[ale] pls sanity check my article

[Casey Allen Shobe]

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001, David S. Jackson wrote:
> I would be much obliged if you could give my article a sanity
> check for accuracy.  It's entitled "20 Old Hardware uses for Linux
> Geeks."  I'm not too sure about the processor requirements on
> some of these tasks, and I have stipulated that you need 486 or
> lower-end pentium for them, but if you find any of the article
> misleading, please let me know.

Number 1:  I did this for a while with an old 386 with two 10base-T cards, but
I couldn't get full 1.5mbit throughput, rather it limited it to a few hundred
kbits...I'd recommend a 486 for cable/dsl, and something with PCI, VLB or MCA32
bus network cards wouldn't hurt.  Oh, and you can use more than two network
cards in this machine, and divide up your network from this level, as well,
allowing different things for different cards with ipchains/iptables.

Number 2 & 3: Great suggestions - I'd throw in a comment about how you could
use two modems in one old computer to use the computer for both.  A 386 should
be able to do these tasks without sweating.

Number 4: As long as you're NOT using IMAP!  IMAP is slow and very CPU
intensive.  I used to use imap://localhost as my email server both for my email
client and for my webmail so that both could be the same, and after
accumulating a couple thousand messages in a bunch of folders, the server would
timeout because it was taking too long (putting the CPU usage at 100% on an
Athlon 1Ghz for more than 60 seconds)  POP3 is great...a shared /var/spool/mail
is also great.  Speaking of NFS, you might want to mention universal home
directory as a use...just use the same home directory on every machine.

Number 6: High-end 486s could also play MP3s without difficulty, and older
machines can also do it with mpg123's half-quality or quarter quality and
mono/stereo playback options (Try mpg123 -4 -m <filename>.mp3 on a 486SX-33
sometime :) ).

Number 7: Woo hoo!  I just started doing this a couple days ago.  I use dosemu
to play games like the Space Quests, etc, but found to be able to do this at
full screen and in full speed, I needed to use X at 640x400x16.  It's really
annoying to fiddle with the X config file every time I want to play a DOS game,
and I'll be damned if I'm going to use DOS ;), so the solution?  A P200 machine
who's sole purpose is to emulate dos for my old favorite DOS games.

Number 9: I'd also like to mention that PHP runs very well in conjunction with
Apache on older machines.  I use a 486DX to power Apache and a PHP powered game
that I'm working on, with the idea that as long as my script runs fast on that
machine, it's going to run fast on anybody elses.

Number 15: Another idea -- a proxy server...

Ending paragraph:  I saw your mention of 'digital VCR', and the Tivo came to
mind.  The Tivo runs on linux :).  So you could make your own Tivo with
unlimited storage space (as long as you're willing to invest in it, that is ;).
A 7x160gb striping raid would be rather nice, wouldn't it?  :P

Oh, and you mentioned the PCI and ISA busses.  Don't forget VLB or MCA, both of
which linux supports nicely :).

Hope this helps,

-- 
Casey Allen Shobe
cshobe at softhome.net
--
To unsubscribe: mail majordomo at ale.org with "unsubscribe ale" in message body.