Giving an Old Computer Life with Linux

So you have an old pc gathering dust in the garage. You have Windows but its full of viruses and Microsoft doesn't support windows 98 any more. Why not install Linux on it and bring it back to life. Most people think Linux is too hard with the Terminal and everything but its not. You can easily accomplish everything you could do with your windows pc and more when you have Linux and know a little bit about it.

First of all, for Windows users, Linux is an open source operating system with many variants called distros. There are over 300 Linux distros to suit personal needs. You can go to distrowatch.com to learn more about Linux distros. There are many reasons why you would want to switch to Linux: Linux never gets viruses or spyware, there are a lot of applications, it supports old hardware and has excellent hardware detection.

For this article, I am going to use my old Gateway pc with a pentium I processor and 80 MB RAM and a slow running Windows 98. I have researched on the internet and so far the best solution I found was a Linux distro called DSL short for Damn Small Linux. It is a very small Linux distro. it is 50 MB so you can easily download it on dial up. To download it you visit this link: ftp://ftp.oss.cc.gatech.edu/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/current.iso

Another great thing about most Linux distros including this one is the ability to run it with a cd without installing. This lets you use the operating system, test it out, and when you are ready, you can install it. After you download the file, you need access to a CD burner and a blank CD. Then download this program for Windows called Active iso burner here: http://www.ntfs.com/downloads/iso-burner.exe

After you burn the iso to the disc, shut down the computer with the burned disc with you. Then turn the computer on and go to the BIOS settings menu. This is given during the first boot screen. Its usually F1,F2, or DEL. Then change the boot order from hard drive to CD. If you choose to not install Linux, then you should change the boot order to hard drive.

Then, restart the computer and pop in the cd when it boots. After that you will load into Damn Small Linux. You can test out its features and see if all your hardware is detected. It has Firefox for internet browsing, XMMS for listening to music, Ted for writing documents, Siag for word processing, and you can get more apps from DSL repositories at: http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/damnsmalllinux.org/mydsl/ If you need more help there is the DSL forums at: www.damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin/forums/ikonboard.cgi

On my computer, DSL detected all my hardware and was really fast (even on the live cd). So I chose to install it, and I can use it browse the internet, read email, im, and listen to music.

If you like DSL and you want to get rid of Windows and its viruses, you can install it. You can also dual boot, which means you have Linux and Windows, and you have the option to boot into whichever OS you want. DSL is an easy way to start getting into Linux and you can try it out and even installing it and revive an old computer you have. If you have good hardware, then you can try other distros like Ubuntu,Simply Mepis,Sabayon Linux,Linux Mint. Installing a program called Beryl can give you much better special effects than Windows Vista itself if you have good hardware.

Linux is a great operating system and it is gaining more popularity for its features and you can make your computing experience better and securer. Linux is entering the Windows only pc market. Dell now sells Linux desktops.

Sources:
Damn Small Linux: www.damnsmalllinux.org
NTFS: www.ntfs.com
DistroWatch: www.distrowatch.com