[sclug] Cheap'n'nasty Tesco Linux machines

[Alex Butcher]

On Tue, 11 Mar 2008, Pete wrote:

> --- Phillip Chandler <phillip.chandler at ntlworld.com>
> wrote:
>> And who cares if their low spec. 2.66 ghz is
>> actually  a good speed for
>> a standard box for the average joe home user,
>> especially for linux.
>
> Anyone else remember when a Pentium 100 was good
> enough for email, web surfing and writing some
> letters?

It still is, but you'll have to accept that you'll have to use the
applications that were around when the Pentium 100 was around, rather than
today's applications. So that really means things like PINE for email, lynx
or Opera for web browsing (old versions of Netscape don't understand modern
web standards like CSS and so are rendered fairly useless) and TeX or
something for writing letters. As far as desktop environments go, you have
to forget about both Gnome and KDE and use a simple window manager (e.g.
fvwm/twm/xfce etc), just like we did back then (assuming, of course, that
you start X at all).

The nice thing is, of course, that it's not too awful to be using a modern
kernel/glibc etc, so at least you can still use a modern distro and command
line tools.

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher, Bristol UK.                           PGP/GnuPG ID:0x5010dbff

"[T]he whole point about the reason why I think it is important we go for
identity cards and an identity database today is that identity fraud and
abuse is a major, major problem. Now the civil liberties aspect of it, look
it is a view, I don't personally think it matters very much."
  - Tony Blair, 6 June 2006 <http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page9566.asp>