[aklug] Re: OLD MACHINES & linux

Was just given an SGI O2 by a coworker. Haven't got it set up yet (And may
be going the OpenBSD route, since it has better support than Linux for the
hardware), but am super excited.

And to the OPs question about pinching pennies, definitely. I have a $35
Raspberry Pi (in an old VHS case) running Debian as a combo
NAS/VPN-host/Print-server. My main desktop has a few components
(hard-drive, video card) that aren't 10 years old, but the bulk of it is,
and the newest parts are at least 5 years old.

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 10:19 AM, William McKinney <wdmckinney@me.com> wrote:

> Like it John, good one.
>
>
>
> > On Feb 5, 2015, at 5:06 AM, John Heim <john@johnheim.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > I'm blind so I really need a scanner and OCR software, right? Well,
> about 15 years ago, when Windows XP first came out, I was taking a walk
> with my wife on Christmas eve and we passed this little Lutheran Church.
> They'd lost their lease and were just giving a bunch of stuff away. One
> thing they were giving away was a scanner with a SCSI card. They had
> upgraded their PC to XP and it wasn't supported.
> >
> > I took the thing home, put the SCSI card in my linux box and it worked.
> I am still using the thing today. I've upgraded to debian wheezy and it
> still works. In fact, I am scanning in the D&D 5th edition players handbook
> and getting great results. I haven't tried to put a GUI on the thing but it
> runs sane and tesseract just fine if somewhat slowly. But I can scan and
> OCR a page faster than I can proofread it anyway so it's not a problem.
> >
> > What a weird coincidence that was though. What are the odds of a blind
> guy who happens to be into linux happening to walk by a church right when
> they are giving away a scanner only a linux nerd could use? And on
> Christmas Eve no less.
> >
> >> On 02/05/2015 03:13 AM, Greg Schmitz wrote:
> >>
> >> At home, all of the machines I am using are at least 10 years old. Using
> >> old machines saves me lots of money (thousands of dollars actually) and
> >> Linux is a big help because unlike MS or Apple products I'm not excluded
> >> because of software/hardware interactions (for the most part).
> >>
> >> Just wonder what other Linux users here think about pinching pennies?
> >>
> >> --greg schmitz
> >>
> >> ---------
> >> To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
> >> with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
> > ---------
> > To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
> > with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
> >
> ---------
> To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
> with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
>
>

---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Thu Feb 5 07:11:17 2015