The Linux Extremist

I recently started working for a publishing company as their Development Manager. I love it here, but there are things which fall under the “effing mess” category. The website for the company, and its IT infrastructure deserve this classification - hence why I was hired to sort it all out.

You would think that for such a big task, there would be a PC waiting for me. Not so - in fact, I’m on week 2 and I had been using my personal laptop to do my work. I got tired of it, so I started looking around the office, once I actually had an office and desk of my own, to see what I could come up with.

The company had stashed away some very old Dells in a cupboard - we’re talking systems from the Pentium II era with 128 MB of RAM. Knowing that the new Xubuntu variant of Ubuntu is supposed to be for low end machines, I gave it a try. While apparently they could boot up the Live CD, the installer was too much, it crashed.

Fortunately I managed to dig up a Pentium III Dell Dimension XPS T600 with a bit more than 400 MB of RAM. It had very strange things - such as two CD drives and two graphics cards. I removed the graphics cards and one of the drives. I put in an old GeForce4 MX 420 card I had lying around, along with an old spare MA311 Netgear PCI wireless card; I then proceeded to install Xubuntu.

The installation was near painless - the system performs, while not particularly speedily, sufficiently and at the very least, one can use a modern browser and office software without a problem. The sole difficulty I had was with hooking up a printer - the printer management software that came with XFce (the graphical interface bundled with Xubuntu) was next to useless. It is far better to use CUPS, which can be accessed using http://localhost:631/.

So kudos to the Xubuntu development folks  - it’s a modern OS that runs off of dust-encrusted rubbish, a rare feat indeed.

I still wish my company would give me the promised laptop however!

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