Free and Open Source blogger with an attitude
After upgrading my AMD decTOP with 160GB hdd, I’ve decided to install a fresh new operating system on it for some side-project that I’m working on. I choose to install Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.3 (Squeeze) on the machine.
The machine is currently running lighttpd web server with PHP5, samba server and sshd (using public-key authentication).
The specs of the machine are outlined in the screenshot.
You can read more information regarding AMD DecTOP on Wikipedia
This is a continuation from my post of running Android on my AMD decTOP machine.
Of all Linux distribution that I tried, I found out that only Puppy Linux offered a usable GUI desktop environment on a plain vanilla AMD decTOP out of the box, but that is not without some effort on the installer side.
On the other hand, it is very easy to get Windows XP running on a plain vanilla AMD decTOP, without additional hardware upgrades. Here is my prove.
It seems Windows XP is more tolerant to low end desktops (or in this case, decTOP) than Linux operating system for fully GUI environment. Are we getting bloated?
AMD decTOP specs
RAM: 128MB RAM DDR2
HDD: 10GB IDE
Processor: AMD Geode GX 500, 366 MHz clock rate
I’ve the opportunity to test out a decTOP computer at my workplace today. decTOP was originally produced as a low-cost computer to allow people from emerging countries to access the internet.
Originally, decTOP (formerly PIC) was shipped with Microsoft Windows CE and Internet Explorer 6.0, but recent release changes the BIOS behavior of decTOP, that’s allow it to boot from USB devices (flash drive and external DVD-drive).
This has led me to do few experiments with the decTOP computer. I’ve tried installing it with Ubuntu, then Windows XP, and finally Android.
and I found Android runs nicely on the decTOP without any modifications. The downside is, that currently only Android 1.6 is available for installing on x86 machine.
What happened to Ubuntu?
Apparently I ran into some difficulties in installing Ubuntu on decTOP. With LiveCD image, it is obvious that the 128MB SODIMM ram is not enough to load the desktop interface, let alone installing it. I tried the server edition and it succeeds, but the point is to run a usable Linux desktop out from decTOP machine, and I think Android do shine in this area.
Android drawback?
One drawback though, Android won’t let you save the downloaded *.apk on the remaining harddisk space, you got to use USB stick for that.
