[GTALUG] distro for an old Thinkpad

[Stewart C. Russell]

I'm pleased to say that the old R51 is now a pretty capable - if a
little pedestrian - 3D printer control box at Protolab. It's running
Lubuntu 16.04LTS, which is surprisingly nice.

On 2016-04-24 10:29 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> 
> Seems easy.  The hard part is behind you: realizing that there is a 
> problem and what it is.
> <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PAE>

All it needed was 'forcepae --- forcepae' at the end of the initial Live
CD boot, and it picked that up for running and the installation.

> How much RAM does it have?  How much can it have?  That's the main cause 
> of machines becoming useless to me.

1.5 GB, and that's the maximum.

> I don't have a feeling for ByteMark.

Sorry, I miss-spoke - it's byte-unixbench
<https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench>. I wanted something that
would test a little more than raw CPU speed so I could triage old machines.

> | *: including an Intel/Arduino Galileo, which was utterly dire.
> 
> Not a surprise.  But sad / funny.  Is there anything interesting about a 
> Galileo?  Is its performance respectable for its power consumption?

Not really. It runs Arduino sketches very slowly (like a few 10s of
analogRead() calls every second). It draws about 15 W, and the fanless
Quark SOC (400 MHz, Pentium Pro-ish, complete with FDIV bug) makes air
above it shimmery-hot. It has no display capability. For reasons best
described as "dunno", I have it set up with a mini-PCIe wireless card.
It run Yocto Linux, which give immediately password-free access as root.
It's twice as expensive as a Raspberry Pi, and gives an overall Byte
Index of less than 1/4 of an original, single-core Raspberry Pi.

cheers,
 Stewart