Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Stuart Turton

Linux saves the human race

Mark the day my friends, for today’s the day goodwill ceased being intangible and took its material form. Bask in the glory that is the GoodWill PC!

Anybody who’s been following the travails of the GoodWill PC knows it’s been something of a rocky road. When I was first tasked with scrounging a PC for free I was full of hope, convinced that they were ten-a-penny and I need only flash an amiable smile at a stranger for heaven to open up and shower me with PC bits.

Turns out things weren’t quite that simple and until a few days ago I was convinced I was going to fail this challenge. This depressed me because if I failed the entire concept of human kindness, generosity and compassion failed with me. So you see, I wasn’t just scrounging free stuff, I was trying to prove us worthy of our place in the universe. I was providing a guidepost to the soul. Yes, really.

That we’re not all damned as pitiless husks is the work of one man. Steve. He posted an ad on FreeCycle for “a relatively old computer” and was then kind enough to let me have it. This, I must confess, wasn’t because I made the best case. It was because it was running Ubuntu and nobody else was interested. It seems Ubuntu inadvertently saved the human race. Glorious.

It arrived this morning and is everything you’d expect a free computer to be. It’s an old Compaq DeskPro, circa 1999, and runs a 266Mhz Pentium II backed with cheery incompetence by 280MB RAM, an ATI Rage Pro graphics card and 13.5GB of hard disk space. Using it is an exercise in patience, given the lag between deed and action. None of which matters, because performance isn’t remotely the point of this machine. While my colleagues were running around trying to get the best machine they could for £250, my task was to prove you could get one at all. You can. End of story.

Benchmarking it, comparing it to their dual-core PCs is irrelevant. If you’ve money to spend on a PC, you’re probably not looking on FreeCycle. Brilliantly though, unlike those £250 machines, if you’ve got a free PC you’re not paying for its flaws. Everything is a benefit which makes the Goodwill PC, by extension, the least disappointing computer I’ve ever owned. So thank you Steve and everybody else who helped, commentated and read. It’s been wild, but let’s never do it again.

The Goodwill PC will shortly be reappearing on FreeCycle. All good causes welcome.

Tags: Goodwill PC, The challenge

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8 Responses to “ Linux saves the human race ”

Darien Graham-Smith Says:
February 12th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
What sticks out from this spec like a sore thumb is the 280MB of RAM. That’s really not a 1999 amount of memory… I believe that, when this PC was originally offered – at a price of some £600 – it actually came with a rather less generous 16MB of EDO RAM. I would guess that someone bought it and added an 8MB SIMM… and then, quite a few years later, when EDO RAM was on its way out, gave it an additional 256MB, making up the total it has today.

All of which just serves as a reminder of the remarkable speed at which computer technology advances!
Jeff Hancox Says:
February 13th, 2009 at 10:23 am
I think with time you could have achieved so much more. I have two ‘free’ PC’s, one a 2.5ghz Celeron processor and the other has a AMD 2000XP processor. Both were ‘collected’ from the local council amenity site when the council workers weren’t looking, while I was visiting to legitimately dump other borked equipment. They have been upgraded with extra memory, a graphics card and a hard drive from freecycle. I’ve only bought one component, a hard drive to turn the 2.5ghz machine into a server…….large drives are hard to get for free! I also got the matching monitor for one of them.

It’s the way forward! (Mind you I do have a bought PC, hard to get a free PC capable of running Autodesk…….)
brian Says:
February 13th, 2009 at 11:10 am
I wish i hadn’t read this rubbish.
John Says:
February 13th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
If it really is that laggy you should put Xubuntu or damn small linux on it that would run far better.
Boycott Novell » Links 13/02/2009: GNU/Linux in South African, the Philippines Says:
February 14th, 2009 at 3:03 am
[...] Linux saves the human race Mark the day my friends, for today’s the day goodwill ceased being intangible and took its material form. Bask in the glory that is the GoodWill PC! [...]
Arthur Marsh Says:
February 14th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
I had a new PII-266 pc which arrived May 1998 with 64 MiB RAM and Cirrus Logic graphics card. After some low cost upgrades it now has its maximum of 384 MiB RAM and a Radeon 9200SE graphics card. It runs Debian unstable with KDE 3.5.10.
Nick Says:
July 26th, 2009 at 8:10 am
WOW! I’m utterly amazed this was a challenge for you. I know you constrained yourself by getting a computer through “donation” in a strict sense, but I’ve done this several times. Granted, I dumpster computer parts and juggle them into a constantly upgrading cycle of computers, but I’ve gotten a lot of parts gifted. I have a gifted box sitting right next to me now waiting to be the home of my next monstrosity.

Linux does make it all possible. My mother-in-law’s computer died a month ago from HD failure, and the only replacement I could put together for her was a downgrade in a technical sense. Less RAM, less processor speed, and a crappier video card. I made it up to her with Ubuntu and double the hard disk space. She’d never used Linux, she’s pretty computer illiterate, and I just knew she couldn’t keep a windows box performing for long. I saved myself the administration time and gave her 9.04, and she loves it. No crashing, nothing.

I’ve sold a few Ubuntu machines, largely to demonstrate everything works without having to steal and set up Windows. I’ve thrown together more than one Frankenstein computer for houseguests, little brothers, and people sans funding, all with Ubuntu. I converted my girlfriend to Linux before it was easy to use, and then married her. Now the girl who complained that I “raped” her laptop by installing Linux is an absolute zealot; anyone who asks her for computer help gets “I don’t do windows, the only way to truly fix your computer is Linux.”

If the CPU is really crappy, I run DamnSmall Linux or crunchbang, with the preference being Crunchbang. Very nice.
Uncle B Says:
July 27th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Please donate your old boxes to a church-group or some needy student in these hard times! To comply with the law, and with Microsoft’s leasing policy, you can now replace Microsoft OS with the free (download from the net) Ubuntu OS, which can be set to erase the hard drive of all traces of the “illegal to give away ” Microsoft system and your private information, before donation! Now, explain to your lucky recipient that all the manuals they will ever need are available for free on the internet! Just ask for them in Google! OpenOffice, which is installed already is plenty adequate for homework assignments and with a little exploring, everything else can work well too! Happy computing!