Knoppix :- Making full use of my old box…
I happen to have a very old PC. It is a Pentium II, 500MHz speed. Has got 96MB SD RAM and I can assure you that it is very very slow. Because of this, my mom decided to buy a new desktop. (She used to use that slow box for 5 hours a day…) SO we bought a new HP desktop (which, as you would have guesses, was not my decision). I did not let her sell this old PC. Said I wanted to do some experiments on it.I started off by downloading a few distributions on my laptop. I downloaded,
I was thinking of making that PC a penta boot thing. But it was not to be. First, Ubuntu, it does not run on that low H/W. The Xubuntu would not boot on that machine. It just could not detect the H/W. I mean, I thought that it was designed for old PCs…. And it cannot detect old H/W. (I always hated Ubuntu and it’s derivatives).
Then came Zenwalk. It booted off very well. I even installed it by formatting an NTFS partition. When I rebooted the PC after completion of the installation, I found that zenwalk had deceived me. The NTFS partition was in tact, the boot loader, GRUB was nowhere to be found. I reinstalled Zenwalk, hoping for a different result, but the same thing happened again.
Then I went ahead to DSL. It was not able to detect the mouse. And Puppy Linux was not able to find the monitor (display) and I had absolutely no plans to work entirely in CLI. I was frustrated. I had wasted an entire day trying to install a distribution in that old PC (or, as Edison would say, I found 5 distributions that cannot be installed on similar PCs).
Then I decided to go back to my faithful Knoppix. I had once installed Knoppix 3.2 on this same PC. But that is a very old distribution and I was looking for something new. So I decided, what the heck. I had already wasted the day, so why not try Knoppix 5.0.1?
I put the CD in. I knew that KDE will take forever to load, to I started with Fluxbox. And to my surprise, the system booted very fast. I eagerly went on with the installation. It took almost 2 hours to finish. But when it did, I had no regrets. The system is as smooth as it can be. KDE has did one incredible thing.
Whenever I log in, a menubar is always there. Even on the desktop. It contains the regular menus which are present for almost all apps like file, edit, view, help. The additional once are loaded for that particular application. This thing has speeded the PC even more. Moreover, as this PC does not have an Internet connection, I was going to have a very tough time searching binaries for that PC on my laptop and moving them to the PC using a pendrive. But, with Knoppix, I have almost all the software and codecs I need already installed.
Thank you Knoppix and thank you Claus Knopper. Now I am thinking of building an LFS system on that PC as soon as my exams are over.
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Article, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
