Women in Technology

Article:		Resurrect Your Old PC for Music—with Linux
Subject:		Faster Distro & WM is best
Date:		2006-11-25 20:22:18
From:		stomfi
As a service to the "Digital Divide", my group refurbishes old donated PCs with Linux and gives them to the needy. We have found that peole want good response times and for the hardware used in this article, Vector 5.8 is the only general purpose distro fast enough on that hardware. Vector also comes with a synaptic like package manager which end user newbies find easy. The Window Manager is XFCE with icons. For music, the latest Dyne 2.3 distro which can load and boot from a hard drive or flash device is hard to beat. This has the latest real time extended kernel, so is good for real time music and video editing and streaming. A distro running a modern version of KDE or GNOME, needs at least 256MB RAM on a P3 for halfway decent response times and 512MB for reasonable times, otherwise the recipient will buy a second hand copy of Win95/98 and use that.

Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.

• Faster Distro & WM is best
  2006-11-27 13:56:59  jo6pack [View]
  
  
  I am just recycling an old machine from work with 250mhz Cyrix processor and (more important) a Matrix video card recovered from a Pentium 166 box. I have tried it with Damn Small Linux and with Puppy, both of which handle the video just fine and are acceptably quick with 64mb of ram (on live cd, I have not yet installed to the hard disk). Most of the mainline distros cannot handle the video card or the ancient monitor that I use. I have downloaded Vector to try but unfortunately the keyboard config doesn't work after the system is booted (a common failing with live cds in my experience; with Knoppix or DSL use the boot option codes and don't forget that you will have to hunt for the letters 'cos it thinks you have a US keymap until you tell it otherwise) so it will have to be installed to the hard drive to see.
  My personal preference for a desktop is Fluxbox without icons. I want to reduce it to a blank blue screen with no wallpaper to put the fear of God into Windows users.
  Brad doesn't mention it but Knoppix is one of the few distros that doesn't assume you are on a network. The pppoe config is the best and easiest to use that there is. The same tool is in DSL. Why don't I use Ubuntu as a mainline distro? No pppoe! (and a lot more like that!) Cheers Jo