Today we will look at the story of an old orphan, who, long after the novelty of his existence wore off, became, day after day, more and more negligible, eventually a nuisance and finally abandoned to the mercy of one willing to liberate of his presence.

First of all, a little explanation: me using the word orphan refers to the fact that the main character of my story became abandoned by his owners (yes, owners, not parents); I felt it important to mention this in o order to prevent your minds of having the image of a little kid as the main character. This is not a little kid we will talk about, we are talking about an old timer, at least in terms of this moment’s dominant social ideology, which defines him as such. And while on the topic of the moment’s dominant ideology, we may as well look at the unpleasant topic of how the old are viewed and often treated; as mostly useless, often not even put up with and pushed from corner to corner until time and dust take their toll and they are no more at all, or until one may come along and rid us of them.

Before you close the window in rage of my radical opinions, keep in mind the following mention I am about to make. I am not talking about a person in this post, I am talking about Martin. Martin is an old laptop computer; in fact more precisely an IBM Thinkpad. And so his story goes:

_{Un peu d’espoir by Joyce Jonathan}

I met Martin for the first time about a month ago, at a friend’s home. My friend introduced me to old Martin, describing him as old and practically unusable, due to the viruses collected by the friends who visited numerous web sites, every now and then when visiting and being offered Martin as a web-surfing computer, since there was little if none other use for him. My friend knew that I might be interested in such a scenario and offered Martin to me freely. Excitedly, I accepted! I felt that odds were in my favour that “practically unusable” would not be the description for Martin after a little work on him.

At first sight, Martin was dusty, that is the best way to describe him, I’d say. It was rather obvious that he hadn’t enjoyed anybody’s attention in quite a while. He gladly accepted the power source cable of my old Toshiba laptop (since Martin came without one, it got lost at some point in his life) and started up without much trouble. Some minutes later (since he was running Windows) I got to see the windows desktop with the usual icons. I went to the Control Panel > System in order to determine his pecifics.

The processor, a single-core Pentium III running at 1.1GHz. The RAM memory measured ~340MB, then later in the BIOS it measured 380MB, and eventually the new operating system called it 390MB, so in other words, somewhere between 350 and 400. I wiped the hard drive clean and initially installed the latest CrunchBang Linux distribution, which although fast is Debian Linux-based and I wanted to stick to Ubuntu Linux; so soon after, I installed a minimal system of Ubuntu Linux 11.04 and configured it from there.

_{This is Martin, the IBM Thinkpad, after installing Crunchbang Linux on it.}

When configuring it, I had to keep in mind that the laptop had a total of ~300 and something MegaBytes to work with in terms of RAM, so wasting any RAM on fancy graphics was not something that I wanted to allow myself to do. So a lightweight window manager was asked for. I decided for the Fluxbox window manager; here are some examples of what Fluxbox can look like. I then had to look for some examples of nicely put together designs featuring this window manager. I found this one and liked it a lot!

Modern Fluxbox by ~Mloodszy on deviantART

In the description of it you notice the link to all the pieces that fit together make it look this way:

WM: Fluxbox
GTK theme: Litestyle suite by ~weakhead [link]
Fluxbox theme: olive – fluxbox theme [link] by me
Icons: Faenza [link]
Wallpaper: Floorboard and Wall (modified by me) [link]
Conky: Aller Display Conky Clock by me [link]
Font: Aller

Apps:
– conky
– wbar
– Sonata
– Pidgin

Conky is (one of my favourite applications) a system monitor application, that displays all kinds of data onto the desktop directly, ranging from the time, to the amount of processor used, to how much RAM the computer has, how much is used, how much remains … in this case, only showing the time and date. (It uses very little RAM to run …as opposed to other applications that display data on the desktop, like the Mac OS or Windows 7 gadgets)

wBar is a launcher application that holds icons that can launch an application when clicked on or just run a script (similar to the dock in Mac OS X, but of course using very little RAM to run).

Tint2 is the bottom panel (that contains the task bar, where the running applications show). Once again uses very little RAM to run.

These put together, along with a custom wallpaper and the icons and themes listed above show below in what came out once I finished the installation and customization. In the end all put together used roughly between 50 and 80 MB RAM. That leaves quite a bit of RAM for other applications to run, like LibreOffice, which uses about 40MB alone to run. So now, by means of Linux, this old orphan got new life breathed into his old nostrils.

_{Martin, running Ubuntu Linux 11.04, wbar, conky, tint2 panel, using only ~50-80MB RAM to run.}

Before I end this statement I’d like to make it clear that I did not mean the previous as a reproach toward my friend’s actions regarding his computer, instead I am making an observation on what seems to be a general attitude towards the not-so-new-any-more; mostly when it comes to objects, but regrettably often times when it comes to people as well.

< / end of my rant >