techies - extending life of an old PC by migrating to Linux

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techies – extending life of an old PC by migrating to Linux

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August 6, 2006 at 1:43 pm

#690656
6

General Lighting

@general-lighting

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The PC I am currrently posting this on is an old Pentium III with 384MB of RAM, various random hard drives (about 40 GB total) plus a USB2.0 external drive (160GB) connected to a Belkin USB2.0 card..

(Its a Dell Dimension L866r)

This is old (my other PC is a newish laptop); and is currently running Windows 2000. Its getting to the stage where ite becoming a bit clunky; but I don’t want to spend more money on hardware upgrades at the moment and would like to use this as a sort of server on my home network for storing multimedia files etc.

When I lived in Reading me and my mates tried setting up a Linux box for our network in a shared house but it turned out to be more complicated (especially as it was done over weekends when we were all quite mashed) and eventually the guy who owned it went back to Windoze…

Would this new distribution of Linux that I read about on Wikipedia be any good for the purposes I mentioned?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28Linux_distribution%29
August 9, 2006 at 5:32 pm

#865057
1

Raj

@raj

Member
its ok i gather but never tried it myself

we have tried SUSE linux and Mandrake
we stopped because they didnt support our soundcards at the time and AFAIK it still doesnt:hopeless:

this got a good review recently in a PC magazine where they were trying to do eactly what you are attempting

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

there were a few others – want me to go and find the mag?
August 9, 2006 at 5:37 pm

#865055
6

General Lighting

@general-lighting

Moderator
Staff
yep thanks for that – info on any other builds would be OK

its a bog-standard dell apart from the network card and USB2.0 card which were later additions (these are the only things I think that may cause problems)
August 9, 2006 at 5:38 pm

#865058
1

Raj

@raj

Member
right will go and hunt the article out [in my disaster area this may take a while…]

:bounce_fl:bounce_fl:bounce_fl:bounce_fl:bounce_fl
August 9, 2006 at 10:24 pm

#865056
1

noname

@noname

Member
Probably a better idea to go for a specialised build, like freenas:

http://www.freenas.org/

Far easier to config than a full build…
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