Re: Appalling Vista

Palindrome (Palindrome <me9@xxxxxxxxxxx>) gurgled happily, sounding much
like they were saying:

That rings warning bells... Hmmm. A quick google suggests the Pana is
PII-300, and the Tosh Pent-133. Both somewhat... aged... - Pana late
90s, Tosh mid 90s at a guess?

They'll certainly _run_ a modern distro of Linux, but I wouldn't be
expecting much in the way of performance with a recent version GUI
installed.

You wanna try Vista on 'em? No, thought not...

That isn't the point.

I *know* that I can run Win98 on them. I *know* I can run XP on the
Toughbook.

....with additional drivers supplied by Panasonic, or just on the core
drivers supplied by MS on an XP CD?

I just want to know what Linux I can run on them. I'm not fussed which.

And I don't want a GUI - all I want is for them to run as, say, a mail
server and/or a webserver for a very small website and two or three
email accounts...

Furry muff. In that case, almost any 2.6-based server-focussed distro.
I'd probably try CentOS first.

I don't expect all versions of Linux to work on them, any more than I
expect all versions of Windows to run on them. I just want one that does
work..

The trouble is, you're not really comparing apples-with-apples. It's not
a case of "expect all versions of Windows" - because you're looking at
different generations of the same product. When you look at Linux, you're
looking at the current generation of different - but closely related -
products.

It's certainly not going to help. I don't even know when I last _saw_ a
PC-card/CardBus/PCMCIA NIC was... Certainly not for a fair few years,
and even then I think it was being binned as useless old crap...

It may be useless old crap to you - but they are the sort of things that
I have to try and make work.

<removes tongue from cheek>

Both will run NT Server- no problem. I have even older and slower
laptops still doing an honest day's work.

Serious question - why laptops for this kind of role? Desktop hardware
will be not only much easier to set up, but more robust and better
performing, too. The only advantage to laptop kit would be if there's
very physically limited space.

The vast majority of laptop NICs from the last couple of generations
are either miniPCI or motherboard, and will just... work...

ANd maybe even work with Vista, too.

<shudder>
Indeed.

And hopefully donated to local charities and then becoming the backbone
of their IT..

Aha. Now we come to it. There's a lot of _much_ better hardware than that
gets dumped regularly - seriously, I wish I'd known before getting shot
of a couple of perfectly functioning c.5yo HP rackmount servers a month
or two ago, not to mention desktops. Seriously, drop me an email.

I tend to go by the hardware donation specs of somebody like ComputerAid
- and they wouldn't go near laptops of that vintage.

I would say "Have you tried a USB NIC?" but I suspect those laptops
probably don't actually have mobo USB...? (and if there is, it'll
certainly only be USB 1, so dog slow)

USB1 yep. I thought the chance of a usb working to be even less
likely...

<shrug> Try it.

As has been said elsewhere, Linux has long been excellent as a server
OS, but it's really only the current generation of distros which have
cut it as a desktop OS. That means, though, that there's an expectation
of vaguely recent hardware in order to have some kind of a fair test...

Which is why I am only asking that they do the server OS thing....

Which still requires the hardware drivers.

They are older kit from well known mainstream manufacturers. All the
driver problems for them should have been sorted out years ago..

Should.

Yes, and no. There's a certain amount of chicken and egg in that because
Linux is only recently maturing as a desktop OS, laptop hardware's been
neglected in the past. Given finite driver development resource, it's
obviously not being wasted on ancient history.
.

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