[NCLUG] Lite distros/programs for old pcs?

[Michael Riversong]

This is right down my alley.  Have had a lot of experiences so far in 
this, most of them unsuccessful.

I managed to get a Corel Linux installation up on an old machine, and it 
worked ok with a really nice display.  Got Netscape working but not much 
else.  Unfortunately Corel didn't provide much software and stopped 
supporting the system after a while.  I've been trying to put something 
else on that machine, but the Corel system is tenacious and blocks every 
attempt.

Red Hat 7.2 has been working well on two machines running at 166.  It 
comes with enough software to be useful.

Installed Mandrake 7.0 at one point on a 133 Gateway.  It worked all 
right, but there wasn't much with it.  So i eventually took it off and 
replaced it with a Windows NT system.

Red Hat 6.1 will work on older machines, but again there's not much with 
it.  I never tried the Internet with that install.  Eventually wiped it 
out trying to install Suse 7.0, but that didn't take and then the hard 
drive crashed.

For your Sunday school, Knoppix might be a good choice.  I've been 
running it for our elementary students with good results.  It has a lot 
of great games, including the best typing drill programs i've seen 
anywhere.  In this case, i run it straight off the CD each time, on top 
of a computer that has an RH 7.2 installation.  I still haven't figured 
out how to access that computer's hard drive, but that's not really 
critical in this case since these students rarely need to save any 
work.  You must have at least 128 MB RAM to run this!

Now i'm waiting for more donated machines to play with, which hopefully 
will arrive soon.

If you're ever up in Cheyenne, perhaps we could arrange a tour of my 
school.  That way, i could get you copies of some interesting 
distributions to try.  Unfortunately most distributions these days 
either require a minimum of 200 mhz and 128 MB RAM, or they just don't 
have enough packages to be useful.  But there are ways, and since you're 
working with a church of course i'm interested in helping out.

On Thursday, October 23, 2003, at 12:18 AM, DJ Eshelman wrote:

> Greetings all- sorry, it's been awhile, but that's the way life goes
> sometimes.
> I'm
> taking on a project to breathe new life into about 15 old (486 33 up to
> P120) PCs and a few elderlyMacs.  The project is for my church in areas 
> that don't currently have PCs:
>
> 1)  Nursery- we'd
> like some sort of email capability and it would be cool to rig some sort
> of interface to alertour AV control in the sanctuary of parents needing 
> to come pick up their
> brats ... er, kids...One of the other big uses of these computers would 
> be for scheduling
> volunteers.
> 2)
> Sunday School- I might be sticking to Win95/98 for these since they will
> likely want to use somesoftware- but one never knows where I could 
> stick linux in...
>
> 3)  Library- I'd like to create
> a database to track usage- obviously there are a lot of old-school Un*x
> systems out there, butI'd like something slightly easier to use for the 
> somewhat elderly folk
> inhabiting ourlittle library.  I have an old Sun system that I was 
> thinking of using as
> a database server(oooooohhhh!)  Some sort of web interface would rock, 
> seems like a neat
> mySQL project, but I'mwondering if anyone knows of anything out there 
> (I know, I know... check
> sourceforge...)
>
> Basically under our current budget crisis, I'm sure that I could
> easily deploy linux because we simply don't want to buy newer computers
> and certainly can'tafford any more software licensing...  But I of 
> course can't exactly
> expect them to tryrunning RH 9 with open office on these things either- 
> I need a nice slim
> kernel with only thebasics- and I'm just not savvy enough to do my own- 
> too much risk of those
> early Sunday Morningcalls :)
>
> Any ideas/experience would be awesome.
>
> Thanks!
>
> -DJ "The Deej"
> Eshelman
> Independent Contractor  (that means I'm unemployed)
> jit-tech.com
>
>
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Michael Riversong
http://home.earthlink.net/~mriversong
The Pure River Project: featuring free Celtic harp and other gentle MP3s 
and radical ideas about music and culture