On Tue, 2002-09-24 at 19:16, Peter E. Williams wrote: > 2) Can older distros (they are the only one's that can effectively run on > older machines), benefit those who don't have a working knowledge of Linux > or even, believe it or not... computers? And one more thing, which distro > could everyone agree would be effective in recycling a computer and to > learn Linux?
I would have to disagree with this statement. Many modern distros. are compiled for i386 processors (including Red Hat and SuSE), and other distros. can compile on a varitey of older platforms (such Gentoo). There are even ports of Debian to other outdated non-x86 processors, such as the Motorola 68k (used in old Macs amoung others). And I myself have installed recent versions of MKLinux, Debian, and LinuxPPC on an outdated PPC system.Most of the time hardware of 386, 486, and 68K vintage will not have to be worried about since many Pentium, Pentium II, and PPC chips are considered outdated. I recently installed SuSE 8.0 on an AMD K6 with 64MB RAM and it will even run KDE 3. I would not recommend installing an older distro. as the software is outdated and some of it may contain security holes. Plus you will have a hell of a time installing any recent apps. I think that the only consideration is what window manager you use. On many old systems the latest version of KDE or Gnome would not be economical because they would run too slow. However you could use WindowMaker, Enlightenment, ROX, XFCE, or any one of many window managers or lightweight desktop environments that are easy to use, and light on system resources. > According to Ron Hockey from the C.R.S., one of the countries that > benefits from Calgary recycled computers is the Dominican Republic. Ron > mentioned that it isn't easy to send a computer overseas because of > overcoming custom/duty problems, security, and of course corruption > (a few computers can and do go missing.) This seems to me like it would be a problem. I'm guessing it would be easier to buy a $25 computer in your own country rather than spending $100 to send a $25 computer. I'm thinking that it may be more beneficial to provide some sort of training on for to install and use Linux, to people in other countries, so that they can pick up a cheap computer, and use a free OS on (it would be a hell of allot cheaper to send a Mandrake CD then to send a whole computer system). Jesse
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