"Mini Linux Lab"

Intro
I sorted my old PC (read ones that are saved from going into dumpster). Machines I played with:

1. Gateway 2000 P3/700MHz /w 384MB RAM and 30G HDD
   
2. Gateway 2000 Celeron/666MHz /w 256MB RAM and 15G HDD
3. Compaq DeskPro Celeron/466MHz /w 128MB RAM and 4G HDD

I had only little time this weekend so I did not have tim to play in depth with each individual combination.

Just for fun
On the first one I tried several distros. I settled with minimal Ubuntu setup (as described in one of the previous posts). Finally, some of my friends needed a second machine just for surfing net so I gave that one to them. I installed regular Ubuntu desktop (Gnome) 8.04 and that machine behaved OK. Was much faster under Blackbox with "mini" setup, but now it is up to them to play with it. It required "acpi=force" inside /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

The second one I settled with TinyMe (mini version of PCLinux) with Firefox, Flash, Java, and Skype. I will put this one in my kids room (5 and 3 year old) so tha tthey can sometimes play on sites such as PBS Kids and such. They love Curious George and Martha.

Third one was fairly slow one. It came with Windows 2000 on it. Took forever just to boot. The funny thing with Windows is that those machines 8-10 years ago came with those same versions of operating system and at that time they worked OK. Now, you take a PC that originally came with Windows, put that same version of OS on it, run updates (if you do not have life and have time to wait), and then those PCs become so slow that they are completely unusable. I finally put Austrumi Linux on it and it felt all snappy and quick (especially when I added expanded RAM to 256MB).


Distros

• Absolute
  
• Austrumi
• Damn Small
• Puppy
• TinyMe
• Ubuntu (alternate installer)
• Vector

Puppy Linux and its derivatives always amazes me. It works so fast that I always say to myself "other guys should learn from this". Litvanian distro Austrumi, also beautiful and really brought this old machine back to life. One issue I miss with both Puppy and Austrumi is multi-user. Kind of not feeling good with autologin into root account. On the other note, those old PCs ran Windows, can not get less secure than that (Win 98/ME ...). Other nice use for these old PCs ar especialized distros such as firewall, file storage, etc.

Vector just released version 6.0. I love Slackware based distros for older PCs. Both Vector and Absolute are phenomenal. Absolute takes little long to install, but works great. However, with these Gateways there was an issue with video card. For some reason Slackware based distros kept throwing my video card in unreadable mode and I did not have time to try to fix that.

For my kids room I installed TinyMe. Works great and it is very easy to manage. I do not have much experience with it but I was always a fan of PCLinux and its derivatives. Very easy to install, and very easy to add Flash, Java, web core fonts, etc. Not as fast as Puppy and Austrumi, but will do the work just fine.

Instead of Conclusion
The fun thing is that these older PCs (these were from around 1998-2000) can be extremely useful and still have lots of value. All we need to do is replace Windows with Linux. The thing is that these PCs usually come for free (together with monitor, keyboard, mice) and all it takes is little cleaning. Sometimes, you can combine parts from couple of machines and make one with more memory, nicer video card, etc. There are even lighter distros such as Tiny Core and Deli. Those are definitively worth looking at.

Just for fun? Nothing wrong with that, although the answer is no. I hope my friends will have some use of the first machine. They are familiar with Linux and saw a value in having second PC for surfing, music, and work. My kids will definitively enjoy that second one. I picked the worst one for myself to keep playing with those "minimal" variants and learn more on how to tune and configure distros such as Puppy, DSL, Austrumi...

References
http://www.distrowatch.com
http://linuxmini.blogspot.com/