which is a 475mhz amd with 128 mb ram and i cant seem to get anything past xubuntu 6.06 running on it. I think theres an issue with my 7.10 cd but it checks out ok and works fine in a VM. i dont know. right now im getting a new hard disk i gave away my 5gb when i fixed a clients computer :-(

Have you tried an older version such as Dapper Drake (6.06 LTS)? That one has worked well on my P3 500Mhz w/256MB Ram (I did have 128MB ram but that was in my Red Hat 8 & 9 and Gentoo days). I think the older version has a lower memory requirement.

Even Edubuntu 6.06 is not speed deamon, but it is adequate for most things. I took off OpenOffice but other than that even Kino has worked on the system. Blender would open, but I don't know how to do anything with it so I can't tell you how well that has worked but I have been able to get Kpovmodeler running on it in a past life.

Are you using the Alternative CD? The base CD says 256MB ram to run (the live environment I suppose) but the Alternative CD allows you to use the text-based installer instead and bypass some of the memory issues. I think the 256MB ram minimum is for running it as a LiveCD (and I cannot imagine how much ram it takes to run as a LiveCD *AND* Install !!

wispygalaxy
November 28th, 2007, 10:32 PM
I had to use floppy disks that my dad got for free from work up until I entered college this past August. My dad was too cheap to get me a flash drive! Luckily I got a Toshiba laptop for college, and I was given a free flash drive! But my school library has some computers that run Windows 2000, and those beige computers are all dusty and gross. They sit all alone in the corner of the library while students plug in their shiny new laptops at desks. :lol:

maybeway36
November 28th, 2007, 11:04 PM
I like to use IceWM with slow machines (and heck, I like it one fast ones too.)

K.Mandla
November 29th, 2007, 01:03 AM
Please allow me to introduce the newest member of my family...
Nice. I used to have (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=394569) an identical laptop to that, except 300Mhz. Those are great lightweight machines. The bay modules fit the entire 8000-series too, so anything that was intended to fit the module on that line will fit in your CPi-A too. DVD-burners, spare hard drives, etc.

It's a terrible video card, but it'll do composite effects (http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2007/02/14/un-freaking-believeable/), if you lighten the load enough. ;)

raul_
November 29th, 2007, 01:15 AM
I wish i could get ubuntu running on mine

I have the satellite 1625cdt which is a 475mhz amd with 128 mb ram and i cant seem to get anything past xubuntu 6.06 running on it. I think theres an issue with my 7.10 cd but it checks out ok and works fine in a VM. i dont know. right now im getting a new hard disk i gave away my 5gb when i fixed a clients computer :-(

Try a new distro :) I first tried Arch on my old laptop, and now it's my primary OS

joe.turion64x2
November 29th, 2007, 01:20 AM
Recently I got an old laptop, well, it's my job's but I am on charge of it.
It is a lovely Sony VAIO with a 600MHz PIII processor, 128MB of RAM, 6.4GB (or thereabouts) HDD.

Right now it has Windows ME on it (and it works!), considering the laptop had been rendered as useless some years ago I am not too surprised to find the system in 'prime condition': no viruses or whatsoever.

I have not installed Linux on it yet because I am waiting for some new parts to 'boost' performance: RAM to max its memory to a whooping 256MB, and a new (bigger, faster) HDD. Right now it is functional with ME, and since I can not spare much time to tweak a small Linux on it, I am leaving it alone...for the moment.

I'll report back when I get it going.

By the way, this guys in Sony really don't want users to 'break' in to their own laptops: screws are too hard. I guess I'll be going to a Sony service center to get the thing 'unscrewed'.

Thanks.
Joe.

TrailerTrash
November 29th, 2007, 01:42 AM
Couple of old laptops i have are:

IBM Thinkpad 10inch screen, 300mhz Celron, 8gig HD, 196ram, NO CD drive, NO floopy, (did not even come with them new) its just plain and very light. It has Windows ME and works very well. I would like to try to install Linux on it one day maybe.

Next is a IBM Thinkpad 233mhz, 2gig hd, 64ram, Floopy, CD, 12inch screen, with Windows ME and also is working well. Would like to try Linux on it also. :)

joe.turion64x2
November 29th, 2007, 05:42 AM
Couple of old laptops i have are:

IBM Thinkpad 10inch screen, 300mhz Celron, 8gig HD, 196ram, NO CD drive, NO floopy, (did not even come with them new) its just plain and very light. It has Windows ME and works very well. I would like to try to install Linux on it one day maybe.

Next is a IBM Thinkpad 233mhz, 2gig hd, 64ram, Floopy, CD, 12inch screen, with Windows ME and also is working well. Would like to try Linux on it also. :)
MMM, so you have a VIA processor, that is interesting, how can you compare it to, say, a Pentium IV?

Thanks.
Joe.

markyb86
November 29th, 2007, 01:40 PM
Dragonbite, yes i install xubuntu 6.06 with the alternate cd, and i knew the live cd wouldnt work i just wanted to use gnome instead of xfce to give it a go.. i just have given up because i cant get my 11wave wavebuddy wireless card to work. im going to get a new wifi card so that i actually know what it is and can get it running.

raul_ at first i tried debian but it would not install properly. DSL works fine (even live) but i still cant get wifi runnin. Once i tried booting mandriva and that started to work, said it detected the card and froze before showing the desktop.. the laptop just needs a few tweaks.

Dragonbite
November 29th, 2007, 02:34 PM
Recently I got an old laptop, well, it's my job's but I am on charge of it.
It is a lovely Sony VAIO with a 600MHz PIII processor, 128MB of RAM, 6.4GB (or thereabouts) HDD.

Right now it has Windows ME on it (and it works!), considering the laptop had been rendered as useless some years ago I am not too surprised to find the system in 'prime condition': no viruses or whatsoever.


When I got my Dell Latitude CP P1 w/MMX @ 233MHz I was totally suprised that it was "running" Windows XP on it! No wonder they were getting rid of it because it was slow.

I looked on the Microsoft website to find the minimum hardware requirements and this laptop matched the MINIMUM (233Mhz, 64MB Ram). I was surprised.

And about 1 minute after discovering it had XP installed, I was running the CD that "vulcan mind-wipes" the hard drive (writing over it 3 times or something). That was the end of that Windows XP experience. :)

Now I have Fluxbuntu running on it and it's doing pretty much as expected (no speed demon, but adequate for mild surfing, email and text writing (articles, blogs, outlines, etc.)

djbsteart1
November 29th, 2007, 03:22 PM
I had installed xp home on a 600Mhz P3 with 8 Gb hard disk and 128Mb ram. it was fine if you never closed ie or switched it off, otherwise if was horrible. Switched it over to 6.10 and the hard ware detection is better and it starts up/ shuts down and launches firefox with out any problem. starts to lag when videos are played but otherwise you cant tell its and old computer.

qpieus
November 29th, 2007, 04:40 PM
When I got my Dell Latitude CP P1 w/MMX @ 233MHz ...
Are you still running that laptop with 64 MB ram? I have the same laptop and I'm having trouble getting a distro up and running. I have not tried fluxbuntu yet. Did you have any problems getting it installed?

Dragonbite
November 29th, 2007, 06:03 PM
Are you still running that laptop with 64 MB ram? I have the same laptop and I'm having trouble getting a distro up and running. I have not tried fluxbuntu yet. Did you have any problems getting it installed?
Once I was able to, I maxed out my Ram at 128MB! (untold POWER!!! ;) )

Fluxbuntu works pretty good, just a couple things to keep in mind:

It didn't recognize something so it would only give me a screen resolution of 800x600 (or less). To fix this I had tomodify /etc/X11/xorg.conf to
add "1024x768" to the list of resolutions (the first one is the default the system tries)
reduce the DefaultDepth from 24 to 16

I recommend using CLI applications for things such as updating/installing with sudo apt-get install xyz because once all of those repositories are updated Synaptic is a dog.
Leafpad is a good text editor that comes up pretty quickly
If you use dial-up you will not find it in the network configuration.

Run wvdialconf to detect the modem
edit /etc/wvdial.conf to enter the number, username and password
run wvdial every time you want to log in (you can use killall wvdial to close the connection)

Even though it takes a lot of resources, I installed Firefox because the default browser just didn't work for me, and to open a page it would take a loooooooooooong time. Once Firefox is up it opens pages are regular speed (just don't open too many tabs at once ;) )
When I, instead of shutting down, go to Standby and close the lid, the laptop automatically wakes up when the lid is opened.
Conky can be a great way to get some status information, like Battery status and such. It isn't installed by default though
USB Pen drives do not automount.
It was recomended by somebody in another forum, to format the hard drive as ReiserFS. Ext2 he didn't recommend and Ext3's journaling I guess takes a hit on performance. So far I haven't had any issues but I cannot guarentee it won't cause problems in the future.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me, or join the Fluxbuntu forum.

Damn Small Linux (DSL)
This distro works well on the system even with 64MB Ram. Even running as a LiveCD it was responsive except when running a resource-intensive application like Firefox.

The interface just takes a little getting used to, but it is Debian based so you can use sudo apt-get install xyz but I wasn't successful in installing anything so I don't know if it was me (I was using an older version of DSL).

My only issue was that when I was navigating any websites with a lot of graphics the system would freeze completely and I'd have to do a hard reboot. Other than that it does work very well on the system.

Oh, and when you run it, add fb1024x768 and it will give you the better resolution and fill the whole screen.

TinyMe
I managed to get TinyMe (a lite version of PCLinuxOS) installed. It was slow, but usable. This, though, I got the same day I got my 2nd 64MB Ram module so I don't know if it will run with 64MB.

TinyMe also uses Opera instead of Firefox, because that is also their Email client. It worked alright (again, don't open too many tabs).

TinyFlux (or PCFluxboxOS)
This is like TinyMe but smaller, and uses the Fluxbox desktop instead of what TinyMe uses (OpenBox?). My CD had errors so I'll have to wait until I get to my monthly broadband access again.

Puppy
DSL and Puppy are the most suggested light distros. I've heard a lot of good things about Puppy, but haven't tried it. I would give it a shot and see how it goes.

qpieus
November 30th, 2007, 04:16 AM
Thanks for the tips Dragonbite. I want to try fluxbuntu and tinyflux. Hopefully I can get them installed with only the 64 MB of memory. I don't want to spend any money on this lappy - it has no battery and no wireless card so it's not much of a portable device and not worth putting any money into.

nat6138
November 30th, 2007, 05:01 AM
Well, my laptop may not be the crappiest, but the video card on it sucks really bad.

And I've upgraded some of it.

Original Specs:

IBM Thinkpad T30

1.8 Ghz
256 MB Ram
DVD-Reader/CD
16 Meg ATI Mobility Radeon 7500

Current Specs:

1.8 Ghz
1 gig of ram
DVD-Reader/CD
16 Meg ATI

For some reason, youtube runs terribly slow on this laptop. But I can run beryl and everything else fine.

stalker145
December 3rd, 2007, 05:30 PM
WOOT!!

From my earlier post
Dell Latitude CPi-A

366Mhz PII processor
128 MB PC100 RAM
2MB Neomagic video
30GB HDD

I've been trying to get wireless running with various PCMCIA and USB adapters I have laying around... in my spare time... probably about 10 hours in the last 2 months dedicated to this problem.

I found, for those that haven't seen it, a fine HowTo on the forums for getting the Linksys WUSB54GC (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=2612546&postcount=1) running.

It worked on the first try... soooo easy.

Oh, yeah, and I got a CD-ROM drive for it now, too. I think the TCO for this thing is up to about $60.

Now my $60 is really worth it \\:D/

ksennin
December 7th, 2007, 07:53 AM
Well, up until 2.5 years ago I was still using my old Pentium1 133mhz with 32ram to run civil engineering structural design software on win98. It didnt even have a sound card or cd player. The floppy had gone bad, so I just had to write down the results as it lived in its own unconnected little world, its single year of web dial-up connectivity (external 28.8 modem) forgotten half a decade previously.

Then I got a hand-me-down from a relative, a Gateway p2-450mhz, with 128mb ram, 40gb hd, dvd-cd drive, and winxp running slow as molasses yet daring to run Autocad2004. To be able to work with larger 3d structural models in a newer version of the program, I maxed ram memory to 3x128=384mb and downgraded to win2k, and it did fine. It was the old keyboard and mouse which were sometimes problematic.

Now, I have been using for the last year a newer PentiumD 3.0ghz with 1gb ram and 200gb+320gb hds, so I decided to see what to do with the older machines, as I hate the idea of wasting devices that worked perfectly not long ago, specially as my work has not changed that much in those years and the building designs remain more of less the same and the basic algorithms of the design program are not that different.

I looked into making the older box a storage server, but it would not recognize hds larger than 8gb! So I found NASLITE, a small OS that runs off a floppy and makes an old pc a NAS, bypassing the bios, so larger drives can be used. Of course, it is linux, and I had to make the floppy in a linux system.

Now I had been interested in linux for a long time and this was the perfect oportunity. I read a bit online, and tried UBUNTU 7.10 on my new pc, and adding an extra 200gb drive, I set it in a dual boot, and have been using it for email, music/video/comics, downloading, etc. with happy results.

I tried the Ubuntu 7.10 live cd on the gateway p3-450 and amazingly it works! Slow, but I can still multitask: browse the web and listen to music. I tried the Xubuntu live cd but it did not seem significantly snappier than the ubuntu and the GUI was less attractive. I downloaded Fluxbuntu, but it doesnt seem to offer the live cd option, offering only a direct install, so I may test it with an added 3gb hd. Or if I give this machine to my daughter, I may try edubuntu.

Any comments on the performance of fluxbuntu versus xubuntu or Edubuntu on such a system?

Now, since ubuntu reads nfts drives, I may not even need the Naslite that was the original interest, as I just got a $120 box that can stockpile 4 drives to a total of 3teras, and can be connected to any machine. But I may try to get DSL on the old p1-133 just for kicks.

Jorge

Dragonbite
December 7th, 2007, 02:16 PM
Fluxbuntu (Fluxbox) will run faster than Xubuntu (Xfce). That is why most of the low-spec distros use Fluxbox.

The downside is that Fluxbox requires more manual manipulations to customize the desktop than Xfce, which includes a number of handy tools but not nearly as much as Gnome.

As for Edubuntu, it is basically Ubuntu with a few different apps, and an easy installer for LTSP (making it a thin client server). As a workstation (fat client) it is not all that much different than Ubuntu.

As an LTSP server, it needs 1Ghz plus 256MB Ram for the base system + 128MB Ram for every client you want to connect. The power of LTSP is if you have a system with, say, 2GBs Ram you can theoretically host about 14 clients, enough to get a computer lab up-and-running in a school or something like it.

All of the processing goes on the server so even the hard drive in the clients is not necessary and just about any old system can be used as a client (I'll be testing that theory if I can get my 233Mhz laptop connected).

The other great thing is that regardless of the chip speed on the client, it will be running just about everything at the speed of the server, not the client. So that 233Mhz system may be running OpenOffice, Firefox and the like with no problems because it's running at 2GHz instead.

ksennin
December 12th, 2007, 08:34 PM
Fluxbuntu (Fluxbox) will run faster than Xubuntu (Xfce). That is why most of the low-spec distros use Fluxbox.

The downside is that Fluxbox requires more manual manipulations to customize the desktop than Xfce, which includes a number of handy tools but not nearly as much as Gnome.

As for Edubuntu, it is basically Ubuntu with a few different apps, and an easy installer for LTSP (making it a thin client server). As a workstation (fat client) it is not all that much different than Ubuntu.

As an LTSP server, it needs 1Ghz plus 256MB Ram for the base system + 128MB Ram for every client you want to connect. The power of LTSP is if you have a system with, say, 2GBs Ram you can theoretically host about 14 clients, enough to get a computer lab up-and-running in a school or something like it.

All of the processing goes on the server so even the hard drive in the clients is not necessary and just about any old system can be used as a client (I'll be testing that theory if I can get my 233Mhz laptop connected).

The other great thing is that regardless of the chip speed on the client, it will be running just about everything at the speed of the server, not the client. So that 233Mhz system may be running OpenOffice, Firefox and the like with no problems because it's running at 2GHz instead.
Thanks. I was looking for a distro with an easy GUI for my 8-year-old daughter, to wean her off from her tentative experience with win2k, and maybe find some educational software as well.

I ended up trying to run Puppy as liveCD on the Gateway p2-450mhz (384mb ram, 40gb+3gb hds, dvd-cd drive) because of its friendly desktop (yeah, Im superficial, I know) but the last version and its "retro" alternative both failed to boot, reporting kernel panic, and failure to mount the os on the ram, though even ubuntu 7.10 had managed to load as livecd (slow, but workable). So asking a bit on the Puppy forum, I was advised to check removing the added/non-factory ram sticks, and sadly, after doing, and despite taking precautions to carry in no static, not only did Puppy remain unworkable, the pc suddenly found itself unable to boot at all its original win2k, reporting device conflict and pci controller trouble before giving a dead prompt on a black screen, so my tinkering with the ram may have damaged the motherboard, or there were other hardware troubles that were excerbated by this.

Amazingly, I can still run the Ubuntu/Xubuntu liveCDs and the computer works perfectly, with video, internet, sound, etc. so it doesnt seem like the mobo was fried. It just wont boot and it will not run the reinstall of win2k. DOnt know if a hd install of Ubuntu or Xubuntu would work, as they too big/slow for the machine anyway.

I am having it checked, and hope I dont have to replace the mobo/processo as that would be like 30% of the cost of getting a newer system anyway.

Not posting this as a gripe, but as a bit of cautionary advice for beginners like me. (ANd I am not a total beginner hardware-wise as Ive changed memory and drives several times before on various machines).

When trying the livecd distros, I see it's best to keep it at the software level. If you need to go tinkering with the pc insides to make a distro work, maybe its better/safer to just sample another distro, of which there are no shortage.

That Ubuntu still works in the problematic machine still amazes me.

A$h X
December 13th, 2007, 03:34 AM
Heh, my system has a genuine windows 98 sticker still on it (well just about, it's peeling away and win 98 hasn't been installed for about 6 years!)

Compaq Deskpro EN
PIII 733mhz
512mb ram
120gb Maxtor HD
LG CD writer
soundblaster live card
SIS 8mb video card :lolflag:

As you can see, it's "state of the art" (aka crap) but it runs gusty and xp surprisingly well (gasp!). But sometimes XP makes it sound like a jet taking off, whereas ubuntu only produces a quiet hum. I find keeping your system clean and only installing programs you will use keeps performance at an acceptable level. Well that goes for xp anyway, with ubuntu you can maintain fast speeds alongside mnay installed programs.

joe.turion64x2
December 13th, 2007, 06:00 AM
Heh, my system has a genuine windows 98 sticker still on it (well just about, it's peeling away and win 98 hasn't been installed for about 6 years!)

Compaq Deskpro EN
PIII 733mhz
512mb ram
120gb Maxtor HD
LG CD writer
soundblaster live card
SIS 8mb video card :lolflag:

As you can see, it's "state of the art" (aka crap) but it runs gusty and xp surprisingly well (gasp!). But sometimes XP makes it sound like a jet taking off, whereas ubuntu only produces a quiet hum. I find keeping your system clean and only installing programs you will use keeps performance at an acceptable level. Well that goes for xp anyway, with ubuntu you can maintain fast speeds alongside mnay installed programs.
My oldest machine still has its "Designed for Windows 98" logo, and it is more 'state of the art' than yours:

Compaq Presario 7476.
AMD K6-2 @533MHz.
256MB RAM
40GB Seagate
LG DVD-ROM
ESS Maestro Sound Card.
Trident Blade 8MB

It runs Windows 98SE very well (surprising?), Windows 2000 and Windows XP (if properly maintained).

On the Linux world it managed to run SUSE 9.0 (very well), Mandrake 10 (ok), Mandrake 10.1 (very slow), Debian Etch (usable with lightweight Window Managers). It is currently running Vector Linux 4.

Thanks.
Joe.

Dragonbite
December 13th, 2007, 02:25 PM
My oldest machine still has its "Designed for Windows 98" logo, and it is more 'state of the art' than yours:

Compaq Presario 7476.
AMD K6-2 @533MHz.
256MB RAM
40GB Seagate
LG DVD-ROM
ESS Maestro Sound Card.
Trident Blade 8MB

It runs Windows 98SE very well (surprising?), Windows 2000 and Windows XP (if properly maintained).

On the Linux world it managed to run SUSE 9.0 (very well), Mandrake 10 (ok), Mandrake 10.1 (very slow), Debian Etch (usable with lightweight Window Managers). It is currently running Vector Linux 4.

Thanks.
Joe.
Somehow, I don't know how, the laptop I got from somebody had Windows XP installed! Currently it is running Fluxbuntu and has run TinyMe. Tempted with trying openSuse (10.2) or Xubuntu (alt. disk)

Dell Latitude CP
Pentium I w/MMX Technology @233 Mhz
128MB Ram (max)
20GB hard disk
CD-Rom
No Floppy
No Speakers
I think 2MB video

Peter76
December 15th, 2007, 02:32 AM
Ooooh, nice thread!!! Got a Toshiba 300cdt laptop with a blazingly fast pentium 166 and 48 MB of ram running on Debian testing minimal install. Adde on top of that Icewm as wm, dillo, sylpheed, xmms, xfe ( file manager ) and opera for my web 2.0 needs ( I compared a couple of modern browsers; but Opera is absolutely the fastest, though closed source:-( ) It just runs great, although Opera not surprisingly slows it down; but it's absolutely amazing what you can get out of such an old machine.


PS, it's got a wireless usb stick working as well.....

mnemosyne
December 15th, 2007, 02:46 AM
I happen to have 3 Gateway E-1400s (650 MHz Pentium III, 256MB RAM, 15 GB hard drive, CD-ROM, floppy drive, USB 1.1), they still have their Designed for Windows 98 stickers and Windows 98 license stickers. One is running a fresh install of Windows XP and one is running Xubuntu. Both run great (my school was running XP Professional on them, until they upgraded over the summer). Neither are connected to the internet yet, but I do have Avast! antivirus and Comodo firewall on the XP box for when it is eventually connected. I don't consider them really bad machines, but I wouldn't use them as my main ones :).

ksennin
December 19th, 2007, 03:43 AM
I happen to have 3 Gateway E-1400s (650 MHz Pentium III, 256MB RAM, 15 GB hard drive, CD-ROM, floppy drive, USB 1.1), they still have their Designed for Windows 98 stickers and Windows 98 license stickers. One is running a fresh install of Windows XP and one is running Xubuntu. Both run great (my school was running XP Professional on them, until they upgraded over the summer). Neither are connected to the internet yet, but I do have Avast! antivirus and Comodo firewall on the XP box for when it is eventually connected. I don't consider them really bad machines, but I wouldn't use them as my main ones :).

My Gateway p2-450 ran Autocad on XP with just 128mb of ram. NO multitasking but you could work. Those old Gateways were some pretty good machines. A pity mine cannot load Puppy for some weird hardware reason (I really wanted EduPUP on it), and even at 384mb ram Xubuntu still seems a bit heavy (I think my ram may be having trouble).

markyb86
December 19th, 2007, 02:20 PM
might be your ram or your hdd speed. i had xubuntu on a 474mhz amd with 128mb ram and it was decent speed

el_ricardo
December 19th, 2007, 02:38 PM
i have 2 crappy old systems, a laptop, and a PC

the PC:

680MHz (advertised as 700!) celeron
320MB RAM
20GB HD as root filesystem
an old 4GB HD as swap!
nvidia geforce MX440 on PCI! (there is no AGP lol!)

it ran xubuntu for a while with no problem, then an update screwed it up, so i took that as an opportunity to try a new distro, it now runs zenwalk, and i have to say i'm very pleased with it. Zenwalk runs xfce by default, has support for many wireless cards out of the box, and a really lightweight package manager called netpkg.

My laptop:

530~1330MHz AMD athlon XP
256MB RAM
80GB HD
ATI radeon mobility U1

were it not for the graphics card, this would be a pretty good linux laptop, I've tried kubuntu on it, but couldn't get the gfx card working with full acceleration, then i tried vector, with the same story, I'm now running openSUSE 10.3 on it, with gnome, and everything works fine! there was a little tickbox in the opensuse installer that said "enable 3d acceleration?" which i found much easier than following these instructions! (http://rzr.online.fr/docs/comp/gfxcard.htm) now i have compiz working beautifully on it!

so i'm pretty happy with my old hardware, i use my laptop for browsing, IM, openoffice etc, just light stuff, and my old PC is hooked up to the television in my front room for watching movies (it can even stream media from my decent PC!)

K.Mandla
December 19th, 2007, 03:59 PM
I have one crappy one and two classics. I hope this isn't in poor taste, but rather than repeat myself by describing them here, feel free to check them out (http://kmandla.wordpress.com/hardware/).

D-EJ915
December 19th, 2007, 10:18 PM
I just stuck ubuntu (7.04) server on my old 550 P-III with 384MB ram, works great, it's using 44MB right now.

petunia50
December 19th, 2007, 11:59 PM
I am running ubuntu 7.10 on a machine which has a p3@733 MHz (coppermine). It has 512megs of pc133 ram. I am using a dlink dwl-510 pci wi-fi card, which 7.10 seems to like very much insofar as I only had to click on the network manager? icon ( in the top panel, near the date/clock) & I was able to connect to a friend's wi-fi access point.
His apt. is across the street from mine.
I also have a system w/athlon@1.05GHz?, 512 megs of pc133 ram. I am connecting via a linksys wusb11 v4 usb wi-fi adapter (yay, ndiswrapper).
I am pleased to say that every component in each of my machines was salvaged, so I am using what would have been thrown into a dump.
he,he,he.
p.s. If it were up to uncle Bill, all of the above hardware would be useless.
Hah!

urukrama
December 22nd, 2007, 01:21 AM
Someone gave me an old Dell Inspiron 2500 laptop (Pentium III 700 Mhz, hard disk of about 8GB, originally 64 MB RAM, but I upgraded it to 128 MB). Since I have no real use for it at the moment, I wanted to use it as a test machine for other distros. Before this, it ran Windows 98 and Windows ME, a bit slow but without any problems.

So far I have had very little success with it, however. I tried several BSDs, Zenwalk, TinyMe (which I really wanted to get working...), Fedora, ...

The laptop generally freezes at "Probing SCSI devices" (or similar). The SCSI drive works, though, as I can use it in Fluxbuntu, the only distro that I could install on it so far.

Any idea what exactly is causing this? Any solutions?

joe.turion64x2
December 22nd, 2007, 06:47 AM
Someone gave me an old Dell Inspiron 2500 laptop (Pentium III 700 Mhz, hard disk of about 8GB, originally 64 MB RAM, but I upgraded it to 128 MB). Since I have no real use for it at the moment, I wanted to use it as a test machine for other distros. Before this, it ran Windows 98 and Windows ME, a bit slow but without any problems.

So far I have had very little success with it, however. I tried several BSDs, Zenwalk, TinyMe (which I really wanted to get working...), Fedora, ...

The laptop generally freezes at "Probing SCSI devices" (or similar). The SCSI drive works, though, as I can use it in Fluxbuntu, the only distro that I could install on it so far.

Any idea what exactly is causing this? Any solutions?
256MB of RAM is the bare minimum in most distros, at least in graphical mode. I would try text only installations. There are more distros out there targeted for legacy systems: Absolute Linux, Vector Linux, Damn Small Linux, etc.

Good luck.
Joe.

Lord DarkPat
December 22nd, 2007, 09:15 AM
I installed Puppy on a 1991(?) Dell
It originally had a 255 MHZ CPU ,1.5 GB HDD, and 32 MB RAM:(, so I got a 20 gig HDD from s'where and I had a 64 MB lying around, so I popped it in,. to my dismay, it couldn't from CD, and didn't have a USB port. So, I plugged in HDD to my current desktop and installed Puppy:popcorn:. Now, that thing flies, I tell you!

jperez
December 22nd, 2007, 11:44 AM
Well, I have several PC's laying around, some out of commission, some taking a break and a couple other active.

Active:
No Name Brand (Custom?) - (See Sig)
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2400+ 2Ghz (OC'd)
RAM: 1GB
Video: nVidia GeForce 6200-LE 256MB AGP 8X
OS: Kubuntu Gusty Gibbon v7.10 + CompizFusion

Compaq Presario 5900z
CPU: AMD Athlon 600Mhz
RAM: 256MB RAM
Video: BFG 3DFuzion GeForce MX4000 128MB PCI
OS: Minimal Debian Etch 4.0r1 (netinst CD) w/ GNOME+GDM

Inactive: (For the moment)
Dell Inspiron 8100 Laptop
CPU: Intel Pentium IIIm
RAM: 256MB
Video: Integrated nVidia GeForce 2 Go 32MB (?)
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Home
-Missing Hard Drive-

HP Pavilion 6330
CPU: AMD K6-2 300Mhz
RAM: 256MB
Video: On-Board SiS (Specific Model Unknown) ?MB
OS: Minimal Debian Etch 4.0r1 (netinst CD) w/ XFCE+XDM

Gateway 433c
CPU: Intel Celeron 433Mhz
RAM: 128MB
Video: On-Board ATI Rage 128 32MB(?)
OS: Kubuntu Dapper Drake v6.06 (Will change tonight)

Compaq Presario 2256
CPU: AMD K6 300Mhz
RAM: 40MB
Video: On-Board Unknown ?MB
OS: Linux (Unknown) Not Working

I have a Packard Bell Multimeda-(?) in my basement, I will add it later on.

Retired:
NEC Versa 5060X Laptop

Packard Bell Multimedia D135

Acer (Unknown) -Need to find case-

Packard Bell Legend 10CD
CPU: 50Mhz
RAM: 4MB On-Board
Video: (Specific Brand Unknown) 1MB
OS: Microsoft Windows 95 (after hardware upgrades)
First solid use PC

That's my complete list of PC's that I have used over the years that I can remember.

I remember my Legend 10CD PC the most, even being the oldest one I've used, besides an Unknown Epson I used back in the day that had a "Tanks" game with the OLD Black & Green CRT screen. That one only lasted 2 days of use before it went dead.

My Legend 10CD was the PC that got me into computers and wanting to take on my now loving passion for programming in college. And I started my road of computer-dom using MS-DOS 6.22, learning how to use it and how to re-install Windows 3.11 WFW on the machine. Besides, if I didn't fix it, my dad would never let me near another computer again. Nuff Said.

Anyway, I'm off to install a different Linux distro into the Compaq Presario 2256 and Gateway 433c.

Jesse~

mips
December 22nd, 2007, 11:08 PM
Someone gave me a Dell Latitude C600/C500 laptop today to see if I could turn it into a useable machine again.

Specs:
PIII 850MHz
256MB RAM
10GB HD
ATI card of sorts
CD-ROM Faulty, cant' read or boot media, keeps on telling me to insert disc.

I'm thinking of putting arch + kdemod on here. Would this be useable?

How do I install an OS if the CD-ROM is faulty. No option to boot from USB in BIOS.

Peter76
December 22nd, 2007, 11:38 PM
@mips: You can do a net install; basically you boot from a floppy and then download all the packages you need. You can do this with debian, possibly other distro's as well, but none I know

zmjjmz
December 23rd, 2007, 01:05 AM
I have these two:
1999 IBM T20
386 MB RAM
700Mhz Pentium II
12GB Hard drive.
Running Arklinux quite well, and Ihaven't connected it to the internet since the install, so I'm going to try a pcmcia Ethernet card, as it was mentioned earlier as working right out of the box with Ubuntu...

1996 IBM 560
40 MB RAM
Pentium (r) (no clue, Windows won't show)
2 GB Hard drive.
Running Win95 now, gonna preform a poorman's install of DSL as soon as I have access to an external floppy drive and an external CD drive.

mips
December 23rd, 2007, 11:29 AM
@mips: You can do a net install; basically you boot from a floppy and then download all the packages you need. You can do this with debian, possibly other distro's as well, but none I know

It does not have a floppy drive.

popch
December 23rd, 2007, 11:42 AM
Someone gave me a Dell Latitude C600/C500 laptop today to see if I could turn it into a useable machine again.

Specs:
PIII 850MHz
256MB RAM
10GB HD
ATI card of sorts
CD-ROM Faulty, cant' read or boot media, keeps on telling me to insert disc.

I'm thinking of putting arch + kdemod on here. Would this be useable?

How do I install an OS if the CD-ROM is faulty. No option to boot from USB in BIOS.

You might try temporarily attaching a working CD drive. The defective drive has to attach to some IDE or similar interface somewhere.

If that's not an option, I would consider installing a first version into the file system of the 'other' OS present on that machine. I believe that this is called 'WUBI'. Once this Linux is running, installation to another partition should become possible.

A third possibility would be to put the fixed disk of the venerable elderly laptop into another computer and install some kind of Linux or Installer there.

BTW, does the machine have a network adapter? Can it boot from the Network?

Fourth possibility (if working network card present): use a program which simulates booting over the network with BOOTP/PXE from a BOOTP server.

Peter76
December 23rd, 2007, 01:01 PM
It does not have a floppy drive.

Hmmm... you might then be able to do a network boot; but i think the easiest is to take out the hd and put it into another computer and install there and then put it back... Or get a new cd drive:)

garwaymatt
December 23rd, 2007, 02:10 PM
My everyday laptop has the following specs

Celeron 900mhz(runs underclocked @ 630mhz)
4GB main storage
512MB ram
7 inch 800*480 screen

Ubuntu 7.10 with compiz fusion
Its tiny :D

http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l256/garwaymatt/DSCF3175.jpg

jperez
December 23rd, 2007, 03:13 PM
@mips, have you cleaned the lens? My Dell Inspiron's DVD-ROM drive was "faulty" as well and wouldn't read ANYTHING that was put into it. I opened it up (literally), cleaned the lens with a small close-bristle brush, put it back together and put it back in. I hoped for the best and sure enough, it works now.

If not, sorry, but it was just a suggestion.


My everyday laptop has the following specs

Celeron 900mhz(runs underclocked @ 630mhz)
4GB main storage
512MB ram
7 inch 800*480 screen

Ubuntu 7.10 with compiz fusion
Its tiny :D

http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l256/garwaymatt/DSCF3175.jpg

ASUS Eee PC 4GB Flash Model 8)

Jesse~

mips
December 23rd, 2007, 10:27 PM
@mips, have you cleaned the lens? My Dell Inspiron's DVD-ROM drive was "faulty" as well and wouldn't read ANYTHING that was put into it. I opened it up (literally), cleaned the lens with a small close-bristle brush, put it back together and put it back in. I hoped for the best and sure enough, it works now.

If not, sorry, but it was just a suggestion.


Thanks, the thought has crossed my mind to remove the drive, strip it and clean it. I will give it a shot.

raul_
December 23rd, 2007, 11:08 PM
ASUS Eee PC 4GB Flash Model 8)



*drool*

K.Mandla
December 24th, 2007, 12:21 AM
ASUS Eee PC 4GB Flash Model 8)
Disqualified: Said laptop is neither old nor crappy! :P

I'm very jealous too. :mrgreen:

firehelix
December 24th, 2007, 12:33 AM
I just got ubuntu desktop 6.06 running on my IBM PC server 704

some quick specs:
2x 200mhz Pentium Pro (4x capable)
1 gig simm ram (ah, the days before ddr ram or sd ram even!)
12 scsi hot swappable hard drives in a raid (with a whopping 100gig total :) )
1x 8gig hard drive for os install
3 hot swap power supplies

1x hand cart for moving the giant 75-80 lb system :lolflag:

right now its running samba to share the raid array
will soon have XAMPP installed

raul_
December 24th, 2007, 03:57 AM
I just got ubuntu desktop 6.06 running on my IBM PC server 704

some quick specs:
2x 200mhz Pentium Pro (4x capable)
1 gig simm ram (ah, the days before ddr ram or sd ram even!)
12 scsi hot swappable hard drives in a raid (with a whopping 100gig total :) )
1x 8gig hard drive for os install
3 hot swap power supplies

1x hand cart for moving the giant 75-80 lb system :lolflag:

right now its running samba to share the raid array
will soon have XAMPP installed

4x? is that a quad core? :cool:

D-EJ915
December 24th, 2007, 05:59 AM
4x? is that a quad core? :cool:
umm, no, quad socket? yes You also need 2 more VRMs if you want to put 2 more CPUs in there.

PC Server cases = epic win, those things are giant and never going anywhere.

jperez
December 24th, 2007, 10:55 AM
Yes, I might invest in an ASUS towards college. I now have my Dell Inspiron up and running..on a 2GB HDD I had from my old NEC Versa 5060X. Since I know Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu would have ravaged the space, along with regular GNOME and KDE, I looked for an alternative way of setting up a minimal system on 2GB running with GNOME, nVidia Drivers, Debian Etch, a word processor, music player, audio drivers and a web browser.

Thanks to a forum post on the Fedora Forums (kinda out of the way?), I was able to have a full system working on my laptop now with everything I mentioned above and still have about 700MB of HDD space left. I love Linux! T~T

Only Linux would let me have a system this small with everything I need! :'D

Anyway...(sorry for hijacking) I'm actually going to start a project here in my town. Perhaps I can get support from my local Linux community with this. I'll have to check the LoCo threads.

I still consider my lappy crappy because the internal circuitry is draining the battery like a mofo, even with minimal settings in the BIOS and by the system. When charging, it will get to about 28% of a charge and automatically jump to 100% and stop charging. When the AC is off, it drains to about 8x% and drops to 5%...it's pretty annoying.

Anyway, I've got almost all my older PC's converted using the minimal Debian guidelines I set for myself. Now I can have good running Linux computers with a lot of space let over for whatever the user needs.

Jesse~

frenchn00b
December 24th, 2007, 01:15 PM
Hey!

All of you who own one of those pc's or laptops that came with a sticker saying "Designed for Windows 95", (ok that's pushing it, mine says Windows 98 ) this is the place for you!

I actually own a pretty recent Desktop (two years) that supports Beryl and such..but the darn monitor died on me, and I had to run for my until now hobby 8 year old laptop. I started recovering it for the fun of it, I actually spent a little too much money on it buying a new battery and RAM chip (you wouldn't believe how expensive old parts can be) and right now it's running surprisingly fast!

I can do all of the basic stuff, I can even play media from my ipod! (My music is stuck in my desktop) Of course that doesn't make much sense, since I can use my headphones...Anyway, the only thing this baby can't do well is watching videos (Youtube videos get choppy) but I even got to enable some transparency for show off ;) it's only for the screenshots though...

Here are my specs:

8 year old Toshiba Satellite 4060CDT
128MB RAM
333Mhz
3,7GB HD
Trident Graphics card
Ubuntu Feisty Server running Fluxbox (i had 3 WM installed at once, last week ;) )

This is supposed to be a place where we share applications/solutions meant to be light and responsive on an old computer. This is one of the many reasons why I love Linux: your computer doesn't have to be top notch to run a fully up to date system.

You can also share Window Managers, Distributions, anything you want :)


Right now I'm using Galeon/Seamonkey as the Web Browser, and they are really responsive. Galeon spends a little more RAM, but it renders pages much faster, and it's very responsive, and it uses my GTK theme, so that's a bonus.

As a file manager I chose PCManFM, and I just love it. It's very very responsive, and the interface is very intuitive, it's a bit like Thunar.

MSN Client: Pidgin. It's hard to find light graphical MSN clients. Now or then I use centericq though, but I actually don't need to. Since i trim down in everything else, at least I can spend something in my messenger, and Pidgin is not a hog at all.

Media Player: every once in a while someone will send me videos in msn, and I use xine to watch them (xine-ui package), and I use XMMS for my music, but I don't use them much.

Right now, conky marks 57% RAM used with a web browser, a file manager, and a messenger client running, and my system is not laggy at all!


Cheers


For this one type, I use Debian sarge, and it runs pretty fast.

joe.turion64x2
December 25th, 2007, 04:53 AM
I just got ubuntu desktop 6.06 running on my IBM PC server 704

some quick specs:
2x 200mhz Pentium Pro (4x capable)
1 gig simm ram (ah, the days before ddr ram or sd ram even!)
12 scsi hot swappable hard drives in a raid (with a whopping 100gig total :) )
1x 8gig hard drive for os install
3 hot swap power supplies

1x hand cart for moving the giant 75-80 lb system :lolflag:

right now its running samba to share the raid array
will soon have XAMPP installed
What's the output of cat /proc/cpuinfo?

Merry Christmas.
Joe.

Atomjack Magazine
December 25th, 2007, 08:31 AM
Okay, I've got one for you: how can I put linux on an oldish laptop with no OS, no floppy drive, a destroyed CD-drive and no USB-boot options?

Without spending more than the laptop is worth, of course. :-)

K.Mandla
December 25th, 2007, 09:09 AM
Okay, I've got one for you: how can I put linux on an oldish laptop with no OS, no floppy drive, a destroyed CD-drive and no USB-boot options?

Without spending more than the laptop is worth, of course. :-)
If you really have shaved all your options down to that, you might be stuck at putting a little money into it before it returns to a convenient (practical?) level of function. That being said, the problem isn't new; take a look at this thread.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=648305

zmjjmz
December 25th, 2007, 03:05 PM
Can it boot from floppy?

Also, I found a list of Linux Compatible cards...
http://tuxmobil.org/pcmcia_linux.html

stalker145
December 26th, 2007, 03:29 AM
Okay, I've got one for you: how can I put linux on an oldish laptop with no OS, no floppy drive, a destroyed CD-drive and no USB-boot options?

Without spending more than the laptop is worth, of course. :-)

If you have another laptop with the same type of hard disk, you can do like I did with my son's laptop - just install the OS onto the blank HDD on the "good" laptop and switch it to the oldish one. It worked out for me, anyway and it's worth a shot.

Bagster
December 26th, 2007, 04:29 PM
If you have another laptop with the same type of hard disk, you can do like I did with my son's laptop - just install the OS onto the blank HDD on the "good" laptop and switch it to the oldish one. It worked out for me, anyway and it's worth a shot.

Yep this should do it. Worked for me. or else you can get a 3.5" to 2.5" ide converter cable and do the same thing from a desktop.

zmjjmz
December 27th, 2007, 01:55 AM
I just got to install Damn Small Linux on a Compaq Presario 5070, with 30 MB RAM, 350MHz Processor, and 4GB Hard drive.
It was hell.

z987k
December 27th, 2007, 03:40 AM
Running xubuntu 6.06 on a sony viao p3 1ghz 256mb ram and 16mb sharred gfx. Flash video puts the cpu at ~20% and since I'm unfamiliar with xfce I'm struggling to find things I'm used to in gnome, but it runs rather quickly.

zmjjmz
December 27th, 2007, 03:46 AM
Cant you just install certain GNOME apps in Apt?