[CS-FSLUG] Need input

Tue Jan 25 07:09:27 CST 2005

Upon digging through my mound of no longer loved gear, I have come by
the following hardware:

3 DIMM modules of PC 100 RAM.  (Two are at 256 MB and the other at 64)
2 RIMM modules of PC 800 RAM.  (Both are 256 MB)
2 Slot Type PIII 900 Mhz processors (Motherboard bios is fried)
1 Working Slot type Athalon motherboard with 800 MHz processor.
1 Socket A Athlon processor at 900 MHz
1 (Still working mind you) Voodoo 3 graphics card
1 350 watt power supply

All gear listed besides the bad motherboard (I wish it wasn't fried as
it supports dual processors) is in great working condition.  I am more
than willing to part with all of it, as the only thing that it's doing
is collecting dust.  If you are anyone else on the list can use it,
let me know and I will get it out to ou this weekend.

Blessings,
Daniel

On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 20:54:01 -0600 (CST), Ed Hurst <ehurst at asisaid.com> wrote:
>                            Refining the Quest
> 
> In my computer ministry I often run into a lot of older boxes still
> running quite well. They lack the processor or RAM to run a full-blown
> modern Linux distro, or even a BSD, if we expect to run recent releases
> of either X server. For the die-hard, there's Deli Linux[1] and that's
> one way of doing things. Use an older kernel series, but fully updated
> for security; use the older version of X, slightly enhanced; use all
> the lightest possible applications: Siag Office, Dillo, Sylpheed, etc.
> That's a pretty good answer for some uses, and I plan to watch it
> closely, and test it on some of those older machines.
> 
> Even without a basic hostility to X altogether, there are valid reasons
> for avoiding it. In the first place, X is a server, primarily designed
> to serve the GUI out to other machines. On the stand-alone desktop,
> that's a lot of code not being used. There's an awful lot of Linux
> machines out there being used that way. There's also quite a few
> not-so-old machines that really struggle to run modern distros of
> Linux, with lots of modern hardware options unsupported by the likes of
> Deli Linux.
> 
> Having continued my research on the console vs. light GUI quest, I've
> concluded there's precious little hope for the latter. There are a
> couple of bona fide light GUI projects: DirectFB[2] and KGI[3], along
> with a few others. While both are available for Linux and FreeBSD, the
> I'm guessing DirectFB has a brighther future with Linux, and KGI with
> BSD. Both projects seem far down the road from producing a stable
> product, plus I'm not yet sure from reading the documentation whether
> current X-based apps will easily port to either. For now, the console
> is the place I'll focus.
> 
> Right from the start, when I began using Linux 8 years ago, I recall
> reading in various user forums how Linux had completely lost out on the
> development of a console word processor. Now, by definintion, a word
> processor hides the formatting code from the user, and substitutes
> various indicators of what the formatting looks like. On the console,
> spacing and alignment isn't too hard to display, but character
> formatting is usually indicated by color. In the minds of most users,
> character-based word processing is connected to character mode
> printing. Thus, for an American, that means a page of text is about 54
> lines, and either 65 columns (10pt), 78 columns (12pt), or 98 columns
> (15pt). Those were the standard font options built into most printers
> back when this sort of word processing dominated the computer scene.
> 
> Unless printer drivers are written for each printer, in the fashion of
> Word Perfect 5.x and 6.x, there's not that many options for character
> mode printing that includes the few basic text enhancements built into
> most printers with their internal fonts. There is a frame work for it
> with nroff and troff, but those are markup languages. As far as I know,
> only the Andrew Project ("EZ") from Carnegie-Melon tried anything with
> that, and their suite was GUI. To use groff guarantees processing the
> output into graphical mode, and ghostscript/CUPS has that covered.
> Frankly, I prefer dot-matrix printers and character mode printing.
> Further, there's an awful lot of folks out there still using that sort
> of hardware. It's not glamorous, it's anything but cutting edge, and
> thus draws almost no attention from developers.
> 
> That's the part I wish I could fix. Where's the handle? How do I grab
> this? I reiterate that a very major part of my concern is making
> Linux/Unix available for the Christians in the Third World. That won't
> interest too many Open Source developers, whose numbers seem dominated
> by non-believers. So I'm back to asking for comments and prayer. What
> do you think?
> 
>     [1] <URL: http://delilinux.berlios.de/>
>     [2] <URL: http://www.directfb.org/>
>     [3] <URL: http://kgi-wip.sourceforge.net/>
>     [4] <URL: http://ed.asisaid.com/blog/index.php?p=203>
> 
> Ed Hurst
> -----------
> A Bible Site -- http://webs.tconline.net/softedges/
> Linux & Unix Help -- http://ed.asisaid.com/
> Blog -- http://ed.asisaid.com/blog/
> 
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