good move
Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
101–110 of 113 posts
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#102Earlier 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.
Tried Ubuntu for my great-grandpa. Having to redownload 100s of MB because of prebundled DE was stupid (was coming from SuSe/KDE). Also the upgrade story was not so good at that time, switched him to Debian and never looked back.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#103SSDs 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.
SSDs and extra RAM are the two best upgrades to improve how fast and responsive everything feels.
I would put extra RAM first, then the SSD, just to prevent the OS from abusing the SSD for swapping.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#104DietPI (.com) already runs on a lot of embedded platforms and is incredibly fast (despite its terrible webpage). Sadly there is no x86 image and it seems it will never be due to excessive hardware fragmentation, but the VM image is so fast that it makes one wonder how good it would be if run natively. It has become my choice for very small systems, followed by Armbian for ones with less constraints.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#105Earlier 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…
X60 and X61 owner here. SSD drive brought new life to the machines. The new pixel desktop makes them fun linux boxes.
Excellent!
An SSD and stock Gnome 3 Debian in my X61s (2Gb RAM) with its Atheros wifi card goes very well, so I'm hardly surprised that your machines work well with a less demanding desktop environment and it is good that you find them of use.
Care to share the output of pstree -l -A from a fresh session? That would tell us what processes are running by default (cups&c).
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's sad that they're using the RPI brand to distort reality. Even though in a way the RPI project was already twisting things (GPIO + python isn't computing education but I'm nitpicking).
Yeah, it'd be cool if they also taught Linux fundamentals, the way the internet works, networking in general, etc.
I think that may be looking at it in a different way that doesn't necessarily reflect the impact of all this, in the UK at least.
The way many of my generation was taught IT was Office (with maybe some Macros), a largely useless high-level overview of networking, an out-of-date comparison of "client-server", "mainframe" and "peer-to-peer" computing etc.
It was dry. Unless you already had an interest in the field, it was boring.
It taught you enough about Microsoft Office to do your other school work, it taught you enough about the web and email to get by, and it taught out-dated terminology that you would unlearn in the real world.
It didn't teach troubleshooting of any kind. It wasn't engaging.
Many of us were already ahead of the teachers. If the teacher had a problem, it was usually a student that could give the answer. (I only had one IT teacher who wasn't below the level of a teenager with an active interest in IT.)
But the worst thing was that it didn't get people interested and didn't teach the mindsets required. The underlying logic. The basics of troubleshooting. Binary exclusion. Shit, how to deal with a paper jam!
Nowadays everyone has a smartphone, can follow a YouTube tutorial, can Google stuff, before they're in their teens.
The Pi and the teaching around it gets kids exposed to the lower levels of hardware (or at least a simplified version of). It's interesting and engaging.
There's a far bigger pay-off than "my spreadsheet looks nice". A blinking light gives a greater sense of accomplishment than a ".ppt" file.
The Pi gives the tools and motivation to actually learn the stuff you are talking about. Hook 'em with the fun stuff while still being useful.
Most kids won't need to know "ls" or "mount". They're never going to "modprobe" anything.
They are already taught the very high-level basics of the Internet and networking. But they're never going to use variable length subnet masks.
But many more kids will hopefully be interested enough to pursue careers in IT. And those who don't will at least have an appreciation for it, and will have been taught skills and a mindset invaluable in the increasingly digitally connected world in which we live.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of Chromebooks are still shipping with 2GB of RAM and they do a perfectly sufficient job of running the "Internet" for most everyday users. I would argue your lower limit of a reasonable Internet browsing experience is higher than average because of your technical background. 512MB would be limiting for sure, but a machine with 2GB of RAM running a Linux desktop, especially with an SSD if possible, would make a…
Even Win10 still has a 32-bit version in fact.
For £35 you can pick up a Windows 10 32-bit tablet with wifi, Bluetooth, HDMI out, USB OTG, 1GB RAM, a MicroSD slot, 32GB eMMC, Intel Atom CPU and a year of Office 365 personal. They're excellent value for money.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#108im looking at https://www.neverware.com/#introtext-3 to breathe new life into my older laptop. Anyone use it yet? I'm curious if it is as slim as ChromeOS.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#109This 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 Ubuntu is compiled for ARMv7, so it doesn't run on the RPi 1 and 0.
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Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#110It's wonderful how the RaspberryPi foundation achieved everything the OLPC initiative--backed by huge names--tried and failed to do.
The details around the commercial relationship between Qualcomm and the Raspberry Pi foundation is lacking quite a bit in transparency in my mind. I guess that one of my suspicions here is that some people are making lots of money on something that is billed and marketed as a selfless charity. ( https://www.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFoundatio... is not nearly detailed enough.) OLPC is a whole other kind…
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