Anything about old PCs, their uses, related OSes and their users
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Phone down for 2 weeks almost, so called phone company, tech came and issue solved. My old phone line was shorted by a nail drilled in the wall or something like that was told. He was excellent and very professional. He has to drive a small VAN with several tools packed inside it, he knows pretty much everything inside it, he is also an excellent driver. Outstanding skills and impressive personality. Compared to him, I can do only a very tiny bit.
I've finally decided to retire my third computer oldboy. Oldboy is a 32-bit HP Scenic that was once my main computer. It runs painfully slow now, even with AntiX. And as I have put 64-bit AntiX on littleboy, I don't need another version.
No one, however poor, will want such an old banger so I shall have to dump it. I am still deciding what to take out first:
1) Hard drive. Only 20 GB altogether, so hardly any use as a secondary disk. I have 100 GB on bigboy and use only a small part of it. But I had better take the disk out and trash it as a protective measure.
2) Memory. 250 MB. Again, not much use for an upgrade. And it may well be incompatible with modern memory modules.
3) Network card. Realtek RTL8139. Worth keeping. Several people here have recommended having a spare network card.
4) Writable CD drive. Normally I'd say worth keeping. But I already have one stashed away. Maybe keep it just in case.
5) Floppy drive and disks. Probably not worth keeping.
There are also a huge and heavy scanner (Umax) and an old HP ink-jet printer. The scanner still functions; I don't know if the printer does. Probably the cartridges have dried up. Both require the use of the parallel port and neither bigboy nor littleboy have one of those, so without oldboy, they're useless.
I wish I had someone like rvijay living nearby.
An old PC like this is great for offline work, testing older software, streaming net radio and terminal use. The HD is also good for its parts, there are videos on how to use old HD for parts on youtube.
There are others like me in UK also, retro gaming is a biggie in the UK, checkout online and youtube.
It's gone and good riddance. I really had no use for it. Two computers are quite good enough for this old woman.
I understand, feel the same way as I continue to age also. I was quite content when I was offline recently for almost 2 weeks, listened to radio, went for small walks and did crayon art. Now on return online I only look for artistic inspiration (max. few hours a day, usually it is 30 mts. or so) if not I turn off my PC and modem even. Being online feels as a bigtime drag now. Not the same as it felt even just over 6 weeks ago, wow things change fast indeed.
Distribution: Mainly Devuan, antiX, & Void, with Tiny Core, Fatdog, & BSD thrown in.
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With Autumn arrived, & Winter coming up, I'll be indoors a bit more, so likely be online a bit less, as I will be practicing on some of my musical instruments again - it's good to have a change.
With Autumn arrived, & Winter coming up, I'll be indoors a bit more, so likely be online a bit less, as I will be practicing on some of my musical instruments again - it's good to have a change.
Agreed, it is better to fill void in life with arts. So many are filling this void with alcohol, drugs, gambling and other vices, this is sad to see. Old Computer helps me with arts, when I am offline, OS is not even vital, ever older OS is fine.
Using old PC with Linux, one can get good support for all these activities above. It is a very rich list that is good to bookmark and recall now and then.
It is about 450 Mb the entire OS so very reasonable.
Will be nice if someone can try and review this.
A special utility live-cd distribution like this needs to run on many machines, it does NOT need to be 64-bit. This will run on any processor 686 or later in the intel series and provide rescue and data recovery tools. If you work on many machines, this is a good image to have on a thumb drive but is not something you would be likely to use on a daily basis.
A special utility live-cd distribution like this needs to run on many machines, it does NOT need to be 64-bit. This will run on any processor 686 or later in the intel series and provide rescue and data recovery tools.
But if you use a 32-bit rescue disc on a 64-bit system, you can't chroot, and sometimes you need to.
A special utility live-cd distribution like this needs to run on many machines, it does NOT need to be 64-bit. This will run on any processor 686 or later in the intel series and provide rescue and data recovery tools. If you work on many machines, this is a good image to have on a thumb drive but is not something you would be likely to use on a daily basis.
It can be used on daily basis as a limited OS also. I use Puppy Linux like this. If it is i686 only then can't be used for earlier like processors.
Still I hope that more CLI only OSes come out, this will be good in general, better more distros than lesser.
But if you use a 32-bit rescue disc on a 64-bit system, you can't chroot, and sometimes you need to.
I can. I suspect you can, although using any 64-bit sofware in the chroot may be problematic. There are easy solutions for that issue adequate for most purposes.
I can. I suspect you can, although using any 64-bit sofware in the chroot may be problematic. There are easy solutions for that issue adequate for most purposes.
Well, that's just it. On a pure 64-bit system, everything is 64-bit including the bash shell. So how are you going to chroot into that using a 32-bit kernel?
Well, that's just it. On a pure 64-bit system, everything is 64-bit including the bash shell. So how are you going to chroot into that using a 32-bit kernel?
When you do the chroot, you are RUNNING a 32-bit shell on a 32-bit kernel: No problem. Things get interesting if you call a utility (in the /bin or /usr/bin within the chroot for example) that is 64-bit. You might need to plan ahead and have 32-bit versions of your utilities available in the chrrot jail or use different recovery media for different kinds of recovery operations.
I use a thumb drive that uses E2B to boot any of about 27 different live-cd images, as needed. On some OLD hardware that cannot boot from USB drives I even have to use real floppies or real CD media, but that is rare and special.
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