[conspire] Today's CABAL cooking. Also: 'because I looked at my calendar'

[Rick Moen]

Hey, today's CABAL day.  I have a kung pao dish already partially
prepared (and people have tended to like that in the past).  That's with
my own garden's garlic, onions, and kung pao peppers.  Likewise, I'm set
up to make garlic bread with garlic and oregano from my garden.


Old saying:  'dates in calendar are closer than they seem'.  That dictum
primarily is intended to warn of _upcoming_ deadlines, but one might
loosely cite it as a reminder that time has _already_ passed, too.
It's 2013; my calendar tells me so -- and one of the lessons of
computing is that old hardware doesn't age well.  In my experience,
occasionally you have to realise that the world has moved on.

Last CABAL meeting, one of the regulars brought a nice little ATX desktop 
box and wanted to put a modern distro (ideally Linux Mint) with a modern
DE on it such as Cinnamon or MATE.  I keep a huge selection, but it's
not endless.  Here are my most recent downloads, for example:

Fedora-19-x86_64-DVD.iso
KNOPPIX_V7.2.0DVD-2013-06-16-EN.iso
Mageia-3-x86_64-DVD.iso
antiX-13.1_386-full.iso
antiX-13.1_x64-full.iso
aptosid-2013-01-hesperides-kde-full-i386-amd64-201305050307.iso
aptosid-2013-01-hesperides-xfce-amd64-201305050307.iso
aptosid-2013-01-hesperides-xfce-i386-201305050307.iso
debian-7.0.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso
debian-7.0.0-i386-DVD-1.iso
kubuntu-13.04-desktop-amd64.iso
kubuntu-13.04-desktop-i386.iso
linuxmint-15-cinnamon-dvd-64bit.iso
linuxmint-15-kde-dvd-64bit.iso
linuxmint-15-mate-dvd-64bit.iso
linuxmint-15-xfce-dvd-64bit.iso
lubuntu-13.04-alternate-amd64.iso
lubuntu-13.04-alternate-i386.iso
lubuntu-13.04-alternate-powerpc.iso
openSUSE-Factory-DVD-Build0651-x86_64.iso
openSUSE-Factory-DVD-Build0653-i586.iso
pmagic_2013_08_01_i586.iso
siduction-12.2.5-paintitblackxmas-gnome-i386-201212231903.iso
systemrescuecd-x86-3.3.0.iso
ubuntu-13.04-desktop-amd64.iso
ubuntu-13.04-desktop-i386.iso
ubuntu-13.04-server-amd64.iso
ubuntu-13.04-server-i386.iso

Notice that all of the Linux Mint images are 64-bit (x86-64)?  That's
because I looked at my calendar.


Any x86-class machine unable to run 64-bit code is _old_.  It is too
old for full-blown modern big DEs. LXDE, Enlightenment, and maybe
Razor-qt or Trinity Desktop Environment might be OK, depending primarily
on RAM.  It is too slow and RAM-limited to reasonably run Cinnamon,
MATE, regular GNOME3, Unity, XFCE4, or KDE4.

So, I don't download those any more, and I'll probably not download IA32
(32-bit x86) images of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or Xubuntu any more, either.

The CABAL attendee wasn't sure whether the nice little ATX box was
64-bit capable or not, which is a common situation with old boxes one
has picked up.  I believe this particular one turned out to have a
Pentium M-series CPU from around 2005.  Perfectly OK for an old
computer.  Many of those will accept up to 2 GB RAM if you can scrounge
that or justify the RAM expenditure.  But its day is long past, and 
you should not expect to run a Linux Mint GNOME edition on it.