Old Tekk Utilised

Christmas time is when we give and received lots and lots of new stuff.

The question though, is what do we do with all the old stuff we no longer need because it’s been replaced by all the new stuff?

My Aunty and Uncle bought themselves a new laptop for Christmas, running Ubuntu 8.10 but had no idea what to do with their old laptop.  I suggested listing it on a local FreeCycle group, but as they’re still pretty new to the internet they didn’t quite no how to join a local group.  They also are realists, and knew that selling it was unlikely, however they are very conscientious of the environment and didn’t want it to go into landfill so instead decided to give it to me, hoping that I may be able to either make use of it, or FreeCycle it myself.

Since then, it has sat near my PC, staring at me asking me what is to become of it.

Tonight though, I have decided it can sit on my kids desk in their bedroom, giving them basic access to the net.

Now my boys, who are 9 and 7 years of age don’t require a great computer while they’re here.  I built them a PC for Christmas which they now have at home (with their Mother - they don’t live with me) which consists of an Athlon 64 3200+, 1GB of RAM and 250GB hard drive running XP – more than enough for their homework, a few games, Brandon’s PowerPoint presentations that he likes to make, a few games, some music and movies, while the 19” Widescreen TFT is plenty big enough for watching DVD’s in bed, and a TV tuner makes it possible to watch freeview digital channels.

The laptop is an old Toshiba Protégé 7010CT lump running a Pentium 233MHz CPU, with 256MB of RAM and a 30GB hard disk, more than enough to run Windows XP, but not when XP includes Service Pack 2 or 3.  I won’t allow any computer to run on my home network unless it is both fully patched and includes antivirus software and firewall.  So XP is not an option.  As such I have been looking in to a Linux distro that requires a very low specification and had decided to utilise Damn Small Linux (DSL) which is just that, damned small.

However, DSL refused to install for some reason that I cannot seem to determine, so have instead decided to give Ubuntu a try, and have come to the conclusion that either 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon or 7.04 Feisty Fawn might be my best option.

At the moment, I have both downloading and for some odd reason they are taking a really long time, so I will leave this article for now and post an update in another article when I have a little more to write about.

Do you have any ideas about which Linux distro to use?  If so please leave your thoughts in a comment!