__/ [Larry Qualig] on Sunday 19 February 2006 06:36 \__
> < snip>
>
>> > The important thing to remember is that the console can be as easy to
>> > use and as capable as the GUI, you can do pretty much everything in it.
>> > Which means that old "junk" hardware that isn't even capable of
>> > *running* X11 and modern windowmanagers, or don't run them well at all,
>> > can run very well indeed and be quite capable machines even now. Maybe
>> > some use can be put to pratically antique hardware eh folks?
>>
>>
>> It's rarely worth the electricity consumption though.
>
>
> Out of curiousity guys... (Roy & Liam) - Where do you draw the line as
> to what hardware is still useful and what isn't? From the thread it
> sounds like Liam is thinking of running something on an old 386 and Roy
> wants "newer" hardware.
It sure sounds like Liam eyes a 486 (or earlier). I once worked with a
75MHz Pentium at work. It wasrunning Mandrake and was only useful for run-
ning GIMP in the background, once in a few weeks. The other machines at
the office were Windows workstations and an iMac. I thought about grabbing
an old 166MHz machines from home, but I soon realised it would be useful
for nothing. It didn't even have an Ethernet card and handling it was not
worth the time. It often boils down to needs for an upgrade, which makes
matters utterly unappealing (appalling rather).
> Of course a lot of it will come down to what you plan on doing with the
> system.
>
> Me for example... I have an old Dell - something machine. It's a P3-800
> with 512 Megs of RAM. I have a little over 250-Gigs of HDD space in
> there (250G + 15G) and I'm up this late tonight installing the Kubuntu
> DVD on the machine (so I guess it has a DVD drive as well).
This is not a low-spec machine. It's very workable with just about any
UNIX variant. Such machines are possibly what Bill Gates smashes with a
hammer for light amusement. He did, after all, suggest that hungry chil-
dren in Africa use mobile phones and PDA's to "connect with the modern
world".
> I'm not 100% sure what I plan on doing with this. Most likely it'll be
> some sort of file server. I'm thinking of using it as a destination for
> backups of the other machines. So being a file server CPU performance
> isn't all that critical so it should have more than enough oomph to do
> that. I might also fool around with putting an IMAP mail server on
> there too.
This gives me a window to introduce another use of low-end Linux boxes.
The 'mother ship' is at the University and it is backed up automatically
(cron job) on the local SAN. Everything I ever do involved an SSH connec-
tion to this machine, either from work (Ubuntu) or from home (SuSE). These
machines are also used for replication of the hard-drive in 3 isolated
places (using recursive SCP). How does it relate to the subject at hand?
None of these machines is high-spec'ed. Power and capacity is not needed.
> So back to the original question... what would you guys think is too
> old for service?
/What/ service? That's the question.
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Stand for nothing and you will fall for anything"
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
7:00am up 1 day 19:19, 9 users, load average: 1.53, 0.92, 0.76
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