Linux Advice

What to do with that old machine...

By R. John Quisenberry

If you are like me, every time you upgrade your equipment you have to figure out what to do with the earthly remains. Those Mac users out there usually sell the old beast to some poor soul even more desperate for a computer than they are. Even if you do it one component at a time, eventually you have a whole PC sitting in the corner collecting dust. I don't know about you, but I have trouble seeing a perfectly functional machine sitting unused simply because a bigger, faster, fancier machine has taken the spotlight on your desktop.

Solution? There are a few options. You can continue to run the same old OS on the machine and use it as a backup machine if the wife is on the new one. That only works if it was a whole machine that was retired. A patchwork machine will require a new install of the OS. If the old OS is no longer available, then you will need to look at what can be gotten that will run on the old hardware. Anything that Mr Gates sells you will likely as not only run on the newest machines. Linux is free, and it runs on an amazing assortment of equipment. Free BSD is also free and runs on almost as many different kinds and generations of equipment.

Let's just imagine you have chosen Linux. What kind? No matter what you have, as long as it is above a 286, there is at least one distribution of Linux you can run. Why though? What can you do with Linux? Can you get software for it? Isn't it hard to install and use?

Linux does require you to learn a little bit, but the newer distributions are much easier to install and use. There is even one that is designed to be as easy as Mr. Gates's product and even runs the same software. There is so much software that you can just download for Linux that I have no way of giving you a realistic number. Even major software companies are making software for it. As for why... it will do the same tasks as it did before, but most of the time it will do them faster. You see, Linux is written to be more economical about things like CPU speed and memory. You can also do some things with Linux that any other OS will only do with the addition of very expensive software, and even then it would require much more CPU and memory than Linux.

What flavor of Linux do I want?

Your feedback is welcome!