The Self-Reliant Thin Client: March 2010 Archives

I cleared the enormous 22-inch CRT monitor, then the smaller 15-inch LCD monitor and the accompanying keyboards and mice off the desk and plopped the $15 Laptop — the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt down, booted into my built-from-standard Debian Lenny install with minimal Xfce (with / under 1 GB), updated for the first time in a long time and opened the Opera Web browser (about the only one that will run acceptably well on this aged 233 MHz CPU).

I turned on Opera Turbo browsing — I'm using Netgear power-line networking to my converted-garage office — and aside from some fuzzy graphics, all is looking and working fine.

In contrast with my converted thin client and its somewhat botched Xfce/GNOME hybrid, here I only have a 3 GB hard drive (yep, the original from 11 years ago), so I've kept it Debian and minimal to save space.

I noticed that I didn't have an image editor. My go-to app gThumb was going to bring in a boatload of dependencies, so I opted for MtPaint instead.

Did I mention how great Opera is on these ancient computers? I just got an e-mail from the company that version 10.50 is out. I'll give it a run on my Toshiba before I upgrade here from 10.10. Opera isn't open source, but it's the best graphical browser I've ever found for old hardware that usually chokes the life out of Firefox. Or is it the other way around?