[ale] EQUIPMENT DISPOSAL - OT

[Jeff Hubbs]

Actually, 386 on. 

Practical issues with 386, 486, and Pentium Classic:

    * CMOS battery will almost certainly be dead or dying.  Some CMOS
      batteries were built into RTC modules that may be too much trouble
      or money to replace.  Different machines may react differently to
      having a dead or missing CMOS battery (dead ones should be removed
      lest they corrode through and ruin the motherboard); some can't boot.
    * Disk I/O is often more pathetic than the CPU.  This greatly
      impacts you if you're RAM-challenged and therefore need to become
      swap-dependent.  In such cases, you'll be *much* better off if you
      can put a swap partition on a different physical drive on a
      separate IDE controller.  I have used RAID 0 to speed up disk I/O
      on a junker. 
    * Disk drives are often quite small, leaving you with Slack or
      Debian as your best mainstream choices.  Gentoo is excellent on
      old hardware, but the Portage tree, kernel source tree, and
      associated baggage can easily eat up 2GB. 
    * About a third of Pentium Classic machines were built with buggy
      IDE controllers and in many of those machines, the buggy
      controllers weren't wired up correctly on the motherboard. 
      Windows <= ME had code that kept this from becoming a problem, but
      OSses with proper pre-emptive multitasking (NT and descendants,
      commercial Unixes and derived products like Banyan VINES, xBSD,
      Linux - Net) would have trouble in the form of random-seeming
      crashes and filesystem corruption.  The Linux kernel has config
      settings to enable workarounds for the buggy controllers (one is
      the RZ1000 and the other is the CMD640) but if the controllers are
      additionally hooked up on the motherboard wrong, you're still in a
      bad place even if you enable those workarounds.  For such
      machines, better to reserve them for diskless thin-client use or
      in those cases where you can avoid using it via off-board IDE or
      SCSI controllers.  It's probably safe to use these unsafe
      controllers for write-once-read-little-to-many parts of your tree,
      to include /boot, /usr/doc, etc.
    * Some PCs from this era - even big-cased high-dollar honkers - had
      really strange quirks.  I recall certain machines from Zeos and
      (straining to remember) Northridge (?) that were either dog-slow
      for their clock speed or would inexplicably appear to run at
      ~1/10th of their expected performance.
    * There is a "sweet spot" with i486 -  DX2/66 and DX4/100 with PCI
      bus especially - that were significantly better than P/60, P/66,
      P/75, P/90 and perhaps some P/100.   Large quantities of such
      machines were built for corporate/government use, mostly out of
      commodity parts.  I bought a few hundred of high-quality PCs like
      this with either IDE or SCSI on the motherboard back in my
      Department of Energy days - I think they had Asus mobos.

nedj10 at gmail.com wrote:
> last time i checked any 486 or above will run a linux kernal sounds like a perfectly feasible training platform for basic unix, C, perl, java etc etc etc for people just getting started.
>
>
> People should be thankful for what they have.
> Ned
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
> From:  "Jeff Lightner" <jlightner at water.com>
> Subj:  Re: [ale] EQUIPMENT DISPOSAL - OT
> Date:  Tue Nov 28, 2006 1:52 pm
> Size:  1K
> To:  "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org>
>
> That reminds me of a few years back.  A co-worker took a sabbatical to
> run a half-way house for refugees from the former Yugoslavia.  He was
> trying to train them on computers and they had an old 486 running DOS
> similarly old apps.  He wrote asking if our boss would donate a spare
> keyboard because the one they had was flaky.  (Ultimately the VP of the
> division got wind of it and donated some REAL computers to the half-way
> house.)
>
> What was amusing was another co-worker on hearing what this one had
> imagined doing the interview for a job for one of these refugees:
>
> "You're familiar with 486 and DOS.  We don't often get people with THOSE
> qualifications."  
>
> (You'll have to imagine the ironic tone he used to say that.)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
> Chuck Huber
> Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 2:10 PM
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: Re: [ale] EQUIPMENT DISPOSAL
>
> ale-request at ale.org wrote:
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 12:05:43 -0500
> From: "Stephen R. Blevins" <srblevi at worldnet.att.net>
> Subject: [ale] EQUIPMENT DISPOSAL
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
> Message-ID: <456C6C67.4050905 at worldnet.att.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> I have a couple of working monitors and an *old* IBM PC (it's already
> been maxed out at 64MB).  Anybody know where I can get rid of them,
> hopefully for free?  Thanks in advance.
>
> -- Stephen R. Blevins srblevi at worldnet.att.net
>
>
> Stephen,
>
> Donate them to a local tech school, like Devry or ITT Tech.  You can
> take a tax deduction on them, it benefits the students, *and* it becomes
> their problem on how to get rid of them.
>
> --- message truncated ---
>
>
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