Monday, April 14, 2008

Running on a 400mhz

I had this old Compaq laying around for several months.
It was a give away from a customer.
High end for it's 1999 debut. An AMD K6-2 400 mhz CPU with a whopping 64 megs of Ram, 10 gig hard drive, integrated ATI Rage Pro video chip, integrated LAN and Creative SB16 audio chip.

They were going to trash it but I decided to 'rescue' it for some unknown future use. That future is now.
I yanked out the 64 meg stick of Ram and installed 2 sticks of 128 meg Ram.

Used the Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 aternate install Cd. This uses the text based installer rather then the Live Cd mode of installing the system.

The install was very slow due to the antique Cd unit. In retrospect I should have swapped in my Cd/DVD unit to do the install. Anyway, 3 hours later and I had a desktop.

It is functional to a point. Have some minor fixes to do.
The audio doesn't work. Seems the emulated SB-16 chip is a problem. All I need to do is find the correct audio driver, install it and make sure it is in the start up config file.

Next is the video. I had a small bar code looking image in the top left corner of the screen. Open the terminal and type any letter will make it disappear.
I will look into this problem. I have read that changing the refresh rate will keep it from appearing. I also saw a post talking about making sure metacity is enabled.

Finally is the power management. When you shut down the computer, it goes through all the motions and then displays a message that the system has been shut down but the monitor and computer are still on.
The Bios is a 1999 vintage and Ubuntu will not implement the ACPI so I will need to force it into the system.

All of these problems are very minor and are fixable.
Once I get them fixed I will post them here.
As I see it, I have another computer that is fully functional and didn't cost me a dime!

No wonder Microshaft hates Linux.
LOL!!!

TaZMAn



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