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 [...]
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 [...]
In my spare time, when my brain simply demands that I stop writing PHP and Javascript and start writing English for a little, I’ve been working up a miniseries of articles on reviving an old computer with help from Linux. I know the topic’s probably been done to death, but since tinkering with old and [...]