[NBLUG/talk] Cheap Computers for All

[R C Smith]

I put Damn Small Linux on a Toshiba laptop Portage T3600CT 486 50 MHz 24 MB
memory 500 MB HD. Swap was set to 96 MB The display is vga only. It was work
because no cd boot, parallel port cd. I did this to get support for a pcmcia
wireless card.
The laptop was reasonably fast on Win 95 and even ran Office 2000. With DSL
it is glacial 5 minutes to boot. Firefox takes over 15 minutes to load as
does Open Office and AbiWord.. It will run Dillo and the FLWriter slower
than you would like but useable. VGA resolution limits usefulness on the
web.
The point of this is that Pentiums arround 200 MHz and  more than 24 MB mem
and 800 X 600 is a practical minimum. I would be interested in hearing how
your installation of the RULE software works. Especialy a comparsion with
DSL. My laptop is the equivalent to a kerocene lamp and stove.
Bob Smith
KD6FVI
----- Original Message -----
From: "Walter Hansen" <gandalf at sonic.net>
To: <talk at nblug.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2005 12:29 PM
Subject: [NBLUG/talk] Cheap Computers for All


> Just ran across this in one of the tech journals I get and thought it
might
> be of interest to you and yours.
>
> There is a project to make an install of Linux that will work very well on
a
> very low power computer. Sounds like they have it working with computers
> such as 486s (might even work with 386s) with as little as 6megs memory.
The
> idea is that there is no real reason why such junk computers need to fill
up
> landfills when people who can't afford much could be using them.
>
> I've got a couple of Pentium 100 laptops with 1-gig drives that I might
> install this onto. Their idea is to use modern distributions but with
memory
> and hard drive minimal programs that will run fast on older hardware.
> They've got a desktop/browser and such all working along with office
> applications and such. Also these are secure modern distributions
> (fedora/kde), not old software.
>
> It kina boils down to the fact that you don't need a P4 2ghz machine with
a
> gig of ram to run minesweeper or check email. In the windows world these
> computers are not supported and are only good for the trash. (Just try
> getting patches for win 95). But in the linux world that may not have to
be
> the case.
>
>
> http://www.rule-project.org/
>
>
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