An Old Laptop: RedHat 6.2
I've been playing with an old laptop, a Compaq Armada 4120T. It seems quite problematic to get a decent operating system installed with a graphical user interface. Windows NT 4 wasn't an option because it didn't have a CD-ROM drive.
After a lot of fiddling, I've finally settled on RedHat 6.2. Yes, you didn't misread that! The nice thing about RedHat 6.2 is that it still uses XFree86 3.3.6 and KDE 1.1.2, which are easy on the resources. KDE is actually quite responsive when the applications have finished loading.
The only downside of RedHat 6.2 is that it has been unmaintained since 2003. Now I don't intended to expose any services to the network, but it's still a risk. Now the most important part of getting this machine secure once more is going to be the linux kernel. The latest kernel RedHat supplies is a heavily patched 2.2.24, so that's not too bad, but still 2.2.27-rc2 fixes at least 9 security related issues in the linux kernel since 2.2.24.
After a lot of fiddling, I've finally settled on RedHat 6.2. Yes, you didn't misread that! The nice thing about RedHat 6.2 is that it still uses XFree86 3.3.6 and KDE 1.1.2, which are easy on the resources. KDE is actually quite responsive when the applications have finished loading.
The only downside of RedHat 6.2 is that it has been unmaintained since 2003. Now I don't intended to expose any services to the network, but it's still a risk. Now the most important part of getting this machine secure once more is going to be the linux kernel. The latest kernel RedHat supplies is a heavily patched 2.2.24, so that's not too bad, but still 2.2.27-rc2 fixes at least 9 security related issues in the linux kernel since 2.2.24.
posted by Pascal de Bruijn at
23:29
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