Claudio Carlquist's Homepage
Well, even my "modern" computers are not really so "modern", exception maybe to the Athlon 1200MHz that is my main computer, which was used to be a simple K6-2 500MHz until a few months ago. This machine runs BeOS, QNX and Linux, of course. The distribution is Slackware 8.0 with kernel 2.4.17, and it's working as a router for my home network.
The second PC is a Pentium 100MHz, running Slackware 7.1 (I'm too lazy to update it for no real reason...). It's mostly used by my girlfriend cause I never leave the Athlon when I'm awake at home :-)
I also have an IBM ThinkPad 486 DX4 running Slack 7.1 too, featuring X-Window and sound, and rocking on my network!!! The installation was a little tricky on the ThinkPad cause it has only 540MB HD and no CD-ROM drive, but I've managed to install the "basic" packages and complete the machine with X-Window, FVWM2 (not FVWM95!!!), Netscape 3.0 (3MB download and Java support!), Maxwell Text Editor (1.5 MB download and can handle RTF documents) and lots of emulators, of course! It still has room for even more files!
Also connected to my network there's an old SUN SparcStation LX, with 50MHz RISC processor, 80MB RAM, 1GB HD. Sadly I had dropped "SplackLinux" (a distribution that aims to keep Slackware/Sparc distribution alive after the official team had dropped it) to install "SuSE 7.3 for Sparc" on it. The reason: the installer was a little broken on the Splack distro, forcing the installation either to "default" mode (installing everything) or to "newbie" mode (each package had to be selected one by one). As I don't have neither enough disk space for everything nor patience for "one by one", I decided to try another distro on the Sparc. The performance is compared to a Pentium 133 - a truly outdated machine and yet, VERY COOL!!!
As a guest, I often plug the notebook that I use at work on my network. It's a Toshiba Satellite 4300 (Pentium III, 700MHz, 320MB RAM) and has Red Hat 7.1 as a second OS after WinNT ("No, Thanks!"). I had chosen Red Hat for this machine cause 1) Sometimes I need some "Red Hat-like" computer at work (don't ask me why, it's classified...) and 2) It was the distribution that liked my hardware most (weird video and sound adapters, Winmodem... ARGGG). I had Xine's DVD Player (with the DeCSS patch, of course!) running like a rocket on this machine!
And last, but not at least, sometimes I have my PDA connected to my network. It is an Agenda VR3d ("Developer's Edition"), from the "defunct" AgendaComputing Company. It provides a 66MHz, 32 bit NEC VR4181 MIPS processor, 8MB Flash Memory for Linux OS and 16MB RAM for user's programs. A really cool machine, allows anyone willing to cross-compile Linux programs to run them on the PDA! According to the former site, "Agenda isn't a "new OS". It is Linux. The real McCoy. And it is X. And bash. And whatever else you port." I have one of the first models, black and white case. If you could find one of them, get it quickly cause they're being sold for U$89.00 in the US. A real bargain for such cool machine, almost the same size as a Palm V and sometimes faster than my SUN Workstation!