Couple days ago, i went for a morning walk and stop for coffee. On the way back to my apartment, there was this guy putting an old 13inch monitor into the garbage. I happened to look into the bin, and saw there was the entire machine in there already. Anyway i asked if i could look at it, and of course he said okay. Brief inspection showed pentiumIII but fairly old. He said it was well broken, couldn't boot properly, he's got a new g4 all that.

I decided to haul it back, part it out if anything was worthwhile. So i plug it all in and up comes windows2000 login. While I was preparing to crack the password up comes a hardware failure message and it dies. Okay, so lets put in linux!

I loaded debian network install from CD, and it goes okay - I just wiped the drive. I notice that there's warnings about the date being set to november of 2003, kinda funny... Then it refuses to get on the network. Everything else seems okay at this point, but i can go no further. I get to a command prompt at some point and reset the date/time and re-boot. It boots up okay, but the date's bad. Okay, so maybe the board is whacked (or maybe just a dead cmos battery!)... Turns out that's the case - i put in a new battery and that's solved. I also had a spare network card - replaced that too.

Guess what - after that, the machine installed great! Since it is in a high-quality case, and the board, fans, everything is clean - i decide not to part it out; my brother needs a new machine, you see. So i slap a bit more memory in and do a full install of 2.6 sarge. After installnig and doing all the normal upgrades to make it nice (mplayer, alsa, java, etc.) - I put in a music CD, and a cpuBurn program and looped a littel disk stress script and tried to kill it overnite. No such luck, the thing was solid in the morning.

Okay, so my brother had a celeron (much newer than the pIII) running xp before. I bring over the machine and hook it up (I made it look real nice with gnome) and it flies. He's never used linux before, but has used firefox, so there's a start. I also grabbed all of his old data (microsoft works) and showed him all the apps that can support what he used to have. He commented that there were no popus (haha). I explained that he'd not get viruses anymore, and he was fully stealthed to the outside (he doesn't need any services running). His other comment was that it was a bit faster and could run more things at one time that his old machine (it was an HP).

Anyway, the jury is out whether he'll like it long-term. I dummied it up as much as I could, cause he doesn't know much below the gui.

Well there is a glitch - hes' got a bloody lexmark USB printer. Im still working on that.

Cool, huh?

**edit** - i didn't give him root (hahahahaaa)

Nice story, thanks for sharing! I wish I could get my hands on a spare PC, install Gentoo or LFC on it. My Dad's laptop is in my captivity but I wouldn't start messing around with that .

About the printer, a little bit of kernel hacking should do the trick, every time I checked, the USB Printer support module wasn't on by default. Give it a shot..

-A

Crazy how people just throw stuff away.
I hope your brother enjoys his new computer with Debian. I think he will, not having to worry with popups and junkware is a great feeling.

you got it right , its great ...

all my computers , monitors and most of the keyboards are "rubbish" , those higher end eg.PIII , i used to refurbished them and give away , provided that people dont mind , people are rather consumer smart nowadays ...


EDIT :: but comes to think about it , its good to live among the consumer smarts ...


.

Thanks for the comments; yeah it's a good feeling to have the knowledge to take a throwaway and give it new life. Brings to mind that I have quite a few friends, relatives who've asked my advice about computers. I ask them what they have, they don't really know. Most often when I look it is a late '90s pentium iii with some flavor of windows. They are actually embarrassed about it; want to spend 2k for a new p4 or whatever. Most times, if the supporting h/ware is good, it just takes a memory upgrade and re-install of OS (i don't push linux on them).

I tell you; the pIII is a good heart for a machine, even today. The one i found in the dumpster runs at 600mhz. Im on a PIII laptop now that also runs at that speed; mind you I've got linux on it. I've got a slightly faster PIII desktop running winxp pro; I slapped 768M ram in it and theres no issue, unless playing video from CD/DVD which i almost never do. Ive heard great things about the PIII 1GHZ chip, but i've never owned one. I've got a 3.2GHz HT P4 with all the latest (It simply roars...) - so I know what's good and not.

Ive got a Pentium 1 200mhz 32mbRAM running as a inet-gateway/firewall/samba/dhcp server (headless). It's amazing what that pile of old parts can do (and what people mindlessly throw away)

By the way, the first computer i ever used was an original IBM pc. The first time I ever opened a machine was to add a hercules card to that one. The first one I ever bought was a brand-new 80286 (pre-windows) - I think the market life of the 286 was about a month; I thought it was the bomb, and still have it (somewhere).

Amazing....

Interesting idea - whats' the easiest way to check that???

That is pretty cool. Your borther is a lucky guy! I have been trying to get Debian to install and run on my machine for 2 weeks now with just forum assistance and here the guy has a nice machine handed to him.

Thanks for the story.

This looks like a success story to me! Moved.

I've installed debian on many different classes of machines and diverse hardware; with little difficulty. Can you tell me the problems (or refer me to your other thread here?)

I've had to use a lexmark printer with linux before. It's not to hard to set up (Assuming that you are using CUPS), you just have to install Lexmark's binary drivers. This should help you, just adapt it to whatever distro you use.

cool, i'll look into that. But im using debian, not sure if im smart
enought to adapt the process...

anyway very cool of you to suggest...!


cheers!

There was an article about this in the New York Times three months ago: Corrupted PC's Find New Home in Dumpsters

Go to /usr/src and check if there's a directory in there that has some Kernel sources in it. Enter the Kernel source directory in a terminal and execute:

It should bring up a GUI configuration thingy for all modules, pretty straightforward. A tick would mean "Installed" and a dot would mean "Available as module"

Sorry I'm late with this..

-A

No need to look for a directory, grep or look at your .config file for your kernel.

# grep USB_PRINTER /usr/src/linux/.config

The config might sometimes be in /boot instead of /usr/src/linux if you've never compiled your own from source.

Good one. Shows Linux doesn't need an expensive and grunty machince.