It lives!

[Vic]

You lot probably won't care, but I've just got a new (to me) box running Fedora 9.

It's a stunning 330MHz CPU with a full 256MB of 50ns RAM.

One of my old UltraSPARCs is back :-)

O frabjous day. Callooh! Callay!

Vic.

[jonbanjo]

Have you got a (presumably not graphical desktop) task in mind for this one?

[Vic]

Have you got a (presumably not graphical desktop) task in mind for this one?

Sort of - I had to tend to a rather sick Ultra running Gentoo the other day. It was at least 2 years out of date:-(

I thought I'd get my machine up and running as a trial in case I need to replace it. But mostly just because it's been sat on my shelf not doing anything for a while.

But non-graphical? Shurely shome mishtake?

Vic.

[jonbanjo]

Nice one. I found my 800Mhz, I think 256Mb RAM laptop was too slow for my liking running KDE on OpenSuse (I think) 10.0. It wasn't that it was unusable, just that my patience wasn't there and thing like loading Firefox seemed to take forever.

I suppose some of this is relative to what you get used to though, eg. I don't think I'd really noticed how slow my parents XP200 was until I got the X2 6000... They were contented enough with the old one btw (one motivation for me upgrading them was my mother getting a 10Mp camera for Christmas. I think it could done with more than its 512Mb of RAM and I didn't want to add new parts to that one)but I don't think they would want to go back now.

[Vic]

Nice one. I found my 800Mhz, I think 256Mb RAM laptop was too slow for my liking

It's not directly comparable; your machine was an x86 processor, whereas this one is a SPARC. It's a very different architecture.

Mind you, the memory is so slow I don't think that makes a lot of difference :-)


I suppose some of this is relative to what you get used to though

Sure. It also makes a difference how carefully you set something up - I have a very useful laptop here; it's a P2 at 233MHz. It now has 64MBof RAM, but when I first put it together, it had just 32MB. This machine is my network analyser, and it does that job very well. Doesn't do much else, mind...

Vic.

[Andreios]

That's what I love about Linux, it can give old PCs a new lease of life. I have an old 700MHz Celeron with 256MB of RAM that I have put several distros on over the years. It's been a general use PC as well as a file server, router and also a network analyser at different points. It's out of use just now as the hard drive packed in. I'll get a new one for it though.

[codemonkey]

Spent today setting up a Smoothwall system using their recently released 3.0 SP1 version and I have to say... mightily impressed.

If anyones looking for a linux distro just to be a firewall or proxy with almost no setup time I can definately recommend it

[Andreios]

Spent today setting up a Smoothwall system using their recently released 3.0 SP1 version and I have to say... mightily impressed.

If anyones looking for a linux distro just to be a firewall or proxy with almost no setup time I can definately recommend it

I like Smoothwall too used for a bit when my friend Graham was writing a review for our site on it. I was impressed with it too. He prefers PFSense which is also quite good.

[codemonkey]

I like Smoothwall too used for a bit when my friend Graham was writing a review for our site on it. I was impressed with it too.

Their latest version is great... considering it's an almost fully featured firewall and proxy, all I had to do to set it up was configure the network addresses... go to the web interface, tick a box to enable web proxy, and another box to enable IM logging et voila. That was it... done... dusted... it was so quick I didnt know what to do with myself lol