Linux Monday: Updating the Old Boxes
We're just finished with curb-shopping season in Iowa City, and between scrounging and Freecycle I put together three more bootable machines. I also stripped for parts and unloaded seven more machines that had cluttered the basement, mostly of a Pentium II 400 vintage.
How many computers is too many? According to me, I have a 16 port hub and I still have slots left. The flexibility of Linux means you can install a full-featured desktop, or a minimalist system. SETI@Home is all about the CPU speed, but with a low-resource distribution, that old machine is using less of its CPU to run itself and more of its CPU to detect aliens.
The slowest machine I have up is a Celeron 700 that's running Puppy Linux. It seems to be really sturdy, and it's an old-style horizontal (as opposed to tower) case that physically fits into an odd nook. It went 57 days without a restart until I bumped the power cord. I originally had Damn Small Linux on this but Puppy was friendlier to my relative newbie skills.
Even though Puppy is nice and reliable, there's a couple quirks. I need to manually reconnect to the net and manually mount the hard drive each time I restart. (You can save sessions to a removable drive, but with two months between restarts I just haven't bothered.)
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