Re: "to outlaw general purpose computers"
On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 03:17:52PM -0400, Sunder wrote:
Sure, you can revive old hardware with Linux, but you'll find it runs KDE 3.0 or GNOME slower than windows 95 did on the same hardware. So unless you're willing to also go to older software (or at least less demanding software) you've still got a useless machine.
What? Your brand of crack must be particularly poor these days. A 200mhz cyrix cpu runs linux w/gnome fast enough for most anything. Slower than w95??? Come again? I've run 1ghz boxes and they really don't surf the net much faster, so what's your point?
OTOH, if it does work well enough, and you don't care for swapping memos in Micro$loth Word V283.23 with cow-orkers or don't care about watching the latest 3d movie on XVD disks, then by all means, if you don't mind the huge power consumption, use that old iron.
power consumption?? my 200mhz box? -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
At 08:49 PM 07/09/2002 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 03:17:52PM -0400, Sunder wrote:
Sure, you can revive old hardware with Linux, but you'll find it runs KDE 3.0 or GNOME slower than windows 95 did on the same hardware. So unless you're willing to also go to older software (or at least less demanding software) you've still got a useless machine.
What? Your brand of crack must be particularly poor these days. A 200mhz cyrix cpu runs linux w/gnome fast enough for most anything. Slower than w95??? Come again? I've run 1ghz boxes and they really don't surf the net much faster, so what's your point?
The big issue tends to be memory rather than CPU speed - while Linux isn't quite the bloatware that Windows is, you *really* don't want to run GNOME with the default window manager on a P66 with 16MB RAM. Trust me, you don't :-) Works just fine with TWM or other lightweight window managers. You also wouldn't want to run current IE / Netscape 6 on it, though Netscape 4.7x worked fast enough. If your box can support current PC100 / PC133 SIMMs, you can probably upgrade it with enough memory to run the newer applications ok, but the generation of machines with Fast Page Mode 72-pin memory tends to be limited to 32MB or sometimes less, and 386s tend to be 8MB.
On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Harmon Seaver wrote:
On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 03:17:52PM -0400, Sunder wrote:
Sure, you can revive old hardware with Linux, but you'll find it runs KDE 3.0 or GNOME slower than windows 95 did on the same hardware. So unless you're willing to also go to older software (or at least less demanding software) you've still got a useless machine.
What? Your brand of crack must be particularly poor these days. A 200mhz cyrix cpu runs linux w/gnome fast enough for most anything. Slower than w95??? Come again? I've run 1ghz boxes and they really don't surf the net much faster, so what's your point?
You missed the entire forrest of course by concentrating on a single pine needle from a single branch of a single pine tree. Fine, have it your way: Yeah? Which gnome? 1.0? I wasn't concerned much about internet throughput as much as display rendering of shit like rendering menus and such. Oh, what, did you expect me to use Lynx maybe? Let's also not forget that the older machines have limits on memory, which also affect performance. I don't know about your hardware, but most of my old 100-200Mhz machines don't have motherboards that can handle much ram. I'd be lucky to get 128mb in there -- if I were to bother hunting down ram for them and paying a lot more per megabyte for it than for say a pair of 512M dimms for the newer boxes. And no, I'm not going to be spending $200 on an accelerated 3d video card with 8mb for a piece of shit machine from 10 years ago either. So yes, gnome is slow on old hardware.
OTOH, if it does work well enough, and you don't care for swapping memos in Micro$loth Word V283.23 with cow-orkers or don't care about watching the latest 3d movie on XVD disks, then by all means, if you don't mind the huge power consumption, use that old iron.
power consumption?? my 200mhz box?
Power consumption per MIPS. Do the math. That old 200Mhz box is costing you as much more in MIPS/Watts than your 1GHz box. Unless of course you're comparing notebooks with fully loaded towers. :) My old piece of shit Pentium 1 box which has a 250Watt power supply. Same as my newer machines. Which is more expensive to run, hmm? Now lets say that you take every machine you've ever had and run them all at the same time. How much aggregate MIPS will you get out of them versus how many Watts/hour would you be using? Will those be servers of some sort? Oh, ok, that means you'll need more UPS's. What? You don't have UPS's? Silly man! I've got UPS's on practically everything. Yes, yes, including the Tivo and my alarm clock. Two 3+ hour blackouts was more than enough to convince me. Hell, I was pricing generators right after that, but thought a few large UPS's would do the trick. Certainly that old Pentium tower makes a fine firewall, DNS, mail, or printer server, or low bandwith web server, but for how much longer? At what point does it become useless? Certainly were I to bother encrypting everything on it, disk, swap, and network connectivity, it would slow down to Commodore 64 levels of usability. And how many users do you have going through it? Just yourself perhaps? Ever notice how much slower it is to ssh to that old 100Mhz PC of yours than to the 1Ghz one? the initial connection takes far longer to complete? Maybe you haven't, I have. Perhaps you need more caffeine in your blood stream. Seems to me your IQ is faling.
On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 10:11:58AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
At 08:49 PM 07/09/2002 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 03:17:52PM -0400, Sunder wrote:
Sure, you can revive old hardware with Linux, but you'll find it runs KDE 3.0 or GNOME slower than windows 95 did on the same hardware. So unless you're willing to also go to older software (or at least less demanding software) you've still got a useless machine.
What? Your brand of crack must be particularly poor these days. A 200mhz cyrix cpu runs linux w/gnome fast enough for most anything. Slower than w95??? Come again? I've run 1ghz boxes and they really don't surf the net much faster, so what's your point?
The big issue tends to be memory rather than CPU speed - while Linux isn't quite the bloatware that Windows is, you *really* don't want to run GNOME with the default window manager on a P66 with 16MB RAM. Trust me, you don't :-) Works just fine with TWM or other lightweight window managers. You also wouldn't want to run current IE / Netscape 6 on it, though Netscape 4.7x worked fast enough.
If your box can support current PC100 / PC133 SIMMs, you can probably upgrade it with enough memory to run the newer applications ok, but the generation of machines with Fast Page Mode 72-pin memory tends to be limited to 32MB or sometimes less, and 386s tend to be 8MB.
All quite true. I've got a 486X33 w/20meg that runs linux just fine, commandline only, although I've got gnome working on it, I don't bother. Good enough for firewall, router, etc. And I had a bunch of P100 w/16meg that I was running for awhile as remote boot/NFS/NIS workstations. They worked pretty well, but were slow with KDE or gnome so went with Afterstep. Also loaded StarOffice very, very slowly, but Word Perfect popped up fairly well. Granted, I'd rather use at least a 200, but those were good enough for reading email and websurfing. Actually I was recently working with a library that had all 486 machines, 486DX-100 w/32 megs -- running W95, and even they were usable for web surfing. On my main home linux box, a 266, adding the second 128 DIMM didn't seem to help a great deal -- mind you, I don't doubt that people can see clear differences with benchmarks and all, but I can't recall the last time I ran any. I've also got a dual-processor 200mhz (604e) Mac with 512meg, it seems fairly fast, good enough for watching DVD movies, although one of these days when I've got a lot of loose change I'll probably stick a pair of G4's in that and add another 512 of RAM, just for the heck of it. 8-)
-- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
participants (3)
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Bill Stewart -
Harmon Seaver -
Sunder