A Dell Optiplex GX150 850Mhz is lying on the corner and here's what it got:
Hardrive - none
Processor - Pentium III Coppermine 850Mhz
Memory -256 MB
Optical - present
It's not basically working so I did some cleaning and all kinds of curses to make it boot. After taking out the processor, blown some magic air on it and putting it back again, the machine booted-up!
Now, It's time to give it a spin!
What's on hand are the following LiveCDs:
Xubuntu 9.10
PCLOS LXDE 2010
SliTaz 3.0
Damn Small Linux 4.4.1
Puppy Linux 4.3.1
Xubuntu did boot-up, but with just 256MB of memory it's able to run totally on RAM so it's not an option.
PCLOS and SliTaz are having problems with the video adapter and I did every thing I know and even googled some forums for possible help, there's just no luck running the two on the Dell box (sigh).
Damn Small Linux booted up and gave me a messed-up screen resolution that I easily configured with vesa. Getting connected to the internet is so simple on it's network manager and browsing the web with Bon Echo is I guess one the fastest I've ever experienced! But there's no support flash so it's impossible to watch youtube with this OS. I didn't give up easily anyway. So, I 've tried googling againg for solutions that might make DSL to be able to play youtube and the likes. I failed :( Yet, DSL is best for browsing the web for html pages.
I thought of the venerable Puppy Linux! I recalled that flash support is out-of-the-box with this Linux distro! So I tried booting it up to see what it got for the old machine and walla! here it goes! The best thing with puppyos is that xorg and xvesa worked perfectly fine on the old box!
Although there are linux distributions we love and prefer to use (in my case, pclos_lxde_2010 and slitaz 3.0), it's really wonderful to think that when a distro failed to make an old pc usable - there's always an option to choose from countless distributions downloadable over the internet.
There's always a way to put an old and dusty computer back to life!
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