A very important battle has to be fought...

to show to regular persons, that Linux is, nowadays, as user-friendly (if not even more) than Microsoft Windows.

It is against all rational thoughts to stay with Windows, and this site, as well as all involved people involved here, as well as Linux users worldwide, should shortly be able to show it to the world.

An interesting thing, would be to RECYCLE OLD PC'S, with light versions of Linux, using actual software. That would defy our consuming frenzy...
A lot of causes could be helped donating pc's with real working capabilities...

Besides, it is really interesting for me, to work on older pc's with actual tools... like OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, etc... Something our ms friends can't easily do! (without horrible security risks)...

There are several recycling centers doing exactly this, take a look around google. I think there are a few LUGs doing this and donating the PCs also.

It's very easy as the support for slightly older hardware in linux is typically spectacular.

every time you donate a PC to a thrift store, install linux on it and put as many whistles and bells on it as it can handle. attach a page inside the cover, with the root password and a short description of the hardware configuration. have it set up to boot into KDE or gnome. have wine and dosbox included a;ong with openoffice, thunderbird and firefox. there's nothing more frustrating than to buy a PC for $50.00 and get it home, only to find out you need to pay $200.00 or more for a windows license if you want to do anything useful with it because somebody left a broken windows install on it.

maybe throw in a reactos install for good measure.

if we're talking about renewable resources, something to consider is that older pcs tend to be far more power-consuming than modern ones esp. laptops, so in addition to recycling computers, we need to learn to recycle their materials...

Hi,

the amount of power consumed by an old PC is extremely lower, than the resources destroyed (water, energy, etc) during manufacturing a new PC. So it would be a very, very good idea to have a PC's live cycle as long as possible.

fair enough... im not exactly an expert...

for older pcs, I'd also reccomend xfce, in general, you can get it to look almost as good as gnome or kde, but it will be faster, and everybody loves a fast computer...

Old computers make excellent routers that can include several other services including dhcp server, firewall, squid proxy, web server, file server, print server, fax, email server.

They do not make good desktop computers because they are too slow to run the newer modern desktops. If you are happy with a lighter desktop you can get by.


It also depends on what you are calling old. I am talking 486, p75 on up.

386,486, p75, put FreeDos on them and use them for utility purposes. i have a piece of software i wrote back in 94 that does video test patterns for troubleshooting and aligning video monitors. where i work there are test fixtures and firmware loaders that require a genuine serial port. there are EPROM burners that use DOS software. i have several HDD test and recovery packages that use DOS software (at least to start, and they do the LBA addressing on their own from there). FreeDos uses FAT32 anyway, so large disks aren't much of a problem. IIRC the Freesco linux router can be run in UMSDOS mode as well. or load TOMSRTBT linux on it and add whatever utilities you need for testing and recovering HDDs. there's lots of uses for those old beasts, and there's plenty of old DOS utilities and small linux packages that will run on them.

True, if you think about it.
I am sure the energy amount to manufacture new computers is 2* or more the amount to run old computers + reusing is more efficient then recycling.

There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread in general and i think anytime you're helping someone else out it's beneficial to the community as a whole.

Thanks to everybody for posting!
The answers are very interesting to me!

Will try some of that!

My main issue are desktops.
My experience has been with:

Puppy Linux: Very good! however it crashes often while navigating with browsers and the security I think is very limited... any opinions on this?

Vector Linux: Works great, but you need at least P-IV to be reasonably fast.

Ubuntu 8.04 works great on pc's that vector would also.

OpenSuse 9.1 works great on pc's that vector and ubuntu would, but cant update or get new software...

any thoughts on this?

It all comes down to the window manager and what programs you want to run on it.

You can run with no window manager at all and save a lot of resources. Not very exciting though. X controls your mouse and keyboard and you can start X manually and just get an xterm from which to start programs.