Im joining the ranks

[brady]

Yesterday the front desk sec. downloaded a virus. I over heard her talking to the boss about what to do so I offered my help. It turned out to be a pretty nasty bug. Additionally, I ran adaware and found the computer to be riddled with all kinds of trash.

When the boss came in I suggested that the best thing to do would be to do a complete reformat since there was an ungodly amount of junk on the system. After thinking about it for a minute he told me to just take the thing cuz he wanted to buy a new computer for the front desk anyways. SWEET.

Its a PIII 500mhz, 96mb ram, 8mb Video Card, 20gb Hard Disk...pretty old, but still capable of doing some stuff...ftp server maybe. Anyways, I got it home and cleaned it out and decided that this was a perfect opportunity to give linux a try.

Ive played around with some of the bootable distros...knoppix comes to mind, but never fully installed linux. Right now im just about finished with ubuntu's installation process and I must say that I am very excited about this whole linux adventure.

I'll let you all know how it goes. :D

[brady]

well, im posting this from a brand new install of ubuntu linux. i have to say this is very very cool looking. and surprisingly very fast on this old system. i think this could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

[oldsk00l]

That's one thing about some Linux distros, it does breath some life into older hardware.

[myshkinbob]

yeah linux can breathe new life into redundant hardware. I have my very first pc, a K6-2 300mhz with 200MB of pc66, running as a router / internet host with it's pci slots filled with network cards.

Thanks to Iptables it has the most configurable firewall, it routes traffic, it runs the local mysql database server, a rather spiffy Squid transparent-http proxy for all clients without desktop config required, a secure internet present email server, another server for pop3/imap access, a very large windows network drive using Samba, the same drive rooted to an (s)ftp server, and also runs Mldonkey for http/bittorrent/ed2k/fasttrack/directconnect transfers. I expect i missed a few other things out too.

It runs all that on a 300mhz with only 200mb of pc66 ram, and it's not even pushing the system. :) Of course i run it without a gui (or monitor or mouse or keyboard or any other peripherals at all, god bless SSH). I actually set the box up over 3 years ago, and haven't had to mess with it since, aside from apt-get updates for security. The distro is debian btw, an excellent server distro.

I also boot my desktop pc with debian pure64 sid/experimental, but debian is hard work as a desktop, you either use older well tested program versions, or using the testing versions of debian and help work out bugs in the latest and greatest program versions.