That heretic that insists on using "obsolete" hardware is at it again...
The platform is an IBM Thinkpad 760E laptop that I purchased at an auction for $17.50US. Pentium (classic) 120 MHz. After a flurry of e-bay buying, it has a 20 gig hard disk and 74 megs of RAM (still looking for the Apricorn RAM card that supports 104M). It is now functional with basically a Debian 2.2 distro and an almost fully loaded Xastir install, network enabled, and talking though that strange MWave audio system with Festival. I was pleasantly surprised, this thing performs amazingly well. Cached map loads are fast enough to be below the "annoying" threshold, and the system does not seem to bog down at all when Xastir is "speaking". Total cost of the laptop is still probably under $50US. Cost of the software/OS - 0.00. On the flip side, setup did take quite some time and tinkering. It is definitely not for the faint of heart. The learning curve involved in shoe-horning this stuff onto older hardware is somewhat steep even for someone who is experienced with Linux. But the results were well worth it. Major kudos to the Xastir development team for thier continued excellence in what should be an award-winning software package! -- Jim Shorney -->.<--Put complaints in this box jshorney (at) inebraska.com Ham Radio NU0C Lincoln, NE, USA EN10ps http://incolor.inetnebr.com/jshorney/ _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir
