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.
Compaq 5009 Desktop Series
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.
As most of you know, I didn’t have much time to do any programming in the past few years while I was in school. I completed my last class in December, 2010 and took a nutrition class for the spring semester of ’11.
“. My version is a little outdated – it’s the 4th edition but it’s an easy book to follow. I’ve never had any problems with the “teach yourself in 21 Days” series.
