That "ugly white notebook" was one of the most usable laptops in its day, *nix or windows, and it still isn't that ancient - computing innovation really has slowed down significantly. Compare to notebooks from '96 and point out the novelty of running a 64-bit OS on a 64-bit machine.
I've got OpenBSD running on an old Dell Atom netbook that I use alongside my desktop for keeping notes/task lists/music control etc. It's quite usable apart from most browsers run like crap, which is impressive for a 6 year old laptop on a processor that was considered underpowered even when it came out.
I'm using i3 just like on my (much much more powerful) desktop, but I hardly use any gui apps apart from urxvt on it. It'd probably make an acceptable webserver if I wanted, but I already have a dedicated server machine. Even with X it's only rolling 82MB memory usage.
This brings back memories of my first website. I hosted it on my white iBook G3, and I used dyndns to get a free hostname for my dynamic IP. The website was only accessible when I was at home, and plugged in (we had no Wifi yet).
It was pretty popular with my classmates for some time -- there was a self-written forum on it where you could upload photos, and people used it to share holiday pictures (this was before Facebook allowed everyone to share stuff online)
Unfortunately at some point the HD crashed and I lost the database since I had no backup of it -- I just didn't know where MySQL stored its files.
Good work! We have a black MacBook from the same era at our house; my girlfriend uses Ubuntu on it as her main computer. Should have thought about blogging about it!
That 32-bit EFI with 64-bit CPU is a real curse for installing recent Linux (although Ubuntu did release "amd64+mac" ISO images for these computers, I think even 14.04 is available this way).
Additionally, my internal DVD drive for this MacBook failed, so I had to use an external DVD drive for booting said Ubuntu. It had the weirdest bug -- you had to reboot from rEFInd three times for the EFI boot to recognize that the external DVD drive has a bootable DVD in it. First time, it won't see it, second time, it won't see it, and on the third reboot, it magically does.
The reason is likely because the drive spins up too slow and the EFI boot timeouts unless the drive is powered up from an earlier spinup.
Besides the internal drive failing, the machine with Ubuntu on it is perfectly usable as a main laptop for a student. It shows how the laptop scene did not improve that much in the last 9 years -- and that one can save quite a bit of money if he buys a reliable machine and treats it well.
Bugs like that are always so satisfying to figure out. It's confusing for so long, you get frustrated, move on, then later you see a slight correlation and a light bulb goes off in your head.
I love it. I had one of those experiences a few weeks ago with ,of all things, a desk. Turns out you gotta open the drawers in a certain series. Or alternatively rip out the tabs that create said series. The second is a lot more fun.
This reminds me of some of my early linux boxes. As a poor high school student in the mid to late 90s I was only able to get free computer equipment. Some of it was pretty cool. In order to squeeze as much performance out of them, I ran slackware and debian.
Some of the most memorable were:
386DX AT&T Server tower (a huge case with a 40lb 1.2GB Hard drive) - got it to run slackware and serve files on a 10mbps network
486SX-40MHz desktop machine running linux with FVWM and Englightenment! :) Biggest achievement: Play a 128mbps Mp3 file streamed from an Apple LC475!
Apple LC475 (68040-25MHz) - The 68040 could decode an mp3 file. I used to use it to decode the MP3 files and send the audio over the network to a 486sx that lacked an FPU. I ran linux on this, not mac os.
Apple Quadra 660AV - awesome little machine. I ran linux and mac os on this.
My favorite linux machine was a 486 laptop with a 450mb hd and 20 mb ram which originally came with windows 95 running at 640x480, which I got handed down from my dad around 2000.
I bootstrapped a barebones debian system, custom-compiled basically everything on my (debian) desktop and copied it over, stripping out as much as I could, and ended up getting a pretty decent X environment going on it, with opera as browser and fvwm as window manager. I programmed my first web app on that machine, in C++. It didn't even run all that slowly, one wonders what went wrong that modern software is so horribly slow. Good times though, fun machine.
Lesson one: Use a DVD-RW instead of a DVD-R.
Lesson two: Use a USB flash drive instead of optical media.
The 32-bit EFI vs 64-bit system issue has reared its head again with some Windows 8 tablets (e.g. HP Stream 7). Switching the iso's EFI boot files is an easy way to solve this.
Very useful idea. One thing I want to add is docker daemon and client communicate over tcp.
So in any computer, you can just export DOCKER_HOST and use it to manage containers and get a more native feel.
I've been learning docker on an old 64bit IBM designed for XP using the a newish version of lubuntu.
There are still some things that make it unintuitive and in my view incomplete (eg. a command to copy/cut/paste/delete volumes).
A couple things I've found out: You should definitely use the Overlay FS driver as soon as possible; don't use DeviceMapper. Also, It can be convenient to use data volume containers but watch out for orphaned files in /var/lib/docker/tmp and always use -v.
2006 era hardware [1] is actually still pretty relevant and current, in terms of the standards and features available on the motherboard and hard disk, so it's not surprising that this software works.
Once you go back as far as a machine that only provides PATA/IDE hard drive connectors, that's when I would expect to start seeing problems emerge.
I installed on even older MacBook Debian Unstable (with part from experimental), Plasma 5 environment (gnome doesn't work because old Intel card supports only to OpenGL 2.1) without any problems and even full fledged KWin. Installation process was: copy netinstall image to usb, sync it, plug usb into macbook and install Debian. Everything works without any problem.
I'm running OSX Yosemite on a 2006 Mac Pro 1,1. It wasn't too difficult once I had the correct boot.efi, and it works flawlessly. With an SSD, a minor CPU upgrade, and a recent video card it's nearly as fast as a 2013 Macbook Pro.
I'm thinking of switching it over to Linux though, I'm no longer happy with the direction in which Apple is headed, and I do nearly everything in the terminal and browser anyway.
Running the same machine with Yosemite, no cpu upgrade but an SSD and video card upgrade. Thinking of putting new cpu's in as they are down to $35 for a pair, almost free at this point. Can't complain about the machine at all, going on 10 years now which is just awesome, and I do so love internal HD's on sleds.
Check out TinyCore instead, its a modular Linux distribution. You can end up with ~15mb Images.
"The Core Project is a highly modular based system with community build extensions.
It starts with a recent Linux kernel, vmlinuz, and our root filesystem and start-up scripts packaged with a basic set of kernel modules in core.gz. Core (10MB) is simply the kernel + core.gz - this is the foundation for user created desktops, servers, or appliances. TinyCore is Core + Xvesa.tcz + Xprogs.tcz + aterm.tcz + fltk-1.3.tcz + flwm.tcz + wbar.tcz
TinyCore becomes simply an example of what the Core Project can produce, an 15MB FLTK/FLWM desktop. "
I wish I still own my PowerBook17 to install CoreOS too. Like the author, I installed almost every distro until I settled on Ubuntu, but it was not enough. Inspiring article! Thanks for sharing.
