Linux Desktop for old PCs
Continuing my post on how to use old PCs this post is about how you can use your old PC as a spare Desktop. You can use it for listening music, do some text processing and surf the internet.
In my case I chose a Dell box with Pentium II, 399Mhz CPU, 64MB RAM and 4GB HDD. I am quite sure you can find one of these at home or at your working place just lying idle.
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The purpose of this small project is to have a spare PC to do
- Surfing - you may not want your guests/friends/relatives touch your Desktop/Laptop
- Music - Be it mp3 or internet radio
- Basic text editing
- Education - don’t know where to start Linux?
- Cut the costs - If this kind of PC is there use it, otherwise you can get this kind of machine for less then $40
So let’s start! Here’s a list of what we need:
- Monitor - Any kind of monitor
- Keyboard/Mouse
- Power cables
- CDROM
- Damn Small Linux CD - download here
Burn DSL 3.3 into a blank CD. Note that you will need to burn the image to a blank CD. You don’t want to just copy the dsl-3.3.iso file to a CD.
Prepare the PC: connect monitor, keyboard, mouse, networking cable. Power on the machine, go to BIOS and change the booting media to CDROM first. Now power on and wait until you will see Linux Desktop(Fluxbox) to appear. And that’s it, you now have a working Linux Desktop on a junk PC!
You may work like this, everytime booting off the CD, however this might be slow and resource(pretty much valuable on your old PC) eating on the PC. So you might want to consider installing it onto your hard drive.
Steps to install DSL:
- Make a room for your DSL. Create partitions on the hard disk:
sudo -s
the above command will let you login as root - Administrator
fdisk /dev/hda
this will let you manage hda (Hard disk, like C:\ or D:\ in windows) - mkswap /dev/hda1
swapon/dev/hda1
Activate your swap - Open terminal and type:
dsl-hdinstall - Follow the instructions and choose your boot manager - grub or lilo after this your PC will reboot. Remove the installation CD and continue installing DSL. Once you have setup passwords for root and dsl users you are done with installation. Now you have fully installed DSL into your old PC!
Here’s my picture running Mozilla Firefox and connected to a win2k server via rdesktop
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Welcome to Arstan's personal blog. This blog includes tips on Linux, Apache, MySQL, Shell Scripts. Hardware/software and internet technologies reviews and updates.
