Many years ago I wrote a series on “reviving your old PC with Linux“, a topic which still remains in active discussion all around the Linuxy corners of the Interwebs. Most of what I wrote still applies, so long as you shift things forward seven years into the future. But as someone who continues to engage in the hobby (and discussion of the hobby) of foisting free operating systems on whatever decaying PC hulks float my way, I thought I’d write up random thoughts about the subject in response to things people say or the changes in computing. A bit of a rant, a bit of state-of-the-union, and a little thinking out-loud on the topic of old hardware running old faithful.
Reviving your old PC with Linux, Part VI: Building your own lightweight remix
In the previous article of this series, I covered a variety of “remix” distributions of Linux aimed at older computers, and posed the question “why not build our own”? In this article, we’ll look at doing exactly that.
Our goal will be to set up a basic desktop system, using only the necessary components, such that it will run reasonably well on a roughly ten-year-old computer.
Porteus
As I’ve chronicled in “Replacing Windows 98…” and previous posts, I’m always interested in new tools that promise to imbue my mountain of mouldering beige boxen with a glorious desktop experience usable by the modern user. A commenter on that post suggested trying out Porteus, so I’ve been playing with it some this evening. While I haven’t time to work up a serious review, I thought I’d share my impressions of Porteus as a distro for rescuing older computers.
Building a Linux system for a Child, part 3: Security concerns
By now you’ve got that old computer purring along like a panther with your new favorite distribution of Linux, loaded to the brim with educational software, ready to propel your child to the heights of intellectual stimulation. But before we launch this starship, let’s take a bit to make sure the safety equipment is in order and reign in some potential problems.
Building a Linux system for a Child, part2: Distros and software
The last article in this series described some of the more general realities of running Linux on a child’s computer. Now that I’ve (surely) convinced you to go ahead an put GNU/Linux on your child’s computer, it’s time to get down to nuts and bolts: which distribution, and what software?
Building a Linux system for a Child, part 1: What and Why
One of the common suggested uses for old computers is to install GNU/Linux on it and give it to your kids. I have five children, ranging in age from pre-teen to infant, and all but the youngest (naturally) regularly enjoy the use of computers running some variant of GNU/Linux. We’ve been using it at home since about 2005, and over the last eight years I’ve gained a reasonable amount of experience setting up Linux on computers for my children or their friends. This series of articles will cover some of my insights on setting up a Linux computer for kids.
Ubuntu Studio 12.04
The Ubuntu studio 12.04 desktop.
Not so long ago, I posted about my attempts to bring my old DAW system back to life with Lubuntu. Emboldened by my success, and eager to get it on a nice firm LTS-release foothold, I tried to upgrade it to Precise Pangolin a few weeks ago. Sadly, the results were not so great: after upgrading, I ran afoul of a mysterious bug that caused Ardour, Audacity, and Hydrogen (and possibly other programs) to segfault when I started them. Despite my best efforts to track down the error (probably caused by my liberal use of PPAs and 3rd-party repositories), it became clear I needed to start afresh.
This time I decided to skip a bit of the DIY and just grab a ready-made audio production distro; after all, there are plenty of them out there, aren’t there? Well, the hunt began for an audio-production oriented distro that would work decently on an older 32-bit system while promising future updates; and yes, believe me, my not-so-fond-of-Ubuntu friends out there, I didn’t limit myself to ‘buntuland. Yet search as I might, every project I found seemed either at least 18 months stale (if not out-and-out abandoned), or a one-man project based on Debian or Ubuntu anyway. In the end, Ubuntu studio seemed best to fit the bill. So I downloaded the nearly 2 GB .iso file, popped it on my flash drive, and loaded it onto the old workhorse; and here, dear reader, are my findings so far…
Icaros Desktop 1.4
The Amiga. If you weren’t of computing age during the Bush Sr. administration, you may not have heard of this legend wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a white case. The Amiga inspired frenzied superlatives from its users (including, notably, pop artist Andy Warhol) in a way that only certain fruity computers do today. In fact, it’s often repeated that, if not for the business bungling of Commodore (who owned Amiga), we might today be reminiscing on the bygone days of Apple computers instead.
Now, I never owned an Amiga, unfortunately; in fact I despised Amigas and anyone who owned one, purely out of an unreasoning sense of sour grapes (the Amiga was, in some ways, more advanced than any computer I’d own for almost another decade). But now that time and tide have washed the vinegar from my teeth, I’ve been overcome with a bit of morbid curiosity about this platform of the past. And when I discovered that some fine folks had developed AROS, an open source remake of the Amiga OS, designed for standard PC hardware, I had to check it out.
How to install Debian offline
When tinkering with old computers, there is little about an operating system quite as endearing as flexibility at install time. The “Universal Operating System” is no slouch in this regard; the Debian installer will work quite happily from CD, DVD, USB drive, PXE boot (my personal fav), and even a Windows executable.
But what if none of those is an option? Suppose you’re stuck with a system with no optical media, no USB boot, no PXE boot, and no OS? Can we get Debian on such a machine?
You bet we can! (more…)
