Years ago I used that machine watching DVD.

Generally I have to say sorry - the thing only has 256 MB of Ram...And new old Ram seems to be very expensive. I´ve installed WinXP again, but had no time testing the speed.

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Another use might be as an internet-radio receiver, with amplified stereo speakers plugged into the audio output jack. New, dedicated internet radios, in my opinion, are more expensive than they should be and this would be a way around it.

If you don't know about internet radio, here's a link to a typical source. Click Listen on the Menu if the link doesn't automatically get you there.

If you have VLC installed, some stations may offer a direct download of their stream through the player, instead of playing through the browser. Then you get the advantage of VLC's multiple-band audio equalizer.

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i wasn't aware vlc could do that. i might have to check it out.

For example, if you click on ABC Lounge (right now, it's on the first page displayed in Radionomy, and then click on Listen to this Station (boxed link, extreme right of page), at least on my desktop (Linux Mint) system, a box pops up, with the text:
Since vlc is the default, you hit <Enter>, wait a moment, then vlc runs and plays the stream.

There is a way to install a customized Bodhilinux or for that matter any ubuntu or debian based distro offline. But it takes some work. It will start with the Ubuntu server install. So some command line knowledge will help. Here are some instructions. Hopefully I caught any typos, but can't guarantee it.

You will need...

1. An internet connected computer or virtual PC on which to build a template, from which we can extract the apt cache, sources.list file and apt list files.

2. An offline computer or virtul pc to install to. (the target pc)

2. Both the target pc and template pc must be able to boot from USB thumb drive.

3. Ubuntu 18.04 server (non live edition) on cd , dvd, or usb thumb drive or just the .iso for a virtual pc install. An additional usb thumb drive, formatted to ext4.


A.Install Ubuntu Server on the target pc.
Go ahead and install the Ubuntu Server on the target pc. When you get to the network setup, let it try, and fail to connect, and then choose “configure later” as we will hopefully be installing off line later. We just need to make sure we can get a working server install on the target system. If we do then, we can proceed to the next steps.

B.Template PC

We need to create the template system, in order to extract the apt-cache, so that the install on the target system does not need to download any packages.

1. Install Ubuntu Server on the target PC. We will need networking on this system, to download needed packages for the target system.

2. Install the following packages on the template pc. This will install the Bodhi and Moksha packages.

Log in to server and issue the following command…

sudo apt-get install bodhi-desktop xserver-xorg lightdm bodhi-plymouth-theme bodhi-theme-pack bodhi-plymouth-text bodhi-theme-moksha-arc-dark moksha-menu pcmanfm terminology network-manager-gnome arandr bodhi-appcenter gdebi udisks2 elaptopcheck apturl-elm faenza-icon-theme pavucontrol ephoto eepdater bc midori epad esudo





add any addition software packages you will want to the above command. Keep a list of the exact package names you installed including the ones listed above. You don’t need to worry about the dependencies.

3.Bodhi doesn’t seem to like the servers home/user folder so we issue the following commands…

mv /home/user /home/user-old && mkdir /home/user && chown -Rv user:user /home/user

**Where user is replaced with the user name you chose during server install.


4. In console enter reboot Hopefully you will boot to a working Bodhilinux system.

5. Update the template system.

In a terminology do...

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist upgrade

repeat to make sure apt comes back with 0 to install 0 to remove and 0 to upgrade.

6. Plug in usb thumb drive with ext4 file system, and make sure it is mounted.

7. Copy apt sources.list to usb.

In terminology do…

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /path/to/usb/thumb/drive/sources.list

Where sources.list is the name of the copied file in both folders.

Example sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /media/user/usb/sources.list


8. Copy the apt-cache In terminal do…

sudo rsync -lvr /var/cache/apt/archives/ /path/to/usb/thumb/drive/cache/


Note the trailing slashes, they need to be there to make sure the files in the directory are copied to a folder called cache in the usb drive, and not scattered about on the usb drive.



9. copy the apt lists In terminal do…

sudo cp -r /var/lib/apt/lists /path/to/usb/thumb/drive/lists



C. Install bodhi to target

1. Boot up target with server installed.
2. Plug in usb with copied files.
3. Create mount point and mount usb drive
sudo mkdir /media/usb
sudo mount /dev/sdxx /media/usb

Where xx is the drive letter and partition number of usb drive. If not sure try lsblk in terminal.

4. move to mounted usb folder

cd /media/usb

D. Copy template files to target pc

1. copy apt sources list (this adds the needed Bodhilinux repo to ubuntu server)

sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list && sudo cp /media/usb/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list

2. copy apt-cache

sudo rsync -lvr /media/usb/cache/ /var/cache/apt/archives/

3. copy apt lists

sudo rm -dR /var/lib/apt/lists && sudo cp -r /media/usb/lists /var/lib/apt/lists

E. Install packages

1. Install the Bodhi and Moksha packages plus whateever packages you added before.

sudo apt-get install bodhi-desktop xserver-xorg lightdm bodhi-plymouth-theme bodhi-theme-pack bodhi-plymouth-text bodhi-theme-moksha-arc-dark moksha-menu pcmanfm terminology network-manager-gnome arandr bodhi-appcenter gdebi udisks2 elaptopcheck apturl-elm faenza-icon-theme pavucontrol ephoto eepdater bc midori epad esudo


2. Bodhi doesn’t seem to like the servers home/user folder so we issue the following commands…

mv /home/user /home/user-old && mkdir /home/user && chown -Rv user:user /home/user

**Where user is replaced with the user name you chose during server install.

3. if you need ethernet network after install we have to edit a couple of files after we reboot into the system in terminology do…

sudo epad /etc/netplan/01-netconfig.yml

change renderer: networkd to renderer: NetworkManager save and close.

sudo epad /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

and change managed=false to managed=true.

Save and close epad.

Log out and back in.

Now you can use Ubuntu server and the files on the thumb drive to install to as many systems as you want, and it will be fairly quick, especially if you script the above commands.


Enjoy!

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wow - nice work randy!

Thanks! There still might be better ways, but this works for me.
I needed to find a way to create custom installs for Bodhi and LXDE, since systemback is no longer being developed. This works great when I put it in a script, and add theme, icon and settings. I can then use it for mass installs. They usually take less than an hour. Not quite as fast as sytemback. I never have any luck with bodhibuilder. Probably due to the custom skel I use.