Comments on: Hardware

By: John

John — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:56:48 +0000

@Matthew’s post – I too use LOTR theme for my network, server is gandalf, wife’s laptop is Legolas and mine is merryweather, even the SSID of my router is Gondor! Bring it on!

By: Taffin

Taffin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 07:31:47 +0000

Seems like I’m not the only one who still likes “old” hardware, I’ve still got a 100MHz IBM Thinkpad stashed away in my cupboard. =D

By: Timmy

Timmy — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:53:51 +0000

Hey K.Mandla!

I love stuff like this! I’ve got a couple of ‘older’ machines myself, but my pride and joy is the Dell Latitude C610 (not that old, but still…) which runs like a charm with Bodhi Linux.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:12:27 +0000

I would. It’s hard to beat a late-model Thinkpad for a combination of Linux compatibility and all-around ruggedness. I’ve only ever had one I didn’t like, and it predated the general reputation that Thinkpads enjoy.

I say go for it!

By: anon

anon — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 11:08:22 +0000

I’m curious.

Anyways I’m planning to get a ThinkPad. An old one, the a22m. It’s got a Pentium III. (800 mhz – 1Ghz, could any of those)

So anyways, wi-fi, USB, ATI card, (no wrestling with trident/chips/omgwtfbbq drivers ) all sorts of goodies. Shall I get it? It’s looking nice…

By: PeterStJ

PeterStJ — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 18:30:02 +0000

Ok, sounds like Science fiction, honestly.
What I did so far was – set init level to 3, disabled ALL service, except dbus (which is needed to allow communication from finch (console chat application) to skype) and hald (which as of my understanding is needed for X. I run i3 as window manager, which is only 6MB. When I am on TTY (i.e. just rebooted, only 2 TTYs are activated, just logged in (i.e. one bash instance)) I get 32 MB usage. How is this even possible. Is it because of the RHGB? I will try and disable that too. Also the ttys are using KMS, maybe it takes too much? Anyways, X take another 15 MB, so once I ‘startx’ it goes to 64-70MB. Skype – another 35, so this is pretty much the limit of the system. Too bad everyone in Europe is using skype exclusively, I would much better be off with XMPP/GTalk but no one is even ever heard of it.

No graphical browser is usable after this initialization, not even surf (which is minimal, but still demands at least 20MB + the shared stuff like gtk, everyone is relying these days on toolkit even for such simple simple things like menus (actually surf uses gtk ONLY for the menus and to implement the native controls like input, button and scroll). Te obvious sacrifice is Skype, however this would mean no real time communication, and this seems mandatory.

So here is my question (again, sorry:)) – is there a way to use skype (text only at least, no voice/video calls) from the console without actually running the Skype executable for linux locally (it can be started remotely I guess, on another computer, but I would prefer not to if possible). And no, using finch on the remote machine where skype is running is not possible as the DBUS sessions will never match.

Thanks

By: anon

anon — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 11:35:59 +0000

I ran Debian on 64 MB, prestine install without a DE, 9 MB used.

Added X, bumped up to 25.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 01:01:36 +0000

Makes me wonder which of these 430TX systems have ACPI. Can you check the dmesg?

By: PeterStJ

PeterStJ — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 13:37:06 +0000

I have one big question for you, so if you please can take the time to advise, it would be great.

I simply do not understand how one can manage to start anything on 80MB of RAM. I have my test machine with 512MB of ram) and I ‘init’ it in level 3 (means no X), I have disabled all services, like automatic update managers, bluetooth, dhcp, apache, nfs, anything that I am not using. I am logged in only one TTY, so only one bash instance is running, I make sure no process I know of is running and yet, after all this preparation htop shows that I am using 129 MB or RAM!
I see processes I am not sure of, like ‘console-kit-daemon’,'auditd’,lots of hal* things, ‘sedispatch’ and some more, tat indicate very low memory usage and yet I hit 128+ of ram usage.
Then how can one use anything more on a computer with 128 of ram.
But then again I remember times when I had Pentium 130Mhz with 32MB of ram and it was working, I ued it with lynx and bitchx a lot, as well as mc. Those were some ancient distros, like slackware 5 or something. How can I achieve workable system when only the system takes the whole memory, no place for user applications?

I am asking those questions as I found a very nice, very preserved Pentium MMX PC from 90s and I want it. But I want it to work! Not just boot and display login message. I want to be able to do stuff, like you are doing, like hbn, newsbeuter/myrss, links….

Thanks so much.

By: msx

msx — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 01:24:08 +0000

What about TinyCore!?