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Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

engadget.com

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Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#91

Post by seanp2k2 »

tunap wrote: post #9
webwanderings wrote: post #3

With 512 MB, there's hardly an Internet browsing experience here. The biggest reason why old hardware have gone out of use (relatively quickly) is mostly due to Internet browsers and their need for more memory. So even if you have a computer with 2-4 GB laying around, and you attempt to revive it seeing the news here, it will be soon before you give up the idea altogether.

Those old machines run fine enough after initial browser loading once you install ghostery, ublock or noscript. As for the engadget link, why not link straight the source: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pixel-pc-mac/

Even better to have other hardware doing the ad plucking instead of making it run tons of rules against each site. Something like pfsense has plugins to do this, or run all the network traffic through privoxy on your home network, and it'll also block tons of in-app ads on all the mobile devices using wifi downstream of that.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#92

Post by seanp2k2 »

Pxtl wrote: post #87
StavrosK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens next? I've given Ubuntu laptops (2010 laptops) to my dad, mom, girlfriend and sister, and they're liking it a lot, especially the fact that they don't have to worry about malware. They're fine with it, it's not like people are born with an innate understanding of the Windows UI and are incapable of learning anything else.

Curious, for the "Ubuntu for Grandma" box, do you use the default partition plan? Because I find that stock Ubuntu has the infuriating habit of filling the boot partition with linux kernels and then freaking out unhelpfully during later updates about the lack of space.

Run purge-old-kernels on an @reboot crontab: http://news.softpedia.com/news/here-s-how-to-remove-old-kern...

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#93

Post by IgorPartola »

keithpeter wrote: post #82
olegkikin wrote: post #36

SSDs are what breathe new life into old PCs. And they are quite cheap. My wife's laptop turned from extremely annoying to decent, almost pleasant to use.

OA uses a Thinkpad X40 as the target machine. A 1.8 inch Hitachi drive with PATA interface and with 256 or 512Mb of RAM soldered to board with a socket for one further RAM stick. This is a 12 year old design. Probably best used with what it has rather than spending any money upgrading. A good test target for a 'light' OS. A Thinkpad X60 or later (dual core) with 2Gb RAM can run a 'full fat' Linux (e.g. Ubuntu or Cent…

Your comment about the kenrel taking a few hours to compile made me chuckle. I went through a Gentoo phase. Nothing like compiling your compiler to compile your compiler to compile your system. Took days.

And before that I had a machine with 24 MB RAM and a terrible habit of recompiling the kernel or running BSD with ports.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#94

Post by seabrookmx »

tbronchain wrote: post #83
jlgaddis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just for old machines either! I've used XFCE for years and prefer it, even on my well-equipped machines (4-core laptop w/ 32 GB RAM and a new 16-core workstation w/ 128 GB RAM). It looks "nice enough" and is still flexible enough that I can customize it exactly how I want. I really liked Gnome back in the "good ol' days" (2.x) but I can't stand to use it anymore.

You made me curious.. 128GB RAM on Xubuntu! Why? Which usage would require so much memory? Found 16cores quite a lot as well. Really wondering what you do?

Not the person you're replying to, but we have lots of 64gb workstations at work for database and BI work, such a testing large queries in Apache Drill. With the right query, you can use up the 64gb quite quickly. Our servers run 384gb and have 16C/32T.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#96

Post by StavrosK »

Pxtl wrote: post #87
StavrosK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens next? I've given Ubuntu laptops (2010 laptops) to my dad, mom, girlfriend and sister, and they're liking it a lot, especially the fact that they don't have to worry about malware. They're fine with it, it's not like people are born with an innate understanding of the Windows UI and are incapable of learning anything else.

Curious, for the "Ubuntu for Grandma" box, do you use the default partition plan? Because I find that stock Ubuntu has the infuriating habit of filling the boot partition with linux kernels and then freaking out unhelpfully during later updates about the lack of space.

I do, yes, although that is a problem I have even on my machines. I just periodically clean their kernels up...

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#97

Post by digler999 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #93
keithpeter wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OA uses a Thinkpad X40 as the target machine. A 1.8 inch Hitachi drive with PATA interface and with 256 or 512Mb of RAM soldered to board with a socket for one further RAM stick. This is a 12 year old design. Probably best used with what it has rather than spending any money upgrading. A good test target for a 'light' OS. A Thinkpad X60 or later (dual core) with 2Gb RAM can run a 'full fat' Linux (e.g. Ubuntu or Cent…

Your comment about the kenrel taking a few hours to compile made me chuckle. I went through a Gentoo phase. Nothing like compiling your compiler to compile your compiler to compile your system. Took days. And before that I had a machine with 24 MB RAM and a terrible habit of recompiling the kernel or running BSD with ports.

> Took days.

at least yours finished. Mine would run just long enough to waste most of my day, only to error out because one lib wanted python-3.2.785.2.r58 but could only find python-3.2.1435.214.r3

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#98

Post by khedoros1 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #93
keithpeter wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OA uses a Thinkpad X40 as the target machine. A 1.8 inch Hitachi drive with PATA interface and with 256 or 512Mb of RAM soldered to board with a socket for one further RAM stick. This is a 12 year old design. Probably best used with what it has rather than spending any money upgrading. A good test target for a 'light' OS. A Thinkpad X60 or later (dual core) with 2Gb RAM can run a 'full fat' Linux (e.g. Ubuntu or Cent…

Your comment about the kenrel taking a few hours to compile made me chuckle. I went through a Gentoo phase. Nothing like compiling your compiler to compile your compiler to compile your system. Took days. And before that I had a machine with 24 MB RAM and a terrible habit of recompiling the kernel or running BSD with ports.

I was using Slackware around the time that distros were switching from xfree86 to x.org. Not knowing any better, I was trying to run it as a bleeding edge system. I think I took a week or two manually upgrading each library one at a time to make the jump to the new X server.

Apparently I didn't learn my lesson; the next distro I used was Gentoo.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#99

Post by khedoros1 »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #58
nathan_f77 wrote: post #35

This will be an interesting one to watch. There's a huge number of tiny Linux distros, but most of them couldn't compete with something released by the Raspberry Pi foundation. I think their biggest competitor is lubuntu. It's just a stripped down Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop. PIXEL also uses LXDE, and it looks like they've made a few design tweaks to the file manager. They both have Chromium as the default browser.…

> "I'm wondering why they didn't just use lubuntu" They could of, and that might have been a great idea. Although not as headline grabby as "we made a new OS!". I think that Debian probably is slightly better on PIs simply because Raspian has been running off Debian from just after the first Pi's came out, and since Debian historically supported more architectures, so maybe makes more sense from stability standpoint…

Ubuntu dropped ARMv6 a long while ago and refuses to consider bringing it back, so it was out of the running as a Raspberry Pi OS, back when just the Pi1 was around.

Ubuntu will run just fine on the Pi2 and 3, just not on the 1 or 0. Pixel is a mildly-tweaked version of LXDE running on Raspbian, which is a mildly-tweaked version of Debian. That's problematic, when part of their brand is providing a good environment for learning (which is helped by keeping the OS as similar as possible between different versions of the hardware).

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#100

Post by bartvk »

I bought an old PC with an Intel Atom 330 @ 1.6 GHz. I equipped it immediately with a SSD and 4 GB RAM but found out that the second bottleneck is really the CPU. It's most obvious when using Firefox. Opening a tab takes a second or two. Even scrolling and clicking a link is a bit exasperating.

What browser does the Raspberry Pi use?

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