Not so long ago, I posted about my attempts to bring my old DAW system back to life with Lubuntu. Emboldened by my success, and eager to get it on a nice firm LTS-release foothold, I tried to upgrade it to Precise Pangolin a few weeks ago. Sadly, the results were not so great: after [...]
The Amiga. If you weren’t of computing age during the Bush Sr. administration, you may not have heard of this legend wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a white case. The Amiga inspired frenzied superlatives from its users (including, notably, pop artist Andy Warhol) in a way that only certain fruity computers do today. In [...]
When tinkering with old computers, there is little about an operating system quite as endearing as flexibility at install time. The “Universal Operating System” is no slouch in this regard; the Debian installer will work quite happily from CD, DVD, USB drive, PXE boot (my personal fav), and even a Windows executable. But what if [...]
In part III of this series, I told you that lightweight Linux distributions can be classified as either “fully lightweight” or “remixes”; and in part IV, we took a look at several “fully lightweight” distributions. Naturally, in this article, we’re going to talk about remixes. Unlike the last article, however, I’m not just going to [...]
Our home server — we call him Rupert — is a real trooper. Beneath his yellowing beige exterior, a first-gen Pentium 4 works its 224 MB of RAM night and day delivering a variety of services to our home network. On top of storing our files, caching our DNS requests, filtering the Web for little [...]
By now, we have established a vocabulary with which we can discuss distributions and their strengths and weaknesses, and thus understand the best uses for them given our needs and resources. So in this article, I’ll talk about some actual “fully lightweight” distributions (for those who didn’t read the last article, “fully lightweight” refers to [...]
Now that your hardware is reasonably in order, and you understand the potential issues involved there, it’s time to look at the software side of things. You want to run some kind of Linux distribution on your system, but you don’t know which one to pick. This is the point at which a lot of [...]
Welcome to part II of this series on “Reviving your old computer with Linux”. In the last article, we classified your computer’s hardware broadly by age or processor type, but there is a lot more to Linux compatibility, performance, and suitability for different tasks than just age or processor speed. So this time, we’ll go [...]
This is part one of a series on making your aging, dusty — or just unused — computer useful again with some help from Linux and Free/Open Source software. Linux has quite a reputation for rescuing old hardware from obsolescence; while this is not entirely undeserved, there’s more to it than just popping the latest [...]