[TriLUG] OT: hardware question

[Chris Hedemark]

JD writes:
> Considering the price old edo simms (I don't know, but I imagine they are
> expensive), I would venture to say
> you will be better offspending money on a new cpu.

Or just be more realistic about what will run on this iron.

Some of the apps you mentioned are clearly meant for bigger iron than this.
I think a lot of newer apps are written by fresh young programmers who have
no concept of writing tight efficient code, and that have an attitude that
hardware is cheap.  KDE, Gnome, Evolution, and Mozilla are great examples of
this.

On the flip side you can select applications that may not be as feature rich
but will effectively act like a CPU upgrade on the machine.  For example,
instead of running KDE or Gnome, try Window Maker or icewm.  Instead of
running Evolution try pine.  As for Mozilla, well, to be honest I haven't
found a web browser yet on Unix that I like.  The feature rich browsers tend
to be fat and slow, and crash often.  The lightweight browsers tend to have
trouble rendering many popular sites.  You may be stuck with bloatware on
the browser front.

So much attention is paid towards scaling Linux up onto bigger and better
hardware.  IMHO more attention needs to be paid to scaling down as well.  If
Linux is to "take over the world" it needs to run on machines that the rest
of the world runs.  Remember, outside of the few highly developed nations,
computers are a very rare and expensive commodity.   Our public schools are
literally throwing out machines that these people would have to pay a few
months wages for.