Sound advice. So, where is the cutoff? And who decides? Haven't we had this debate before? Personally, I LIKE to refurbish older machines.
Actually so do I. I just don't expect most of the current versions of the larger distros to run on them. If they do or can be made to with install options, that's nice, but I don't think the distro is broken if it is too much for an older machine. Where is the cut off? There is no single cut off. If a machine was new in 2002, then the best software to run on it is stuff from near 2002. Some small number of years before and after. What number of years? Who cares? Sometimes you're lucky and can run 5 year newer software, sometimes you lose compatibility the next year. Either way, there is software available that runs on that hardware. I'm sure opensuse 6,7,8,9 will run just fine on that P3-700. It is unreasonable to expect to get the ever increasing levels of functionality that new software provides, out of the same unchanging old hardware. I have machines where hardware support was simply removed from the mainline kernel, affecting all distros, simply because no one was updating the scsi card driver or the multiport serial card driver and the kernel changed it's driver api and no one updated these drivers to the new api, so they didn't work, and so they were removed. So, I either stopped using that old scsi card, or kept using the old software that supported it. It's just that simple.
Case in point - everyone raves about the new netbooks. For less than $100, I put together a Thinkpad X21, P3/700/384MB. Runs about as fast as some of the netbooks I have seen, but has a better keyboard, and better screen(taller anyway. most web pages are vertical). So, I saved a good bit of cash. Yes, it isn't AS small, but it's more usable, and the battery lasts over 3hours(and used at that), and it's very portable. That's what I call value.
I would use such a machine too. Well actually what I would do is exactly what I did. I paid a little over $2k and got a vaio-tz which is about as small as the netbooks, yet has every hardware convenience (dvd-rw-dl, gigabit, wifi-n, evdo, cam, bluetooth, fingerprint reader) and actually has a longer battery life. The notebook, a more portable version of it's charger, the power cord, and a 15 foot super flat cat5e cord and a few misc items like usb sticks a couple cd's etc all packs into a tiny carry case designed for the 13" macbook. (the vaio is only 11 inches) and the whole thing weighs less than most normal laptops just bare by themselves. That thing, in order to remain tiny in size, and in order to have a 5 hour battery life, one compromise is cpu, it's only a 1.06 ghz core2duo, and the ram, it's 2 gigs, but in the form of a single stick (so no dual-channel) and only running at 533mhz. It's brand new, and so it shipped with Vista, but I don't run vista on it. I run XP and xubuntu. I also have freebsd and sco open server partitions but I dont use those for general work, they are just for testing, reference, and bragging rights. (it was NOT a simple matter to get even freebsd on there, let alone SCO, because of the odd dvd drive which is internally connected via usb. I have old machines I soup up for the fun of it too, but they sit in the corner and I don't actually use them except in a few odd cases where one may serve as a router or light duty server or appliance. They don't run desktops. Such machines would not be good enough today even if I tried to customize one manually. Web sites just require too much these days. The mobile boom will help that, but still there will be too many sites that expect you to be using a modern pc. A souped up old machine is a toy not a tool. I don't think it's wrong for opensuse and other main distros not to waste time on that. It might amuse me to keep a 386 alive, or to play with a little device that fits in my pocket. But, they can only ever be toys. I can't go without a dvd drive, at least a cd burner, wired and wireless nics, and enough cpu, ram and hd space to actually run apps and store data. I don't think opensuse should waste time on toys. The netbooks and the various appliances and embedded devices all have super custom versions of debian or fully custom systems of their own, not stock versions of anything. I see nothing wrong with that. My palm centro has more cpu and ram and "hd" (in the form of flash) than my first full pc's. However it runs a comparatively limited PalmOS system instead of the desktop and server os's I ran on those pc's. Even though the cpu could handle it and there is more than enough ram and filesystem room for it, I can't install and run my text based database and application development system on it. There is nothing really wrong with that. I have no need to be able to install opensuse 11.0 on a machine that small and slow today. It's fine for that device to require it's own special optimized system. Same goes for netbooks. In any event, the original poster doesn't even have a problem as far as I can see. It sounds like he's just inventing a problem because he doesn't like the idea that there is an MTA or that there are ldap libraries. Other people have pointed out that there isn't even necessarily any big ldap dependancy anyways. So he chose to install something that specifically pulled in ldap with it. Trying to have a unix based system without an mta today is just silly. It's possible because anything is possible, but it's well outside the norm, and so he should just accept that he is obligated to hand craft his own customized system that has no mta or simple local forwarder. There is some dependacy sprawl where various things pull in all kinds of junk you don't really want. I'm not saying that there isn't some excess and inefficiency there, I'm just saying most of it isn't worth worrying or complaining about. Certainly not the mta in particular. My production servers don't even have desktops and are never accessed in gui mode, yet I end up having half or more of gnome (and thus x11) pulled in anyways just because I do use imagemagic and ghostscript and some other things which have both gui and non-interactive modes, and so they end up pulling in most of the desktop environment as "dependancies", when none of that junk is actually used at all. It's absolutely not even worth thinking about let alone rasing a stink about, and it's a lot more files and total size than the OP is talking about. I want some tool, and the tool only exists because it was easy to write, because lots of libraries existed for the author(s) to use, and so, to get the tool I have to get the libaries, which in turn may depend on yet larger systems of libraries and maybe even running daemons. Well. I want the tool so be it. Sure it could physically be written without most of that stuff that I don't happen to use, but the fact is, then it simply wouldn't have been written at all, or not nearly as fully featured. So the choice is really live without or live with a little excess. Everything we have could actually be written in assembly instead of the higher level languages and could then run on much smaller hardware, except, no it can't. The man-hours don't exist for that. That's the opposite of value. What's value is, you get a lot more bang for your buck having developers able to use big fat rich libraries and big fat rich languages, who can produce a large powerful app and then continue to improve it with large changes on a constant basis. And that all requires more hardware, but the hardware costs waaaay less than the cost of either coding everything in low level languages or living without the rapid, and ever increasing rate, of development, or living without many things entirely, at any stage of development. I'll take the development, and pay the hardware price, thanks. So, by a completely different route we arrive at the same conclusion that you should be happy to run opensuse 6 or some other old version of linux on old hardware, because in a world where developers were more concerned about hardware instead of development, opensuse 11 as we know it today wouldn't exist anyways. -- Brian K. 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