Re: The 11 Euro Alternative
@cantennas - sorry, but no
I'd note, owning far too much Old Crap myself, it is MUCH more fun to use modern kit or a VM the vast majority of the time unless the old kit has specific custom hardware (like the SGI O2 I have, or the legacy DOS games PC with an AWE32, Voodoo2 and Roland sound modules). Even open source systems follow the progress of time - support for older hardware and processors is dropped, operating systems become larger despite cutdown distributions, and compiling the latest version of software is a pain in the arse.
Examples of the delights of owning old kit :
Noise, power. This is why the sparcstation 10 is in my loft, gathering dust.
Hardware that goes foom, especially power supplies. The price of a decent new power supply is considerably more than a second hand PC or a Raspberry Pi, and owing to the change in ATX specs between 1.3 and 2.x, you can't put a low power 2.x ATX PSU on a 1.x system, because the rail loading is different.
No drivers. In *theory*, e.g. the AMD Geode GX1 is supported by X, unfortunately it rotted in the X->Xorg transition and no longer works. No one can be arsed to fix Pentium 1 era hardware (never mind 486, and 386 support has dropped even from NetBSD now). Hell, no-one could be arsed to fix my 975X (Core 2) boot hanging problem on a specific but not too rare motherboard for OpenBSD! (yes, I may fix it sometime. Currently I also have other priorities).
Horrifically long compilation time. My how I enjoy spending an entire week waiting for a usable X environment to build on an SGI O2 or AMD Geode system. Cross-compilation can work, but is yet more hassle.
The joys of weird connectors and the need to find SoG monitors.
Security. You can't stick an old system on the net because it has vulnerabilities, but the new release of the OS either doesn't support the hardware, is hideously slow or uses too much memory. Backporting security/application fixes is Not Fun.
Web browsing. Many websites are now utterly unusable due to the heavy use of javascript.
A low power system, that uses a generally reliable brick PSU, with a reasonably fast CPU, half decent graphics hardware and ONE configuration (no thousands of motherboards to handle) and features a warranty is immensely more appealing than any of the old stuff out there.
Add in to this the likelihood of the power supply failing (high), the cost of PAT testing, the possibility of there being hard drive failures, motherboard faults or similar and it's completely uneconomic. When it fails, they need to pay commercial disposal costs.. Fine for individual users with plenty of time - not for businesses or schools.