Online article: "Microsoft funds African PCs amid open source debate"

[Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski]

2005/10/5, Vincent Trouilliez <vincent.trouilliez at modulonet.fr>:

> I really hope Linux will succeed despite all this, as I am generally
> very confident about Linux's future on the desktop

We have a small advantage! Vista won't run well on old, obsolete HW.
Africa and other poor regions won't just jump into possesion of
mid-range HW. Linux runs just fine on old hardware. I know very well,
'cause I'm running it on such.

I have bought old Dell computer. It cost me, with shipping ~10 pounds.
I've throw at it spare HDD, CD-ROM and 64+128 Mb in DIMM. It runs
Breezy.

emil at borsuk:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 5
model name      : Pentium II (Deschutes)

(Borsuk's badger in Polish. It's also nickname that my gf gave me. It
was before Hoary, so I think it's Mark who's behind it;-)

This compter works as desktop for me. Yeah, no s*t. I run Firefox and
Thunderbird there. Beep Media Player. GXine. Gajim. Konsole. VIm.

But wait, there's more. I run IMAP/SMTP/Auth-MySQL and MySQL on it.

Sure, it swaps from time to time. Sure, sometimes it takes Firefox
some time to rethink page layout. But it's far from being unusable.
Throw P III and 256 Mb of RAM on Linux, and it will fly.

Windows XP/2000 is quite good OS when compared to Windows 98/ME, but
still, Linux is more flexible and not ruled by one company, thus, it's
my choice.

--
 Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski, http://bronikowski.com