Have a Spare PC? Ubuntu it!
I have a lot of inactive PCs in my house. They include several Pentium and Pentium III workstations, a dual-180MHz CPU Pentium Pro server, and even a Winbook 486 laptop (fondly known as “the brick that ate my data”). The oldest in my collection is an 80386 motherboard with 4MB of RAM that I bought “at cost” for $800US back in 1989 (retail was $1200US) from a place called Beaver Computers somewhere in Oregon. My oldest machines, a Heath/Zenith Z-89A (1983), a Radio Shack (Tandy) TRS-80 Model 1 (1984), and a Polo System I (MS-DOS) from Polo Microsystems (my first PC clone, 1985), have sadly long been scraped.
So what does this high-tech nostalgia have to do with Ubuntu? And just what is Ubuntu? Well, you know how each new release on Windows is less likely to work well on older computers? And how you actually have to pay for each copy of Windows that you install? (Wipe that smirk off your face.) Well, unlike Windows XP and Vista, Ubuntu an operating system that happily runs very well on older PC computers–and is completely free.
Ubuntu (pronounced oo-BUN-too) is a very popular distribution of Linux that is highly praised for its usability, ease of installation, popular support from many hardware and software companies, and comes loaded with free software applications that are unencumbered by legal restrictions. Ubuntu comes in two distributions: Ubuntu Sever Edition and Ubuntu Desktop Edition, both of which are based on Debian GNU/Linux. The desktop edition (which also runs great on laptops) supports the x86 and x86-64 CPUs and the PowerPC Apple Macintosh computers and required 256MB of RAM. The server edition also runs on the same platforms and the Sun Microsystems SPARC as well. The latest version of Ubuntu is 7.04, released on April 19, 2007.
Check the links at the end of this article for more technical details on Ubuntu.
So how do you get started? It all begins with a big download and a working PC.
Ubuntu is distributed as a single ISO file 698 megabytes in size and can be downloaded from many servers on the Internet, including several P2P file-sharing networks. After downloading the ISO image file, burn it to a CD-R/RW using your favorite burner software (I use Nero Express). You can also burn it on to a DVD, but older computers will not likely have a DVD drive, so don’t completely make the move to DVD+RW while you still have old computers lying around.
If your old computer once ran Windows, it won’t need any special preparation to boot, run, and install Ubuntu. However, I would suggest if the computer has not been used in a while, you should consider testing the hard disk using a utility like SpinRite to “boil and repair” any bad sectors, and possibly wiping it clean using Darik’s Boot and Nuke.
Installing Ubuntu is incredibly easy. Boot the CD and select “1″ on the startup screen menu (if you wait 30 seconds the selection is automatically made for you). Ubuntu will proceed to fully load and run entirely from memory, allowing you to try it out before installing it on to the hard drive. Pretty cool, huh? This is the LiveCD feature found in many Linux distributions.
After you are finished playing Robots and Mahjongg, it’s time to install Ubuntu on to the hard disk. On the Ubuntu desktop, you will notice an Ubuntu icon with an arrow pointing to a hard drive. Double-click this icon and wait for a while for the installation wizard to appear (it’s an old computer, remember?). Select your language, set the local time and time zone, choose a keyboard layout (now’s your chance to really learn the Dvorak keyboard!), and enter your login account and computer information. All of this should only take you a few minutes to perform.
At this point, you are now ready to partition the hard disk. You are presented with options to erase or resize existing disk partitions, or manually repartition the disk using the gparted program. I prefer to use gparted so I know exactly what my disk partitions will look like and I can pick what file systems are used. My old PC has an 18GB hard drive, so I created an 11GB primary ext3 partition, a 1GB linux-swap partition, and an extended 5GB NTFS partition (for file sharing with Windows computers). Click the Install button and let the disk reformatting and Ubuntu installation begin. After a prolonged serenade of hard drive chattering followed by a CD ejection and a reboot, Ubuntu is happily ensconced on the hard drive.
Now take a step back and realize that you just took an old PC that could barely run Windows 98 and transformed it into a living, breathing productivity tool. Ubuntu is so easy to install that the toughest part is deciding what software application to use. Need to create documents, spreadsheets, databases, and slideshow presentations? Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice preinstalled. Need to have remote access to the computer using VNC? No problem! Use any Web browser you want (except IE) with Flash 9 (yes, Flash now runs on Linux!). And now there’s nothing stopping you from learning Java or C++ programming on Linux.
Even if you aren’t (yet) interested in Linux, it’s worth downloading and installing Ubuntu just to say that you’ve used another operating system besides Windows or OS X. And who knows, you may just find a use for an operating that run better than Windows did on that same computer.
Links:
April 19th, 2007 at 11:36 am
Great blog and advise! I actually took a similar yet different approach to using old PC’s myself. I took an old Pentium 3 and put Open Filer on it. I then set up 3 Hard Drives and now have my own home NAS drive. :)
http://www.openfiler.com/