Old and dusty Pentium III Dell computer brought back to life by Puppy Linux!

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!

PCLinuxOS delivers where others failed

This is a follow-up post to "A real-distro-hopper-stopper".

One of the reasons why I said PCLinuxOS is "A real distro-hopper-stopper is its ability to auto detect your devices. I have read elsewhere that mostly, only branded tvturner cards can work with linux. To my surprise, this is not the case with tvtime, the native tvturner software in PCLinuxOS and I guess it is available out-of-the-box on every versions of PCLOS (excellent job guys!).

This software (tvtime) is so easy to use. Just right click on it and a menu will pop out for you to select a task. To get your tvturner working, simply click on "channel management" then "scan for signal" and start watching your favorite tv show!

I need to install at least three things to get my tvturner card running on windows (driver, media center & remote utility). Got no luck running it on other linux distros either. :(

As I said, PCLinuxOS is "a real distro-hopper-stopper". Do you think I got the reason to say so?? Try running it to check it yourself!

You can safely check tvtime out by getting your Live copy of PCLinuxOS from this mirrors.

No more such thing as microsoft windows dominance

Fast & furius 30mb OS

I've got an earlier post regarding this linux distro and I'm using it right now to watch youtube videos. I'm impressed on the way midori integrates with flash to render youtube videos seamlessly. I tried running slitaz on P4 CPU 3Ghz (screenshot below) and AMD Turion 64 X2 1.8Ghz processor and it performed extremely well on the P4 and blindingly fast on the 64bit CPU.

Slitaz is frugal on cpu and memory usage. Though I've noticed that it acted differently from browser to browser (screenshot below is showing task using midori). Yet, it's not a big deal, because firefox and midori renders webpages and flash videos with no problem at all.

     

 showing task using midori and firefox respectively                                          

Here's a short list of the other cool features of SliTaz:
Built-in LiveCD and LiveUSB creator - works perfectly 
Mountbox - gives full control on which drives you'd like to mount or unmount
tazpkg - easy to use apt-get like package manager with GUI
Gparted Partition Editor - easy to use partition manager

This little spidey is not as robust as PCLOS LXDE 2010 (my preferred distro) but at 30mb - it is really an impressive distro (please note that SliTaz also got LXDE as the default desktop environment). SliTaz has the ability to become a full featured desktop simply by adding packages using tazpkg with more than 2000+ apps in its repository.

SliTaz loads totally to RAM so if you have 1G or higher memory, it can be extremely fast. 

Right now, I'm hunting for older boxes to try this small wonder in, to see what it can do on machines with lower resources.

Important links:
http://www.slitaz.org/
http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/index.html#stable
http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/cooking/slitaz-cooking.iso

Related post:
http://noteither.blogspot.com/2010/03/boot-baby-boot.html

A real distro-hopper-stopper

 

pclinuxos-lxde-2010-beta2a

Above is the screenshot of the new PCLinuxOS with LXDE as native desktop environment. This baby is still in beta stage but compared to its predecessor, this version is almost complete. Having Firefox 3.6 with built-in flash as browser - watching videos via youtube and the likes is a breeze out-of-the-box.

The printer manager is also easy to use. Just plug-in your printer and it's automatically detected.

CompizFuzion is also out-of-the-box. So if you've got a decent graphics accelerator you'll be up and running the most advance desktop in the planet. :)

Cube with 3D, gears and transparency in action!

Take note that this OS also auto-detected my PCI tv-tuner.

I have tested few LXDE distros this past week and I am very delighted that PCLinuxOS rolled-out this beta version. BTW, here's the link  to PCLOS mirrors for Beta 2 releases.

Here's a list of some cool features of pclinuxos-lxde-2010-beta2a:

Internet: Firefox 3.6, Thunderbird 3.0.3, Pidgin 2.6.6, Xchat 2.8.6
Sound: Audacity 1.3.10-beta, LXMusic 0.4.0
Video: Imagination 2.1, MPlayer, TVTime Television Viewer

It also got the Synatic Package Manager so that installation of new applications to satisfy your needs is just a click away.

Boot baby... boot!

Could you imagine a usable operating system that is only 29 mb with a Firefox browser built-in? Imagine a sleek window manager and desktop environment that only uses a small fraction of your RAM and CPU! An old computer running latest softwares? Your kidding me man!!!

But nope! I'm not kidding! What you can see in the picture above is the screenshot of a customized SliTaz GNU/Linux operating system. It does not contain under the hood some basic tools to keep you up and running and do some computing task but it also got more than 2000 easy to install packages with its SliTaz packages manager.

I've been playing around with linux distributions for some considerable time already but SliTaz really impressed me. It uses LXDE as its desktop environment - what makes RAM and CPU usage very minimal. It runs completely in RAM meaning you can run your computer even without a hardisk. By default, hard disk and partitions are not mounted which I believe is a very beautiful thing because the user is to decide whether you wish to have partitions mounted or not.

If you know how to play around Linux and LiveCDs... why not give SliTaz a try and be amazed on what something so small can do. :)

Installing Windows 7

Windows 7 is the latest operating system from Microsoft and this new toy from the OS giant looks like a shiny new penny :) But unless you've got it pre-installed with your new PC, you won't encounter problems with sounds and video cards. But if you've installed it by yourself into your old PC (given that minimum system requirement is met of course!) then you'll probably be needing to install the correct drivers for your sounds and video devices to work properly.

Just in case you need help, it'll be appreciated if you post your questions/problems about installing Windows 7 in an older machine here. Because for sure, not all devices will be auto-detected during the installation.