[Tfug] Machine Rehabilitation

[Samuel Hart]

On Mon, 11 Jun 2007, hharden71 at netzero.net wrote:

> I want to try and breathe new life into a machine I have been given.
> An old IBM Aptiva
> 450 Mhz AMD
> 128 Megs ram
> (I don't know if this can be upgraded-2 memory slots ea/w 64m currently)
> (PC 100 or 133 memory)
> SIS 350 video card (onbaord)
> Onboard audio (works /w a live cd I tried out)
> ISA 3Com 3C509 10baseT ethernet card
> (haven't tried this piece of hardware - but it is so old I expect only minimal trouble - it is ISA after all)
> PCI 56k modem
> 8-10 gig HDD
> cdrom
> 3.5" floppy

Hah! I lurk on this list mainly these days otherwise I probably would have 
caught this sooner, buutttttt...

I have this exact machine (almost, mine is 300 Mhz) and still use it 
today. It's effectively my "gateway" server to my home network, running my 
IRC client (always on, always connected), email client, screen session, 
etc. It also is an NFS server (slapped in an extra 80GB drive in it) for 
my home network, and runs a wiki for basic personal notetaking.

> This seems like it would fit in fairly nicely with the "Grandma Millie"
> discussions I read.  Especially since, once it was set up I wouldn't really
> want to change it.
> I was thinking of trying to turn it into an "internet cruiser".
> I have reasonable expectations of what I want out of the system.
> E-mail
> Web Browsing
> Audio Jukebox
> Along with word processing & spreadsheet office functions,
> Image display/editing,
> and a little p2p/torrents.
> There is also the desire to be able to hook it up to a home network/broadband at some point.
>
> Now for my quandry.
> I will probably have to modify the heck out of somebody's distro.

Nonsense, a system with these specs is plenty powerful enough for these 
purposes without significant re-engineering of a distribution (unless you 
start with one of the more "blocky" distros, e.g., Fedora, CentOS, even 
stock Ubuntu).

I personally would install stock Debian on this box, slap a thin window 
manager on it (something like IceWM is fast and can be very familiar to 
the "Grandma Millie"s out there who have used Win32), put Iceweasel (or 
something smaller) on it, audacious for "audio jukebox", etc. 
Realistically, you should be able to get everything you want and not have 
to modify the distro at all.

----
Sam Hart - http://samhart.com/ - http://samhart.net/