My area of the country was mostly unaffected by Friday’s events, even if it did cause a ripple in our work flow. But the bulk of that is past and it isn’t really appropriate for me to pause much longer.
Nor is it practical. I’ve gotten a lot of links and notes in the past few days, and many of them are from people who appear to be on the same quest as I.
- Vincente Munoz sent a note about a home server running in a 433Mhz Celeron with 128Mb of PC100 on a 40Gb main drive and a 10Gb slave, with more to come.
Vincente says Debian 6 is making it all work, and mentioned not only alpine, axel, rtorrent and so forth, but music and video players for the console. It sounds like the system might end up as an entertainment center, if I understand correctly. Nice work!
- Kristian Nordestgaard wrote about a Thinkpad 770 — looks like a 200 or 233Mhz Pentium, probably with 32Mb or so — being used as a hybrid typewriter-computer.
Kristian said it does a much better job of trimming distractions than faster, high-end machines running heavier desktops that can run “no distraction” software. I’d second that.
And Kristian said that one has “the best keyboard ever produced.” I don’t have a 770 to confirm that assertion, but if I run across one I’ll definitely put it to a test. š
N.B.: Kristian has an unusual method for a session backup. Check it out here.
- One writer who asked not to be identified mentioned this sparkling gem of a site: http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I didn’t even know such things were possible.
I’m tempted to go out and buy the next dull yellow-beige component I can find — regardless of age, brand or function — just to give that recipe a try.
To think of all the machines I could have used that with. … šÆ
- Totalizator sent along a link to a very interesting interview with Ryan Gordon — alias icculus, who is possibly responsible for a huge portion of my Linux gaming experience.
It’s worth skimming through the interview at the very least; Ryan has a lot of interesting comments on how games translate between systems, and some interesting perspectives on other points too.
And it’s always nice to hear about another C-64 devotee. š
That’s about all for now. If you want to brag about your latest elderly computer system, please feel free, and send along an image so we can all drool over it. š
Motho ke motho ka botho 
My gateway runs ClearOS and it’s a Pentuim 500MHz with 192 MB of ram and a new 40 gig hdd. Bought right after 2000 and running nicely š
Nowhere near as exiting as your stuff though š¦
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Hello K. Mandla,
I was interested in Vincente’s home server. I followed the link but it seems to send to a totally different site. Is it correct?
Thank you and kind regards.
I double-checked with Vincente when I published this, and that’s the address he gave. It’s possible his site doesn’t focus much on Linux. Everyone has a variety of interests. š
Hey there!
Just adding a quick note about that, yes the blog is for Metal on Southern California and Baja California so I think that’s a little south of what you were expecting.
Regardless here’s the address of the blog: http://thesurgetechblog.blogspot.com/
Final note, if you’re interested in the Media Server project you could be interested in a LAN Party Management System that’s been in the work for the last… 4 years I believe?
I’m just saying. Have fun!
My little collection of old machines includes a tower with a K6-2 350Mhz 64MB/10GB currently running Debian 6 with dwm and mostly cli apps, but it can run ice weasel OK. I also have a Toshiba Satellite 2060CDS with K6-2 366Mhz 32MB/4GB. It can run a very lightweight Puppy 4.2 derivative called Pulp, which uses GTK 1.2 apps, but I mainly use a console only install of Slitaz 3.0 with screen, elinks, alpine, and moc. Of course, I’ve learned about these things from this blog.
I’m glad you’re ok mate, I was a bit worried since you’re the only person I know about who’s in Japan. Keep it up.
Same here. I’m glad for you, and hope things get better in time around there.
Also, ammonia works wonderful on making computer-things white again. I don’t know how. It just does it.
I’m sad my old Pentium II, 233Mhz 288MB RAM died, before being able to give it a second life as a home server. Now the only “outdated” computer I have is my old notebook, an Acer Aspire with AMD (don’t remember the model) 3200 and 1 GB RAM (IIRC). But this will probably be left for my mother’s net browsing. The only “shorthanded” system I’m using correctly is my Ben Nanonote, the handheld computer by Qi Hardware. I’m using it to run TaskWarrior in a ssh session, that I can then plug at home in my Mac and in my office in Linux (read more here: Using TaskWarrior instead of emacs+org mode for to-do / appointment tracking).
Maybe when my two year old Acer Aspire One needs a new life I could use it as a smallish home server… So far it works too well with Arch Linux and fluxbox. And for the uses I put it to (emacs, LaTeX, and lightweight mathematical computing) it can last a few more years.
Cheers,
Ruben
I thought that you should have a look at the ongoing discussion on removing APM (replaced by ACPI now) from the linux kernel (thereby reducing support of vintage hardware):
https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/linux-pm/2011-March/030684.html
Thanks, that’s very interesting. I’ll follow that closely. Cheers.
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