What are you making?

[Bongu]

All my computers pretty much came out of dumpsters

My latest dumpster find is a Dell Precision 470 workstation. It has dual Xeon 3.4 with 2Gb memory. HD and Opticals were absent but no problem for me. Just need to check caps for bad ones before I restore it to service. This is one for me to be proud of.

 

[Lone Gunman]

I've save a couple from a dumpster over the years but my real pride and joy are the two custom built puters I have with socket 775 Asus boards in'em that I converted to socket 771s. I'm running the 5460 Xeon 3.16 GHz Quads in those (single CPU) and upgraded to 8GB of RAM. Made them screaming bitches and probably extended the life of those two by another 3 to 5 years. Here's a link to what I did to these two if you'd like to see what was done.

http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/

And here's another link on the same topic:

http://www.overclock.net/t/1384920/...71-is-available-to-convert-to-775-motherboard

Those two processor came from fleabay for $80 for the pair.

Added a 32GB SSD to each and installed Ubuntu 14.04 on'em and that made them even faster! Those things will boot up in less than 15 seconds and shut down in less than 3. Gots to love that technology stuff, hey!

 

[Magic Static]

I just retired the P4 ASUS machine running Ubuntu & Win 7 and replaced it with another ASUS LGA1156, 16g DDR3, 120g SSD. I have not loaded Ubuntu yet, but am curious to see the differences.

 

[Lone Gunman]

Magic I bet that thing is a screamer!

FYI, I bought 4 of those 32GB SSDs over a year ago and they aren't much larger physically than a book of matches. They are MINI SATA mounted on a regular SATA converter board and I only paid like $22/24 each for them. I don't store anything on a Ubuntu partition and have multiple Windowz drives that I do that on so those small drives work fine for Ubuntu. A few years back I had a Ubuntu load get to where it wouldn't boot and it was a pure PITA to get data off of it. Won't make that mistake again!

This computer I'm on now has 7 bootable hard drives in it along with one that's not. That's a total of 8 drives?? Yup, just color me nuts! Had to go to a 750w power supply to keep it all happy. Love that technology stuff though!

 

[TRG]

If I might make a suggestion. First off I'm a Linux guy 95% of the time. I only retain a Windows partition on my computer(s) because of a couple of applications I need that wont run under WINE. I used Ubuntu for many years and it was great. That is until they dropped GNOME in favor of Unity. I know a lot of people like Unity but it isn't for me. I tried several of the Ubuntu derivatives such as KDE, XFCE etc. but never was all that happy with Ubuntu after that. A friend of mine, a fellow Linux user, told me about Linux Mint. I made the switch and never looked back. That was five years ago.

Linux Mint uses the Ubuntu kernel and shares many of its repositories. But the similarities stop there. For me the user interface that comes with Linux Mint is much better than Ubuntu/Unity. If I caught your interest and you want to check it out Linux Mint offers a Live CD download (like most other Linux distributions) so you can try it before installing. My recommendation is the Cinnamon version which is a fork of GNOME 3. Another good choice would be MATE. MATE is a fork of GNOME 2. Both are very stable releases and both offer Long Term Support (LTS) that follow the Ubuntu releases. I believe the current LTS release is supported until 2019.

http://www.linuxmint.com

 

[FTA4PA]

If I might make a suggestion. First off I'm a Linux guy 95% of the time. I only retain a Windows partition on my computer(s) because of a couple of applications I need that wont run under WINE. I used Ubuntu for many years and it was great. That is until they dropped GNOME in favor of Unity. I know a lot of people like Unity but it isn't for me. I tried several of the Ubuntu derivatives such as KDE, XFCE etc. but never was all that happy with Ubuntu after that. A friend of mine, a fellow Linux user, told me about Linux Mint. I made the switch and never looked back. That was five years ago.

Linux Mint uses the Ubuntu kernel and shares many of its repositories. But the similarities stop there. For me the user interface that comes with Linux Mint is much better than Ubuntu/Unity. If I caught your interest and you want to check it out Linux Mint offers a Live CD download (like most other Linux distributions) so you can try it before installing. My recommendation is the Cinnamon version which is a fork of GNOME 3. Another good choice would be MATE. MATE is a fork of GNOME 2. Both are very stable releases and both offer Long Term Support (LTS) that follow the Ubuntu releases. I believe the current LTS release is supported until 2019.

http://www.linuxmint.com

Have to agree that Unity was a big mistake. I stuck with Ubuntu but use Gnome Flashback as a way to get around Unity. I've never tried Linux Mint myself but I do see it mentioned frequently and what I've heard is positive. May give it a look myself.

 

[Lone Gunman]

When Mate became available for Ubuntu a few years back I switched back from Mint to Ubuntu and have been running the Mate desktop since. I do have one computer with Mint 17 on it that the Wife uses for secure online stuff but the rest have Ubuntu/Mate 14.04.2 or 15.04.

FYI, Ubuntu with MATE only is an official offshoot of Ubuntu starting with v15.04! I've got that loaded on a mule box and a laptop and it works great. It's not LTS yet but probably will be with the next release.

The reason I went back to Ubuntu was because of their support forum, which is the BEST I've ever seen. IMHO the Mint forum isn't nearly as good.

 

[TRG]

When Mate became available for Ubuntu a few years back I switched back from Mint to Ubuntu and have been running the Mate desktop since.

I didn't know that was available. The desktop looks just like Ubuntu pre Unity. I'd probably ditch the bottom taskbar as I've never really found it useful and it takes up screen space. I also like my main taskbar on the bottom but that's easy enough to change. I'm downloading the ISO now so I can take it for a spin.

The reason I went back to Ubuntu was because of their support forum, which is the BEST I've ever seen. IMHO the Mint forum isn't nearly as good.

You might be right about that. Not bragging or anything but I'm an advanced enough user that I don’t need a lot of support. When I do need a little nudge the Mint forum is usually sufficient.

BTW - I've re-purposed a bunch of Windows XP computers to Linux for people when Microsoft dropped support. I got some strange looks at first when I made the recommendation. Once they try it they love it.

 

[Lone Gunman]

TRG I'm not very good with command line stuff so I occasionally need some help and the Ubuntu forum usually gives me what I need. I don't have a desire to be a Linux guru as I only consider it a tool to do specific stuff, mostly things that need to be secure, ie, online banking, credit card purchases, etc. Wife uses that one with Mint 17 still on it for those things. She does web sites and runs a couple of online businesses so she has to have Dream Weaver and Photoshop for those and she has them on her Windows 7 business only computer.

Like you, I do some Windows stuff for locals but what I do basically consists of keeping the malware crap out of them. Haven't been able to talk anyone into Linux yet but one or two are close. One more virus episode might be enough to do the trick.

I've stayed up to date on the Windows stuff until 8 was released then I kinda dropped out of it as that was the largest pile of krap I've ever seen. I have, however been downloading and playing with 10 builds, which seems to be a keeper BTW. I joined the "Insider" program hoping to get a free copy for beta testing I've done. That system works very well and seems to tolerate some of the older software as well. It's suppose to go RTM the end of this month.

Ennywho, I guess we've hijacked the thread enough. Good luck with your new Ubuntu/Mate load.