PC-BSD

I acquired an older machine over the weekend from Mary’s parents. They bought a new Compaq and asked me if I would set it up for them.
I decided it would be fun to take their machine off their hands for them and practice wiping it clean. (For that I used Darik’s Boot and Nuke utility. It went pretty well and wiped the drive to something slightly less secure than the Department of Defense requires in about 2.5 hours.
After that I installed what is roughly described as a UNIX-like operating system called BSD. This particular variant is called PC-BSD. You can read a little lot about it on WikiPedia if you are interested. Or you can get it from the horses mouth.

It is pretty cool and fun so far and it looks to be capable of doing everything I would require of a desktop OS, like printing, writing documents, playing music, playing kids games (that come with it) etc…only one problem. The machine I acquired only has 64MB of RAM and the minimum recomendation for this OS is 128MB. It runs but it isn’t fun. And the printer doesn’t seem to react to commands and I don’t have the power brick for the speakers so I can’t prove the media player works either. {curses}

Oh yeah, and no ethernet card either so I can’t prove the internet capabilities either. {foiled again}

A quick search found that most current day operating systems recommend a minimum 128MB RAM. I can help (perhaps a great deal) by configuring a different desktop environment (similar I guess to say, turning off the WinXP Pro GUI interface and cranking it back down to Classic mode or something, the effect on memory/CPU usage is more drastic than that but similar concept). And I could always go ‘old school’ with an older version of another variant of BSD…but then it wouldn’t be so easy to install and configure as PC-BSD is/was.

I will update progress, if I make any, or if I end up changing the OS in the near future. There are so many options.