[ale] Best Choice for under-powered System

Jonathan Glass jonathan.glass at ibb.gatech.edu
Mon Sep 29 10:25:21 EDT 2003


Just out of curiosity, do you have a home network, and a more powerful
machine running linux somewhere on that network?  If so, why not check
out LTSP.org?  I've used this in development (never made it to
production) to convert some old clunkers into reasonably well-behaved
thin-clients.  The total setup time, reading from the manual, was around
3 hours...or course, I did install the server from scratch, so take out
about an hour.

Thanks
Jonathan Glass

On Sun, 2003-09-28 at 17:52, John M Trostel wrote:
> I've cobbled together a system for my son from an old 100 MHz Pentium
> (I) wt. 64 MB of RAM.... 4 M of that RAM is used by the on-board SIS
> video chip.  It's got a whopping 1 GB HDD, a cd drive and a 3.5"
> floopy.  An old SMC 10BT ethernet card rounds out his $0 cost system. 
> (Actually $5, as I needed a PS2/AT keyboard converter dongle.)
> 
> Right now I have the system running RH 7.1. Do you realize how many
> upgrades there are out for the stock 7.1 distro now? ;)
> 
> He needs a system that will run Netscape/Mozilla/Galeon with Java
> support.  It barely runs on the system set up now.  (Mozilla and Java). 
> Would I be better off running Debian on this box? (Leaner, meaner, 
> slightly less than glacial...) Or even something like Vector Linux,
> which is supposedly for just such a situation? The ISO of Vector I
> burned seems to have trouble... Has anyone else tried Vector or another
> small distro for old machines that includes X, a nice windowing system,
> and a java-enabled browser?
-- 
Jonathan Glass
Systems Support Specialist II
Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience
Georgia Institute of Technology
Email: jonathan.glass at ibb.gatech.edu
Office: 404-385-0127
Fax: 404-894-2291



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