Linux on Old Hardware
Let me introduce you to Gideon[1] — he’s a PII-400Mhz desktop machine that has been maxed out at 384MB of RAM. He has an 8MB graphics card, a CD-RW, and three hard disks of varying sizes. I’d tell you what company I bought him from, but very few peripherals are original — just the motherboard, CPU, and case. I bought gideon about a year after I graduated college. I think he came with Windows 98 installed, but I never booted that OS up. The first thing I did was put a SuSE CD the drive and install it. Over it’s life it’s had SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. There may have been a Red Hat in there — I’m not sure.
If you understand any of my description of Gideon, you know that his specs are low. In fact, now he is mostly regulated to the basement in the hopes that we can get printing to work on it reliably, batch jobs, and syncing geocaches with my Garmin (since I only have a Serial cord to my Garmin and my Macbook Pro doesn’t have a serial connection). I still ssh into once or twice day and I hope to run a few more geocaching-related batch jobs on it.
I was also using an old version of Ubuntu that — surprise! — no longer has repositories online. Which means I can’t do an update on it anymore. I can only install a new version of Ubuntu from CD, which I could do but I didn’t need GNOME or OpenOffice on this machine. I really only need screen with a command line, and maybe working “startx” in case I need to get a GUI going for something.
I did some research and chose Debian, mostly because I could choose exactly what packages I wanted. And doing a version upgrade is only a little more than apt-get update. Much easier than loading off a CD.
I chose Debian’s NetInstall CD. I did have a few problems — it wouldn’t add a repository to my /etc/apt/source.lst and I’m not sure why because the network worked fine. So I added it myself. And I had to google to find how to configure X-Windows. But, considering I was “downgrading” a machine, it wasn’t so bad. Now I have a machine that has a command line most of the time, and when I want X-Windows, it runs IceWM and I have IceWeasel to surf with. Gideon is now amazingly fast without all the cruft installed in it.
Now I need to get CUPS to work, but that’s a whole different battle. . .
[1] Yes, I name my machines after Old Testament characters.
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