[plug] Free CD linux - any good ?

[Simon Scott]

	I still have a Compaq 386 I use as a dos box (with tcpip) for 6502
cross-assembling. 

	'Fast enough' just doesnt exist.... Every time someone buys a new
computer they say 'Now *this* is fast! Id never need more than this!'....
but 1 year later the box feels like a wet sponge.... I just upgraded to 1Gig
Athlon with 384M RAM and its plenty fast.... but Im sure in a couple of
years people will be telling me 'You cant use Mandrake on an Athlon, its too
low-end' :)

	I remember doing wordprocessing (using a natty little 80 column WP,
the name of which I believe was 'Tasword') on a Commodore 64  10 years ago
and thinking 'This is excellent, Id never need more than this!'.... Or my
first Amiga 500, which to me was super-powerful, complete overkill, and I
didnt even have a harddrive. Now I have 3 A500s in a box gathering dust.....

	But what it all boils down to is that 'need' does not equal
'want'.... We dont need fast computers, in fact for what most people do a
486 would suffice... But we *want* fast computers so we talk ourselves into
thinking we 'need' them....

	In reality, 95% of what we do today on super-fast whizzbang machines
(except for gaming) could be achieve on a 486 dos box (or non-X linux box).
Email, WWW, WP etc Think about it, what do you do today that you couldnt do
5 or 6 years ago? As I said, except for super-3D games, not much I bet!




	From:	David Griffiths <griffith at environ.wa.gov.au> on 30-03-2001
11:42 AM
	Please respond to plug at plug.linux.org.au@SMTP at Exchange
	To:	plug at plug.linux.org.au@SMTP at Exchange
	cc:	 

	Subject:	Re: [plug] Free CD linux - any good ?

	>
	>486's are still incredibly useful machines, esp the one that
started this
	>thread. A 133mhz 486 can run a good deal of daemons, compile a 2.2
kernel is
	>15 minutes. Now XT's, thats a tin can and string machine.

	Yep, I still boot up my 486/33 on occassion to play with networking.
Also
	use a windows 486 booting off a toms rtb floppy  as a text console
(ie
	second screen) to my main computer. Which is a humble 166MHz cyrix
chip
	(P200+) cpu.

	A celeron, as out of date as they are, is something I'm still
dreaming
	about at this point. (well I'll probably go straight to athlon/duron
anyway
	once I get back from travels).

	cheers,

	Dave.





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