Software suggestions

[LM]

Anyone have software they'd recommend as must haves for older
machines?

Personally, some of the lighter programs I like include urxvt,
autocutsel, flxine, diffh, lxsplit, p7zip, perigee slideshow, picaxo,
green, scite, nano, lxtask, timidity, gramofile, sox, uzbl, links,
grafx2, umix, mupdf, abcmidi, abcm2ps, pcal, sylpheed (the original,
not the claws fork).

Would appreciate hearing what lightweight applications others find
useful.

Sincerely,
Laura
http://www.distasis.com/cpp/osrclist.htm

[robert pogson]

The lightest software for an old PC is a thin client operating system. This can be a minimal installation of GNU/Linux. For this to be an option, you need a more powerful/resourceful machine on the network which the thin client can connect to in order to log in and run sessions.

Last year I worked at a place that had a lot of 8 year old PCs. By installing GNU/Linux on an old server, I was able to serve 10 of the old machines as thin clients of the more powerful machine. The server was also 8 years old but had a fast processor, 2gB RAM and 4 SCSI hard drives. By mirroring the drives, my students could seek four files at once for an average seek time more than 10 times faster than the usual PC. Also, because files were cached in all that RAM less seeking was needed to log in or start a process. It took 5s to log in and less than 2s to open OpenOffice.org. Students loved it because it was so much faster than that other OS on the old machines. It was even faster than some brand new PCs.

To use LTSP on the thin clients, you should have more than 64MB RAM. 128 MB is plenty. 100 mbits/s NICs are much better than the old 10 mbits/s ones. Any CPU 400 MHz or over should be fine. You need 256 MB or so on the server for the operating system and about 100 MB per client. It's a very efficient system. If you can install a GNU/Linux distro on a server, you are good to go. You can have the server run its own LAN with DHCP to configure the clients when they boot. Some machines around 2000 or early cannot boot from the network but you can still install a minimal OS on the hard drive and have the x-window-system connect to the server. GNU/Linux is a true networked OS. Even the display is networked so it is no problem setting it up to display on one machine while running on another.

see http://wiki.debian.org/LTSP/Howto on Debian GNU/Linux

I have a couple of videos on the subject:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RimB4qKiz8
  
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swcGFYTIYc8
  

[LM]

They recommend thin clients a lot on the Schoolforge mailing list as
well. However, for the machines I work with, connecting to a server
is usually not an option. Sometimes connecting to the Internet isn't
even an option and I end up getting all the files over by Sneakernet.

On Aug 30, 1:07 pm, robert pogson <robert.pog...@gmail.com> wrote:
> To use LTSP <http://ltsp.org/> on the thin clients, you should have more
> than 64MB RAM.

So far, I've been able to run FreeBSD (including X Windows) in 64 MB
on a non-networked PC with no problems. Am able to use it to do
various multimedia projects. There are some interesting examples of
what you can do with Linux and low memory machines (some of them 64 MB
and lower) at http://kmandla.wordpress.com/