The Linux Extremist

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a set of desktop computers in a more wretched state than those I saw this morning. They had been sitting in an unventilated storage unit that had no climate control whatsoever; it’s important to note that this has been one of the hottest summers I can recall as well. My colleague and I bundled them into the back of a Volkswagen Golf for a rather bumpy ride back to the office; at that point, the damage had been done by the conditions, it was difficult to see how it could be much worse.

The machines were all the same model: the Packard Bell iMedia 1307. For those who aren’t familiar with this model, it comes with a Celeron D processor, 256 MB of RAM, SiS graphics, and strangely, these had a 160 GB Hard Drive.

It was going to be something of a miracle if they started up; however they did. Still, the result was not particularly pleasing: the machines come with Windows XP Home as standard. It was clear from the outset, however, that it was not running happily. There was a definite grind and churn. Once booted, Internet Explorer was sluggish.

I would have been tempted to leave it alone; it might have been sufficient to say that these were “functional”, more or less, and let it be. However, these PCs were going to be used in a demonstration to customers. The idea of the customers thinking my company was as sluggish as these machines was as unpleasant as it was untrue.

Among the assets I had was an old Nvidia GeForce 4 graphics card. Fortunately the iMedia 1307 has a spare AGP slot. Also, the case construction makes it inot difficult to open and install additional components. As a test, I installed the card in one of them and then put Ubuntu Dapper Drake in the CD ROM drive. The Live CD worked well: all the hardware worked straight out of the box. I decided to install it, and see if Linux could bring something as wretched as this back to life.

Installation was peculiar; just a note of warning, the CD ROM drive scratched the first Ubuntu CD I put into it. A second CD and attempt resulted in the installer crashing. Another attempt with the same CD worked. After about an hour of installation and then downloading the latest upgrades, the PC was virtually reborn. It booted in approximately half the time that it took to boot Windows XP.

To put icing on the cake, I installed the nvidia-glx drivers; these are obtainable by going into System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager and searching for “nvidia”. Once installed, it’s worth going into Applications > Accesories > Terminal and typing the following:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

After typing in your password, and Gedit opens, search for the following text - “nv”. You’ll be led to a section where the video driver is named. Replace “nv” with “nvidia”. Save, and then reboot; you’ll know if it was successful if a large Nvidia logo appears for a moment while the computer is booting.

The computer was by now amongst the living; to add some final sparkle to its performance, I put Swiftfox on as its main browser. In the case of Ubuntu, it’s relatively simple; I got the appropriate package from www.getswiftfox.com, and installed it using the GDebi installer that offers itself up as a default option. The only difficult portion was changing all the Firefox links to Swiftfox - this can be done by right clicking on “Applications”, selecting “Edit Menus”, drilling down to the Firefox item, then right click and selecting “Properties” on Firefox. Replace all instances of “Firefox” with “Swiftfox”.

With the added graphics card, Ubuntu and Swiftfox, the iMedia 1307, in spite of being roasted, was turned into something decent; it is definitely not an embarassment. It would indeed be an ideal computer for someone who just wants to do web browsing and basic office tasks. In this case, however, it’s a relief that it merely works well.

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