Old hardware has new legs with linux
This isn’t actually news in the “new” sense, but to many people this is newsworthy. From slashdot… aselabs is running a bit on DSL linux on an older laptop (Pentium 266MMX with 64 MB RAM). Most people would agree that is old/slow hardware by current standards and this is something that can be useful still with linux as the base operating system (fluxbox as the Window manager – I think that’s what dsl uses?)
Many times with older hardware (laptops especially) come the chicken and egg kind of problems like how do you install if you don’t have a cd-drive…. Fortunately they struggle and deal with that issue and others. They go into pretty good detail on the “Damn Small Linux” install talking about many of the problems that came up and what fixed it. (Also the constraints of small (4.3 GB) hard drive).
I challange you to have a decent workable Windows XP install on this kind of hardware. There is a list of greivances on this release of DSL as well as a report that the installed system is quite usable in spite of the klein specs of the machine.
This old hardware rejuvenation is an area that linux truly excels for the variety and choice in ways of getting things done. (Whether you’ve got an old machine acting as a firewall with a web administrative interface or an old laptop with a small window manager like fluxbox, or an old pc acting as a thin client to pull a full desktop from another system.)