laptop question

Tue Nov 18 11:11:23 CST 2003

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003 23:45:44 -0600 
"Jonathan Hutchins" <hutchins at tarcanfel.org> writes:

> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Leo J Mauler" <webgiant at juno.com>
> 
> > I'm sorry, I should have stated that "low-income people 
> > like me" have problems with laptop installs.
> 
> I've been lucky enough to salvage a couple of good systems, 
> and to play around with many that weren't mine.  I don't have 
> much cash in the 300MHz machine, and like you I've had to 
> deal with trying to install Linux on the older hardware.  
>
> I'm absolutely astonished at the proposal that Linux can be
> a useful way to keep old hardware working - yeah, if it was 
> top-of-the-line, not that old, and you're lucky about the 
> specific hardware models  having drivers.  Otherwise you're 
> far better off putting MS DOS or Windows 95 on it.

I'm not too astonished at it.  For starters, people who tend to be 
"astonished" have needs which far outpace a machine running 
at 100Mhz-200Mhz, or exaggerated opinions of what a computer 
is supposed to do.

Sure, you're not going to be able to run OpenOffice on a machine 
with less than 64MB and 100-200Mhz Pentium CPU and *enjoy* 
the experience.  But when it comes down to it, you don't need 
OpenOffice to write a report, just for adding the pretty fonts and 
the bells and whistles later on. 

I'm reminded of a tidbit from the editors and columnists who work 
for the LinuxFormat magazine from the U.K.  Their chief editor says 
they all use vi to write their columns and articles, because all the
extra 
stuff just gets in the way of creativity.  Its like having the ability to
play 
around with bells and whistles distracts from writing the actual story.

My father still uses WordPerfect on his Windows95 laptop (in fact 
I think its slightly better than mine, at 24MB and 100Mhz Pentium).
It does everything he needs it to do: word processing, email, and the 
occasional game of Solitaire.  When you get down to it, not everyone 
really needs to have the desktop publishing applications on their 
laptops, just the ability to create text files and the ability to access
their 
email.

Incidentally, he only upgraded from his old Kaypro PC (100% IBM PC 
compatible!) with 768MB RAM and a 50MB hard drive, because he 
wanted to use free JUNO E-mail to keep in touch with the relatives and 
his children, and had to upgrade from DOS to Windows.  People only 
need a fraction of the computing power they usually have.

> It's like the idea that you can make an XWindows terminal out of an 
> old PC.  It's only true if it had just the right wicked high-end
graphics 
> card, and if the old motherboard can take far more RAM than was 
> typical when it was current (see the 96M 380's).

While the latter comment about RAM is probably true, the graphics card 
usually isn't the problem when making a system into an XWindows 
terminal.  Most 486 systems had VGA at least, and you can still do an 
XWindows terminal using the vga16 XFree86 server.

As for the low-end RAM, you can usually find used SIMMs for cheap 
these days on E-Bay.  I could upgrade a current 32MB system (four 
8MB 72-pin SIMMs) to 64MB without much trouble, 128MB for 
less than the cost of a storebought 128MB PC100 DIMM.  While 
there was a memory limitation on some of the old Pentium mainboards, 
you can still find some which take up to the whole 128MB.

> Of course, if you can stick with text mode, you're doing great.  
> Run up RedHat 6 or 7 and have yourself a fine time.

The folks at R.U.L.E. (forgot what the initials mean...) and Slinky 
are making higher-end Linux installs possible on lower-end hardware.
Slinky claims to be able to do a RedHat 9 install on a machine with 
less than 16MB of RAM, and install a GUI from the same RedHat 9 
CD in 32MB of RAM.  RedHat 9's installer chokes on less than 
64MB RAM, for a comparison.  

I dragged out a 486 with four 4MB 30-pin parity RAM SIMMs 
(thats 16MB RAM to spare you the math) just to give Slinky a 
whirl.  It installed enough of RedHat 9 to be usable and let you 
install anything else that the Slinky Installer people didn't feel was 
necessary on the system.  

Frankly, I might be only using text mode Linux, but I still want to 
be able to use kernel 2.4, even 2.5 or 2.6 once they're stable and 
available.  R.U.L.E. and Slinky make that possible, as well as 
Morphix to some extent (Morphix LightGUI insists on 32MB 
RAM on the download page; have yet to test that requirement 
on the 16MB laptop).

As for the really low-end stuff, the only way you're going to run into 
any issues is for the typical uses for such low-end stuff, such as 
turning it into a router or E-mail server or other server-type system.
The only issues that I can think of for the 386 and 486 systems out 
there are finding ISA NICs, and at least two if you're going to be 
using the system as a firewall or router.  And even if you find them, 
ISA NICs tended to be 10Mbps cards, not 10/100s or even 
100Mbps cards.  If the goal is a fast 100Mbps network, low-end 
hardware won't be much of a savings.

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