fun with trash

[pidsley]

You all know I have too many computers. Most of them are machines other people would recycle. One of my oldest machines is a little p4 I bought at the recycler a few years ago for $20.



After the recent kerfuffle about no more 32-bit chrome and how everyone can afford a 64-bit machine, I decided to try a little experiment. I installed Debian 8 LXDE, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu on the p4 just to see how they performed. To make it even more interesting, I made sure it only had 512M memory in it. I'm writing this from Xfce.

Debian LXDE, at boot, and with five tabs open in iceweasel and pcmanfm:



Lubuntu, at boot, and with five tabs in firefox and pcmanfm:



Xubuntu, at boot, and with five tabs in firefox and thunar:



Note that all the installs hit swap, and they do slow down a bit, but they are still usable. This should not surprise anyone here.

The pstrees are too huge to post.

Just for fun, I installed jwm on the Debian 8 LXDE partition.

[wuxmedia]

Nice, thanks for the trash talk. :)

[rust collector]

I don't have a scrot of it, but my old p4box ran ok-ish with windows7 starter.
They can still do useful work.

[simgin]

Nice trash talk Pidsley :)
I do like small computers, and good to see jwm there +1

Cheers
simon

[pidsley]

My oldest machine is a 1.7 GHz P4. It was free, and it's so old it doesn't have a VGA port or ethernet port and its USB ports are USB 1.1. I added a VGA card (AGP!) and an ethernet card, and ran Trollinger (LXDE) on it for a while. It is now being used as a headless NFS backup server, and it works quite well with only 512M memory in it.

[wuxmedia]

I had to ethnically cleanse my machines.
Still got the P2 Thinkpad somewhere in France.
Old doesn't necessarily mean compatible though. :)

[vic]

Cool trash you got there pidsley. :) And just to here the name Trollinger again...the memories...the smiles it brings back on my face. :)

[franksinistra]

Nice, solid, lightweight piece of trash. Isn't that another term for gold? :-)

[GekkoP]

Great job, Pidsley. I still have a Pentium 4 with 768MB of RAM rocking Debian sid with jwv. Another P4 is running Ubuntu netinstall with evilwm. Old machines, yes. Also my Acer Aspire 1304XC is not that young anymore and it is running Arch+ratpoison with no problem. Good old machines, that's for sure.

[machinebacon]

Beautiful topic. I am addicted to trash, for example:

Panasonic CF-T5, it's a 512MB RAM notebook, apparently with a 1.4GhZ CPU, that weighs 1.5kg and costs something around 30/40 USD. The ads say you can drop it from 30cm or so, and it won't break even if you sit on it. Well, haven't tried either. For this I use the typical BBQ spin -- in this case it is a Chinese variant which I haven't uploaded (it's actually based on Haggis). It performs nicely even with Chrome, fcitx and the GTK3 bloat. Yes, I do use swap space (usually 1G), but it never swaps in no-GUI-Browser-mode ;)

cft5.jpg (32.52 KiB) Viewed 5340 times

The other lightweight portable for around the same price with a few grams less: an NEC VY10E, 1.06 GHz, 512MB RAM. This one has two BBQs running on it, one of the is Menthol (MATE with systemd and all that crap), and it is surprisingly snappy. Well, to some extend of course. Flash runs smoothly on this, and IIRC it is a siliconmotion (or SiS?) gfx adapter. So this factor plays a role in performance and resource usage, yes.

Of course the T43 can be considered trash, too. I never spend more than around 50 USD for my computers, the T43 costs a little bit more because I had to get an additional RAM stick. It's an excellent work computer, unfortunately its battery is completely dead, so I only use it at home, occasionally. Can't remember how many different distros are installed on its main drive, many many. My favorite piece of trash, because it has personality. And history.

Well, actually I only have trash around me, since all computers I own are either second-hand or third-hand... or for free (like the Siemens Amilo which I use to drive the CNC). I would love to get some more. Some old 8-bit box for fun, or anything from the 1980s, 90s. Unfortunately, space is an issue, and of course I hesitate, not knowing where I will/want to spend the next months :)

[pidsley]

Very cool bacon. Thanks for all the posts guys.

A couple more strange ones. First, a Lenovo 3000 -- this is basically a netbook in a desktop case. Single-core hyperthreaded Atom; no processor fan, so it's quiet. I was using this as an NFS server for a while, but it's currently not in use.



There is a lot of extra room in that case :) I paid $12 for it on e-bay.

Next, an e-machines T3302. I bought this one because it has a Sempron processor (one of the first 64-bit processors) and VIA graphics. I was attempting to collect one of all the old processors I could find. It's kind of a crossover machine -- it has both SATA and IDE disk ports, and an AGP graphics slot. I ran CRUX on it for a while -- it takes a while to compile things, but it has good cooling so it never overheats. The downside of this is that it is very loud. It also has the best sound system of any machine I own. The VIA graphics are shit, so it has an old ATI graphics card in it now.



I paid $10 for this one on e-bay. It is also not in use right now, but I am planning to build a rack and I have a four-port KVM switch, so one of these days...

A few more to follow.

[Theo]

A scrot from one of my oldest PC's a Tulip 233Mhz. It's less bloated than it seems (except for the conky).
JWM + Wbar and don't get fooled by the fancy icons, most of them are CLI programs :)
Oh and the distro in use is Deli(cate) Linux.

[pidsley]

^ cool! Those older machines are "vintage collectible" on ebay now, and are worth more than core2 duo or athlon machines. Maybe if I keep my old machines long enough they will be "collectible" too...

[Theo]

I know :) I still have a P75 (with Millenium bug), a P1 166Mhz and old Toshiba notebook (P1). Old junk, but it works :) I think that I have some collectible machines. A C64, Atari 130XE, Canon v-20 MSX 1, Philips NMS-8250 MSX 2, Atari 520STm and Commodore Amiga 1200. Everything with lots of goodies.. software, hardware, books.. So as expected, my girlfriend has her own home :P

[Theo]

Some pictures of my trashcollection :)
The first one is the P1 166 (slackware, without X)


Both Commodores and Atari ST.



The last one is a bit rare, besides The Netherlands, Japan and South-America MSX wasn't that populair.
The NMS8250 was a great 8 bit machine. It has the Z80a, 256k ram and 128k Video ram (dedicated) and an internal 720kb internal drive.

[franksinistra]

Very interesting thread, cool machines you got there Pids, MB, and Theo.

[Theo]

^Thanks franksinistra those machines that I've got are from my youth and a bit later. The Atari 520ST is upgraded by my dad, one hell of a job, soldering 16 ICs on the excisting ones (piggybanking). My dad died 5 years ago and some hardware is modified by him, so there is no way that I would I ever sell it. He was more the hardware kind of man. A nice fact, some of my friend bought the Atari 600XL, those were cheaper than the 800xl and could be easily modified to the '800xl' by replacing the TMS memory chips (4416 -> 4464). Some other friends buyed the Sharp MZ-800 (64k with 16k VideoRam), the VideoRam has 2 empty sockets and could be upgraded to 32k VideoRam.. And guess what? The obsolete TMS 4416 chips were useful :) So it was a bit of recycling those days.

[pidsley]

Nice antiques, Theo. :) Are you also a packet radio op? I used to do that many years ago.

Here is my Dell Optiplex 360. I bought this one for $7 on ebay. It has a 64-bit Celeron (this is why I bought it; I didn't have a 64-bit Celeron -- I didn't even know they made 64-bit Celerons.) After reading a bit more, I learned that this uses the same architecture (Conroe) as the early Core2 series, but modified for low-power applications.



I use this as a test machine for buildroot installs, and I have CRUX 3.2 on it. It's slow compiling (building gcc 5.3 took several hours), but it never overheats. I just start the builds and go do something else.

[ivanovnegro]

You probably know I own an Optiplex, maybe it is even 64 bit, no idea but one thing is sure. This damn old thing never overheats. I made a screenshot somewhere else here or maybe not. :)

Nice, solid, lightweight piece of trash. Isn't that another term for gold? :-)

Definitely.

Fantastic thread btw Pidsley and thanks for the experiments.
Anybody noticed that on cold boot Lubuntu used less RAM than Debian? :)

[Theo]

^^I used to. It's running slackware with xFBB and xrouter (dosemu). Oh, and I own a 64-bit Sempron too. Mine was for free, a school was replacing some machines.
^ I don't know, but one of the first things I do with Lubuntu is killing openbox and replace it with oroborus, it saves about 9mb and a few percent cpu usage.