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Showing posts with the label old

Breathe new life into your old PC with WattOS R9 and ZRAM ZSWAP

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Breathe new life into your old PC with WattOS R9 and ZRAM ZSWAP Breathe new life into your old computer with the lightweight distro WattOS R9. It uses  Ubuntu as the upstream distro and built the latest version from 14.04 LTS for long term support and stability. WattOS R9 comes installed with the LXDE desktop enviornment  ( LXDE  is a lightweight desktop alternative to Unity, GNOME and KDE. Its ideal for old computers or anyone looking for a fast, lightweight system. Its even lighter than Xubuntus XFCE). The installation process is similar to the one of Ubuntu 14.04 (see how to install Ubuntu 14.04 here ). For 768 MB RAM or less: enable zRam: zram  (also called  zRAM  and, initially, compcache) is a Linux kernel feature that provides a form of virtual memory compression When your computer has very little RAM (768 MB or less), then of course your best choice is a lightweight member of the Ubuntu family, like Lubuntu. But even then the lack of memo...

Booting an old VIA EPIA 5000L motherboard

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Booting an old VIA EPIA 5000L motherboard I purchased an old VIA fanless mini-ITX motherboard on eBay, including CPU and RAM and shipping, for a reasonable price ($43). I want to play with it and see what I can get it to do. Maybe build a cool case for it... MB attached to ordinary ATX power supply, VGA monitor, and PS/2 Mouse. Tiny black rectangle on the right is the on/off jumper. Step 1: Hook it up Happily, I have an old PS/2 keyboard, VGA monitor, and ATX power supply handy. Hook them all up...and nothing. Of course, the power switch. Get the manual, read the manual, find the jumper, and use a spare jumper to connect them for a moment. Hooray! Fans on the power supply start to spin! Beep! Splash appears on the monitor! I made the following BIOS changes: Always restart upon power loss (since I dont have a power switch!) Enable fast startup (skip memtest, faster boot) Skip splash (annoying) Skip BIOS summary (annoying) Change the boot device to USB-ZIP (not USB-FDD, essential for USB...