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Subject:Re: Home businesses and older computers From:"Sandy Harris" <sandyinchina -at- gmail -dot- com> To:TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:44:59 +0800
CL T <straylightsghost -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> If you're willing to install a Linux OS, you'd be surprised at the mileage
> you can get out of an older machine (and I'm nowhere NEAR a Linux advocate).
I am. One of the interesting things about Linux, or any other Unix, is how much
performance you can get out of a few old machines sharing the load. X is a
distributed window system, so it is possible to have one machine doing all the
display while another runs the client processes.
About 10 years back, a friend of mine built a remarkably powerful
system on nearly zero budget using Linux and junk computers.
A 486 ran most processes, a pair of Sparc II's (40 MHz RISC chip
and 128 K ram) ran X, one for the X server and the other for the
window manager. There were a couple of other boxes being a
mail and a news server.
My machine was fairly powerful for the time, 800 MHz P III with
a good video card and more RAM than his machines combined.
I ran Win 98 and Linux. His performance was close to mine on
anything interactive, though not on things like compiling a big
program.
--
Sandy Harris,
Quanzhou, Fujian, China
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