FreeBSD I LOVE YOU

[David Gerard]

Anthony Atkielski (atkielski.anthony at wanadoo.fr) [050121 02:12]:
> Matthias Buelow writes:

> MB> Wake up from your pipe dreams.  Shipping decommissioned computers to the
> MB> 3rd world is not going to solve any development problem.
 
> It helps solve an environmental problem, though.  And they need not be
> shipped anywhere.  It is sufficient to just continue using them, instead
> of throwing them away.  That's true everywhere in the world.


Last year's model is more usable than you might think if you fill it with
memory. My desktop is a PII-450. I got two more identical ones free. It's
running FreeBSD 5.3 with KDE 3.3 just fine; it would have no problems
running current GNOME.  The main thing needed in such boxes is *memory* -
it's got 768MB.

So something around 500MHz will happily run Pango and the other
cutting-edge internationalisation stuff if you fill it with memory.

Oh, and I *really* want a much bigger hard disk so I can rip more of my CDs
at higher quality. I have 60 gig of stuff and it's not enough ;-)

The main reason for MHz is media tasks that involve number crunching. I
have a Debian laptop, a Pentium MMX 233MHz (Pentium I, not Pentium II).
Minimal install - base, then XFree86 4.3 with twm, Firefox, VNC.  It has
enough CPU to play MP3 or Ogg, but not to play any sort of video.

However, 500MHz is enough to play 320x240 video files and to do pretty well
on DVDs. So I expect the next big jump in what people think of as CPU
requirements will be the next CPU-intensive media format. Or, of course,
Longhorn. I'm not sure even KDE with SVG for everything could outdo that
;-)


- d.