Thursday, December 27, 2007

Two old computers, and pics.


So, today I brought home the Presario.




But, I also got an eMachine (read: piece of crap) with 192 MB RAM 400MHz Celeron, and a 4GB Hard drive.
While it should load Xubuntu, I got some very strange errors trying to load the LiveCD.
Same with all the other Debian based distros (I tried Knoppix, Dreamlinux, and Xubuntu)
I had to install MEPIS (only thing I had at the time), but it's a bit too heavy. I can't figure out how to decrease the KDE effects either.


Although I don;t have it here at home, I did have an old Pro-Tech with these specs.
132MHz Processor, 16MB RAM, and a 1 GB Hard drive. After failing miserably to install DSL via Poorman's (it wouldn't boot from CD)
Also, it had a rather weird screen color. I totally destroyed it anyways, so I'm gonna have to try getting an OS that fits on a floppy.




On a lighter note, just before I left, I managed to install DSL on another Pro-Tech Machine, which seemed slightly newer (or just had better specs).
132MHz Processor
32MB RAM
1.5GB Hard drive

I was succesfully able to install DSL on this one, however, it took me three tries (GRUB wasn't working, so I had to use LILO)


Well, that makes, uhm...
5/7 of my Computers now have Linux.
And I'm getting two more (maybe three, but don't count on it) tomorrow.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Question about your emachine: Is it one of the fanless Celerons? I got my hands on an ancient 400Mhz Celeron about six months ago that had no processor fan or case fan -- just a wacky fork-shaped heat sink on the processor. (Actually, I guess a lot of pre-Pentium III machines ran without fans, but this one was surprisingly quiet.)

I thought it was weird until I realized it would make a perfect media machine -- no background noise to interfere with the sound quality.

I actually toyed with the idea of booting it live (it only used a 225W power supply) and running without a hard drive, then networking in the music collection from another machine. I never did it though.

Nice blog! I enjoy reading about old hardware, and seeing how it works, or doesn't work. Cheers! ;)

zmjjmz said...

Uh, I'm running an eMachine right next to me here, and it isn't too quiet (192 MB RAM, running Xubuntu), But on that note, there seems not to be a fan of any sort.
And it is a Celeron.