Kevin Harper

A little more than two years ago talked about Damn Small Linux (DSL) and how I suggested it to a friend because it had revived an old PC of mine.

Yes… DSL revived it but I wasn’t sure what I would use the PC for. At one point I turned it into a XMAME machine, running classic arcade roms. And that was fun, but I didn’t have the time or craftsmanship ability to build a cabinet to house the machine. Nor was I willing to pay someone to have it built. Shortly afterwards, the computer went right back to the garage… Until Friday afternoon.

Yes! I found a real-life use for this machine! In fact, it will now serve a bigger purpose than it ever has! I purchased this machine in 2000 – the second computer I had ever bought. I remember buying my first and thinking I would never fill its 6GB hard drive… I wasn’t naive enough to think I would never fill this computer’s monstrous 15GB.

So this computer served for writing reports for school, for e-mail, and for surfing the web. About 6 months after I purchased it I got my first job in the technology sector. I needed to learn to navigate through *nix-based systems so I installed Red Hat 6 along side WindowsMe. Another six months went by and I noticed that my windows partition was almost full (I had split the drive in halves).

I went out and bought a second, bigger, faster drive and installed Mandrake 7.2. I liked Mandrake because I had been using RH6 strictly via the terminal. I never realized that I could install x on it. Wait… Did I just admit that on the web?

Mandrake came with a VERY NICE desktop environment. The bad thing was that I could not connect to the web. It didn’t recognize my network card and I didn’t know how to manually install the necessary components.

:) Thank God I had my Win98se laptop through all of this!

Needless to say… the computer became a jukebox 18 months after I purchased it. I would deposit my mp3′s there and play them. The computer had speakers, worked out great for the next few years. Until about 2008 when it would take WinMe anywhere between 5 and 10 minutes to boot up. I was relying more and more on my laptop so off to the garage it went.

The specifications

700MHz processor, 64MB ram, 11MB video memory, 15GB hard drive, CD-ROM drive, a separate CD-RW drive, a 56Kbps modem, and ethernet adapter.

How is this old computer useful?

I need a contact management system where I can keep track of communications I’ve had with business partners and customers. Instead of putting one up on this or another one of the websites that I manage, I thought, “Why not set the old computer up as a web server? Why not install Apache, MySQL, and PHP on top of DSL?”

That’s what I did. It took me a couple of days to get reacquainted with DSL and web servers… I had never set one up by myself and I did a lot of reading. Turns out that setting DSL up as a web server is one of the easiest things anyone can do! Everything comes pretty much pre-installed! Everything except PHP, which is a trivial task to get and install.

Quickest way to set up your server

Install DSL on the hard drive.
DSL comes with the Monkey Web Server and SQLite3 for a database. It also has perl and lau installed – these can be run on the cgi-bin (also preconfigured).

Really, the only thing missing was PHP! And this is much, MUCH simpler than how I went about it. I hacked it.. yes. But for what I need this system, it is PERFECT! There are two php packages in the MyDSL Browser. Simply search “php”, select either (I chose php-4-monkey.tar.gz), then click “Install Selected”. Installation is done!

Next… My hack

Launch a terminal. Copy /usr/local/bin/sqlite to /usr/bin/.

That’s it! Your server is ready to go! Ahhh… And DSL also comes w/ an SSH & FTP daemon. I added:
/usr/bin/betaftpd
/usr/bin/sshd
/opt/monkey/bin/banana start

to /opt/bootlocal.sh to have then start automatically when the server boots up.

Okay… It’s time for me to start building the contact management system.