Projects: Linux for Phil's old PC

Phil, the nephew of one of our friends, had an old beat-up IBM Aptiva (AMD K6, 128MB RAM, 10GB HD) laying around that wasn't working very well with Win XP. I told his uncle I'd take it as a pet project to resurrect the old clunker as a Linux box, so he could have something to use for his writing hobby.

At first, I downloaded Debian Linux - with 6 or 7 CD's and no indication of which ones could be ignored, this was quite a cumbersome process. When I finally got around to booting up the first CD, I had to know how I wanted the partitions done, and I'm a computer guy, but not quite a Linux pro, so I did what I thought would work - I gave it a small boot partition, one for swap, and one for everything else. The install went through, but when I booted it up and it tried to run Gnome, the screen was just a garbled mess. Having no idea how to fix it, I looked on the web to see what people consider the easiest Linux, and found Ubuntu.

Ubuntu was one CD, so downloading was a breeze and took only about 15-20 minutes. For Debian, I had to use BitTorrent and it took several days to get all the CD images. I popped in the Ubuntu CD, booted it up, and it pretty much configured everything itself. It detected and auto-configured the network card (which Debian didn't do) and auto-partitioned my disk (a relief for me and any other Linux non-pro). There were a couple of problems due to the crappy old CD-ROM drive that was in the machine, but it recovered pretty gracefully after a reboot. However, just to be sure I replaced it with an old CD burner I had that was still in good shape, and everything went fine. After a couple of normal reboots to finish up the install, the system booted perfectly to Gnome, and I was able to log in and immediately start surfing the web with Firefox and create docs with OpenOffice.org.

If you have a machine that's even slightly newer than this one (made in the last 5 years or so), switching to Ubuntu Linux should be a viable option for you, even if you're not a computer geek. It pretty much took care of everything for me, which was something I've been looking for. I was pleasantly surprised - perhaps Linux is finally a viable option for the masses looking to move away from Windows.

If you're going to resurrect an old machine that seems to be out of commission, one thing I also recommend is to open the box and get a can of compressed air from your local electronics store. Use the air and a vacuum or DustBuster to remove the enormous amounts of dust that have likely built up in there over the years, especially on the CPU fan and in the power source fan. Very few people do this, and it's one of the main reasons people's PC's "blow up" - the processor or the power source overheat due to dust build-up. It's a shame, because it's completely avoidable and simple cleaning twice a year or so can greatly extend the life of your PC.