Striped of resources and money, we tend to look at DIY and recycling to fund projects. In this case, I wanted a computer that could surf the net, pidgin, email, youtube and play music. I hoard junk like some old granny and her records, so I had some stuff laying around to make up a fairly old PC. What I ended up with was, 800mhz, 512mb RAM, 32GB hard drive, Geforce 2 MX 400 (32mb), RaLink RT2500 wifi card, cd burner (which has now failed after the install). I haven’t spent a cent on this box, it’s just pieces from PCs that would have been thrown out.
You’re thinking, 800mhz, that’s Windows ME old, there’s no way you could possibly do all that on such an old box. Well I can, and I’m doing it right now. Sure it isn’t a speedy box, but with Gentoo on it, it accomplishes all this with easy, I can surf, check my mail, IM, irc, and listen to music at the same time with absolutely no problem.
This is with the help of Gentoo. The way Gentoo is made, it’s made for speed and performance. No two Gentoo installs are the same, everything is compiled (with the help of emerge) for your PC and you choose exactly what you want installed. The smallest Gentoo install only includes the bear minimums, for the machine to boot.
Sure it’s a lot of compiling, but emerge does it all with a breeze, and you just set a few things to compile and goto bed. With the use of CCACHE you can speed up recompiles easily and if you’re lucky enough you can get distcc to use other computers to help with the load (I couldn’t do this).
The Gentoo install was pretty easy and the thing that usually takes me weeks only took me 30 minutes including compile. Wifi, the Wifi card installed a breeze and it only took me a bit of reading before I worked out howto hook it up with my WPA PSK enabled home network.
I’m using xfce4 as it’s lightweight and powerful, and is really nice to use. It’s like gnome without the fat. Xfce4 took the longest to compile but it was worth it.
If you ever have the time to setup a full blown Gentoo setup, I really suggest it, it’s a really good desktop Linux distro. I wouldn’t really use it for servers (I’m a FreeBSD fag) but I’ll be using Gentoo a few times in the future.
Now I wanted to share some of my favourite Linux apps:
- MPD (Music player daemon), I finally got around to installing this nicely and it’s great to use with gmpc. I also found impdclient (shown in picture), so I can use my iPod Touch to control the music on my nix box.
-gkrellm, As ugly as it looks, it’s really nice to have to see stats.
-xchat, has really picked up it’s game the last time I used it, and looks like a really nice client now. Still needs some stuff smoothed out
-Thunderbird, Very nice email client.
-Transmission, Perfect for torrents. (sharing linux distros)
-Gimp, great for image editing
A few more obvious ones that I use a lot are, Firefox and pidgin.