This post originated from an RSS feed registered with PHP Buzz
by Alan Knowles.
Original Post: Live CD's and recycling old machines
Feed Title: Smoking toooo much PHP
Feed URL: http://www.akbkhome.com/blog.php/RSS.xml
Feed Description: More than just a blog :)
"So should we throw away that old portable", my wife frequently asks if I leave it lying around. An 8yr+ old toshiba PII/300 portable, that has windows 95, supposidly for her use.. but generally ignored due to the fact that it's too slow to fart.
It's a perfectly good machine except for the speed and the battery life is now about 2 seconds. So I occasionally embark on a hunt for a nice small linux distribution on a live cd, that would run a desktop via XDMCP.
Unfortunatly I've yet to succeed.. - Todays efforts included
dsl (Damn Small linux) ~50Mb - boots up the machine, finds all the hardware and network perfectly (including a wireless card). Has a reasonably usefull looking desktop for browsing the web. But unfortunatly uses tinyx compiled without XDMCP support.
PXES ~11Mb - a 'network ready' really thin client boots with a nice option to specify XDMCP, but totally fails to start the pcmcia cards and hence the network (kind of necessary for XDMCP!)
So unless someone suggests an answer (as I dont really want to get into the live cd building business), the box will go back to annoying my wife, being left around the house..
And on a slightly more successfull note, I am still realing from amazement at how well debian linux runs on a Sun Enterprise 2 machine a friend of mine had lying around his office - a more than 6year old machine, that apart from the crappy display card performs about the same speed as my 3year old development Intel box. (and has pretty much the same software installed thanks to debian)
Previous Topic
