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On Jul 26, 11:11 am, Kevin Buzzard <buzz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> Cluttering up my bedroom is an 8-year-old laptop with 192 megs of RAM
> (yeah, it was pretty state of the art at the time) and a 6 gig
> hard drive. It has Redhat 8.0 installed on it and it's a fine machine:
> it is super-super stable and although it can't quite handle Firefox 2
> it's the machine I use every morning to e.g. read the news before I get up,
> and I regularly ssh to other machines from it to read mail etc.
>
> I have been loathe to change the OS---why fix it if it ain't broke?
> Upgrading from RH7 to RH8 in 2002 already cost me a lot in terms of
> responsiveness. But now I am a bit concerned that it probably *is*
> broke, and quite seriously broke, because of the recent DNS resolving
> issue thing and reports yesterday that good sploits are now
> circulating in the wild. I'm not so sure that RedHat are going to
> come up with a security patch for an old RH8 machine. On the other
> hand I am concerned that any major OS upgrade is going to do for
> the machine completely. Do people have any advice (other than "buy
> a new machine")? Can I patch the nameserver issue myself somehow
> [note that *everything* is old: gcc 3.2, perl 5.8.0, etc etc]?
> If I attempt to install a new OS am I likely to get a machine that
> barely moves? etc etc.
>
> Kevin
If it's got USB I'd suggest having a look at Puppy Linux - which can
boot from floppy then run off USB memory.
You can reasonably expect that the batteries will not be holding as
much charge as they used to (but this doesn't stop you running off
mains supply) and that the hard disk is probably on its last legs. One
way to solve this would be to use a CF with IDE adaptor which can be
sourced reasonably cheaply and deliver nearly the same performance as
your current hard disk (read and write are much slower but there's no
seek times).
C.
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