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

[Berk]

I'm noticing a lot of people are using their older machines for media machines etc, what software do you use for that? It is easy to setup?

I've set mine up with firefly (mt-daapd I believe, through synaptic), it's worked fairly well tbh, it streams happily to my girlfriends windows install under itunes. Though It hasn't found all the songs yet, and I haven't even looked at accessing it through my linux install, though it should be possible I guess.
The whole thing is more an exercise in playing with linux than anything else though, and to keep me busy during my inter-semester hols from Uni.

[OneMixDJ]

There are some good instructions on the LXDE wiki.

http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Ubuntu

Get the server edition of the Ubuntu of your choice. This will be text only so you have to use apt-get or aptitude to get the rest of what you want.

Install the desktop you want. The Gnome desktop environment isn't too bad either.

The main 9.10 download page has a minimal CD that you can get to that is tiny. It is a net install type thing. Only about a 12Mb down load if I remember right. I got one and upgraded it to 10.04-testing and then put the Gnome desktop on it.

EDIT
This may interest you too;

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/05...buntu-desktop/

=D>=D>=D>
Snowpine and Ranch Hand...Thanks very much!

[blackmuel]

err i have to old school boxes an old hp vectra 133 16mb 2gb with vec linux w00t! and the solo 2300 mmx 266 48mb 8gb and ubuntu 6.06 still screamin away!

[TheWanderingMaverick]

I've run Puppy Linux on an old Centaur 133 mhz , 128 mb ram computer. In its previous life it ran win 95 (that went out the window!), and will most likely be turned into media center of sorts (or a file server, I don't know which!).

[Phrea]

Wow! Finally people who may see my computer as a POWERHOUSE!!

[...]

(someday my kids will pull out their PHONE more powerful than this system!!!)

Sir, that day has already come, 2.5 years after you posted this...

[oleink]

Same deal! I may be receiving an 8-10 year old laptop from my dad and put puppy linux or a small lightweight ubuntu on it for the heck of it. If it aint broke why fix it? (or upgrade)

[Psumi]

Lucid XFCE Still boots 40+ Seconds... no one seems to know why.

Bootchart = http://www.mediafire.com/?z4jlkc4xl3h

Video Screencast with specs = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xROONapdNAU

[ranch hand]

Can't get it big enough to read.

However, if you are on old hardware I would say that is a pretty good boot speed. The 10 second goal is for booting on some mini computer running on an atom cpu with a SDD. You can look up what the specific box they are aiming the boot speed at.

There is no way older hardware is going to get that kind of speed.

My box is in my sig and the best I am doing so far is about 36 seconds. Haven't checked lately as bootchart does not work on most of my installs anyway with any reliability.

Some are almost 2 minutes. They are all on the same hardware. This is not something for real concern at this point in development.

If there is not better performance across similar hardware after release I think that plymouths days are numbered.

I do not suggest removing plymouth but I have a number of installs and occasionally remove it from one. Speed really goes up then.

[Psumi]

@ranch hand:

1.60 GHz Pentium M (Centrino) Processor, no logical cores, just single core.
512 MB of RAM (496 Usable)
40 GB Harddrive (SCSI)
128 MB of Video RAM (ATI FireGL 9000)
IBM T41 Laptop.

The image for the bootchart should be its original size, since mediafire doesn't resize images for download.

[ranch hand]

It ought to run on that for sure.

I do not know but there have been a number of the buggers that I can't get big enough to read at all.

I could grab the bugger and look at it in gimp but I doubt the quality and frankly I have l crappy luck with bootchart and it just irritates me. It doesn't work on a couple of my installs, works sometimes on most, and most of the time on one.

Boot time have varied quite a bit all through the testing cycle. Right now, for me they are getting quite slow. I would not count on the variation going away for a while yet. Plymouth is being tweeked by Ubuntu techs. I hope they get it right.

Fedoras techs never have and they have been using it for some time now. I think it is just a buggy program but I hope I am wrong.