Old Hardware Rant

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Sorry, it wasn't LJ, it was Linux Magazine in February, reviewing Merilus
Gateway Guardian.  They open with this blah about how this is a great use
for "a pile of old 486 machines sitting around", but then recommend a
minimum of a P266 with at least 64M.

I recently set up a new PC to replace an old 486, and installed both
Windows95 and Mandrake 7.2.  I had no problems with the install or setup of
either, but when I delivered the machine it would run just fine under
Windows 95 at 800x600x24b (may have been higher but I'm sure of that), but
would not run X-windows at any resolution on the existing monitor.  The
monitor is some discount brand 15" three to five years old, and there's no
chance at all of ever finding a sync rate table for it, so I guess that
system will run Windows until and unless a different monitor is found.

(Yeah, I know, I could walk through a table of possible sync rates tweaking
the config file and testing each possibility, and I'd probably find
something that would at least run 640x480, as if that were any good for X.
But it's not mine, it's not at my house, and I don't have three or four
hours to put into a $500 system.)

At a shop where we had some fairly decent older Compaqs that were running
NT, and would have been fine for Windows 95, I tried Mandrake, Redhat,
Storm,and Turbo Linux CD installations.  Most of them failed at the point
where they tried to go into the Graphical install on all of the machines
through the P200's.  None of them completed successfully.

That means the average consumer couldn't even install Linux on a name-brand
PC as recent as three years old.  Pretty pitiful.