3xb055

I must post before the end of 2009!

My 6 year old son’s pc (running Ubuntu) was getting a bit ‘sluggish’. Of course that is expected when you got an (old) Intel Pentium III machine with around 256MB RAM. Ubuntu was actually ok and I was just lazy to install other distro then. My 8 years old daughter had been asking for her own PC and it just so happen we got another old Pentium III machine with more or less the same specs lying around the house accumulating dust (and my significant other’s wrath .

And so I have a good excuse to start feeling old-skoolish. After looking at puppy linux and zenwalk, i went ahead with zenwalk, which is a slackware based distro. The installer reminded me of the nostalgic past when the keyboard is your best friend (and patience was with everyone!). So at the end of the day, I got a modern distro on 2 old machines. At one point I had to use the command line to go to run level 3 and rerun videoconfig. Now how many folks out there get to use the command line when installing linux these days ?

I also went out and got a BENQ 18.5 inch "world’s first LED Monitor" and a pink optical mouse to make the experience worthwhile . And yes, I’m fully aware that the monitor costs more than the value of the 2nd hand Pentium III computers themselves.

Zenwalk gives you xfce as the default desktop. Iceweasel with flash support is also provided by default. The rest of the applications is in the repository (can use netpkg), but really my kids only need the browser and flash plus the Internet for their day to day activities.