Linux Tuesday: Practical Application

Linux Tuesday: Practical Application

We skipped Linux Monday last week, no doubt to the relief of some readers, because I was in the midst of a large and actually practical Linux project. For the first time in about five years, my basement is free of computers in semi-working condition. With the investment of $15 or so in some used hard drives (Goodwill Reboot, good deals on parts) a half-dozen Linux machines are up and flying at Democratic HQ, appropriately being used to elect Microsoft-suer Roxanne Conlin and the rest of the ticket.

Biggest bump in the road was on a really ancient machine (400 MHz processer, started with 96 meg of memory but I upgraded to 512). I managed to install Ubuntu 10.04 but it was painfully slow, so I downgraded to the previous long term support release, 8.04.

We could still use a couple monitors.

I don't think anyone down at HQ will be rocking the command line but if they were here's a half dozen Command Line Tools for Linux Performance Monitoring. If things are running slow on desktop Linux, 99 times out of 100 Firefox is the culprit.

Matt Hartley is not an Ubuntu fan and recommends three other distributions.

FOr the really, really specialized, here's 12 unusual distros.

Finally, Linux from hell. Literally.