[Wylug-discuss] [MASSMAIL] Not wanting to start a distro war

[Gary Stainburn]

On Wednesday 17 February 2016 23:25:28 Martin Rowe wrote:
> Wylug is
> still the only place where I've seen a phone turned off by throwing it
> across the room - nice one Rob :)
>
> I really enjoyed the various talks, even if the subject matter was beyond
> me a lot of the time. Family commitments meant I had to drop the Monday
> meetings not long after they moved venues from the Uni, so I'd be up for a
> reunion meet.
>
> Regards, Martin

Pretty much the same for me.  Getting married and inheriting 4 kids was the 
main reason I stopped coming :-)

I had forgotten about the flying phone.  Having said that, this was "different 
times" before phones were the price of a small house, and more powerful than 
the space shuttle.

On Thursday 18 February 2016 08:34:24 Rob Speed wrote:
> It sounds like people might be interested in getting the band back together
> for a one-off gig...
>
> Somewhere in the centre of town as it's easier to get to for most people -
> buses, trains, a short walk and probably even free parking.
>

I'm sure I could get a day pass for this

> Martin - The bad old Siemens S10... (I went back to Ericsson). Can you
> believe that I've still got that phone, ok, it's in a box marked old
> phones, but I think it still powers on.
>

I used to always have a Nokia 6310 which were armour plated and bounced 
brilliantly.  I even drove over one

With most modern mobiles, they're stuffed if you fart in their general 
direction :-)

> Which brings me to another question... What old kit are people hanging onto
> because of nostalgia or maybe because it's still going and would probably
> be faffy to replace - we've still got a Beeb ("other computers are
> available") running here - I kid you not.

I've just removed two 1U  P4 servers that I purchased back in August 2004.  
Because they were running Linux, they were still up to the job.  The only 
reason they've had to come out is that the fans have finally died and finding 
replacements was proving hard.  One of these has been replaced by - a Pi :-)

> There must be a few 386's running early distro's still ticking along, or is
> it that Linux has improved at handling newer hardware, and the old software
> (mostly) still compiles that it's easy to swap old kit out for things that
> consume 'slightly' under a KW...?
>

At the time, I thought I was very retro when I did a fresh install of Windows 
3.11Windows for Workgroups in 1998, even after Win98SE had been released.  
This was to enable us to connect our ICL Series39 mainframe to our PC network 
(or was it the other way round)

Looking at how long Win95 hung around, that doesn't seem much now :-)


I still have a number of internal boxes running Fedora 9 perfectly happily.  
After F9, Samba authentication no longer supported "security = share" which 
stuffed up pretty much most of my fileshares

Unfortunately, over the years Linux has gone the way of the bloatware.  I 
still think it is more tollerant than MS and will run on smaller kit, but not 
the same as it used to be.

I know you can still strip it down to reduce the load, which is something you 
can't do with Windows.

There are exceptions of course, such as TinyCore, and Raspbian but I don't 
think we can class them the same as full desktop/server type distro.

Rob, I've just spotted that as of 9th Feb there's a new Jesse image available

https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_latest

It has some of the update pre-applied.


>
> R.
>
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-- 
Gary Stainburn
Group I.T. Manager
Ringways Garages
http://www.ringways.co.uk