Breathing Life Into Older Computers

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»Breathing Life Into Older Computers

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Many people in the information technology world collect computers like I do. Taking a quick inventory of computers I have I noticed that there are rather older computers that aren't being utilized for anything. Linux can easily breathe life into that old hunk of junk collecting dust in your closet. Find out how...

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It was great to see someone do a frugal install. I've been running DSL frugal, toram with nvidia 3D acceleration for quite awhile and it's awesome. Old or new hardware works well. You can make the mydsl apps persist at reboot as well as any personal settings. May I recommend the Frugal Howto document posted here.. http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/pdfdocs/

If you tire of your old hard drive, a PC Engines CF adapter will (almost) fit. I just metal-taped the case shut until I get energetic enough to clearance it.
Other CF/IDE adapters may be slightly slimmer.
Dead quiet, runs fine, more battery life.
No swap partition of course (I want the CF to survive) but with 96mb ram DSL runs fine. Netgear MA401 works with no hassles.
Sandisk cards work well. Apparently some other brands don't conform to IDE specs.
For those without the Portege accessories, if you can install your CF card or hard disk into another machine to run the Frugal Install, is should work fine when put back into your lappy.
If you are not sure what head/cyl/sectors to enter when installing a CF card that isn't correctly auto-detected by your BIOS, ideinfo.exe run from a DOS boot CD or floppy can help.

http://pigtail.net/LRP/hd/ (neat Linux Router Project help site) has the utility, and more tools/info worth a look.

Porteges have such a nice form factor, are well made, and parts are cheap. With DSL I can control the rest of my LAN and chair-surf in comfort.

I too had an old laptop. I bought a pcmcia wireless card, installed DSL and was able to successfully browse the internet. The only thing was that the graphics only had 16,000 colors... if it had better graphics, I would have made a digital picture frame out of it.

I don't exactly remember the specs on it... something like 96meg ram, 4gig HD. There was a CD.

with out my extra 512 mb memory stick linux cant save my old computer barely runs Xp but now its on windows 98 and going to set up a sound system for it fer me daad

Yeah, Damn Small Linux will be able to run on it just fine.