Machine Revival - Part I

Yesterday, I went out with my wife and bought a computer table. I had been planning to revive an old Dell Dimension XPS T500 I had laying around and repurposing it to be an all-around computer for the kids. My son has simple needs. He has great fun playing the games included in Child's Play and Gcompris. Well the wife and I ended up buying a cheap computer table from Saver's Mall in Balibago.

After I got home, I immediately started working on the machine. I installed an 80GB Maxtor IDE drive I bought used a few months back. I also removed a non-working network card, and stuck a more recent PCI LAN Card i had lying around in one of my desk drawers. I also installed a PCI USB card.  The  Dimension XPS T500 had slow USB 1.1 and the card would at least bring it up to USB 2.0 speeds. I then closed up the side panel and expected the thing to boot. But it didn't! Beeps ensued and the Diagnostic LED's on the machine's back lit up with a pattern. So I went to find an online manual, praying one was still online at all. This machine has a date stamp of November 1999 after all. 

As luck would have it I found one (if your interested, it's here: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dkub/) . Following the clues as to what was going wrong, I reseated the video card and tried booting it. It booted up but the color on the display was yellowish. I reseated it again and powered it up once more. It beeped with a memory error. I unplugged the DIMMs, moved 'em to other slots and gave it a try. It POSTed! But then it was showing a PCI error. I forgot I left a PCI dial-up modem installed and decided to chuck it. The thing booted fine afterwards.

After I got it working I tried Fedora 12 Games, but it was just too slow to be usable. I was just hoping, but I knew the machine was too slow to use Fedora 12 Games. Anyway, I went off and tried another live distro, Linux Mint 8. This time it booted a lot more faster than Fedora, but it was still quite a good 8-10 minutes before I saw the desktop. I could just imagine my son jumping in anticipation only to get tired before the machine had fully booted. He's a little hyper over waiting time and jumps excitedly at times. While that was happening, I was waiting for my DreamLinux 3.5 download to finish. I've used DreamLinux 3.1 before on this same machine and it worked okay. And so I went with the reliable option and went ahead and installed  DreamLinux 3.5. After rebooting though, the machine wouldn't boot into it. It looked like the drive was having problems. So I tried disconnecting it and checking if the cables and connectors were okay, then booted it up again to try and install DreamLinux 3.5 again. Then I noticed the drive size was only 74.++ GB when it should be a little over 76 GB. Something wasn't right about the capacity. While thinking about it I decided to think it over. 

So today, after I got home and after thinking about it the whole day while at work, I gave the drive a go with DBAN. It's still running, actually. I don't expect it to finish any time soon. Maybe tomorrow morning. So I'll post an update if i get this to work. It would be a waste if I didn't get to play Tux Racer on this old machine now, would it?

Mandriva 2008 Spring

I just read the announcement that Mandriva released 2008 Spring (ver. 2008.1?). I was surprised to find a few interesting items in the list of things they've improved in this release. Notably they have now have parental controls, media server capabilities and better synchronization support with mobile devices built-in. Sadly Palm is not included in the list of devices that 2008 Spring provides "Easy support for synchronizing" for. Another noteworthy item is the out-of-the-box support for the Asus Eee PC. Mandriva touts that 2008 Spring "works perfectly on the Eee PC with no modifications" needed. I think I'll be busy during my offs trying out Mandriva and DreamLinux ^_^

By the way, you can check for screenshots of the beautifully designed desktops here: KDE, Gnome, Xfce. If your interested in trying out Mandriva 2008 Spring, you can download your free copy from here.

DreamLinux 3.1 Released

I received news that Dreamlinux released version 3.1 already. I'll be making time in the coming week to download and test this. The look of it is quite appealing, as evidenced by the screenshots in Distrowatch.com (here and here) and Dreamlinux' mainpage (here).

I really need to set-up VMWare server on my machine. That'll make it easier to test out new things without adding to the landfills unnecessarily (re: burning CD's). I'll see if I can make time this week, this personal mess hanging over me and all.