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Rokan was my workhorse for many, many years. Obviously, it is quite a bit slower than the average computer these days. However, I picked it up refurbished at quite a discount, and it was the best money I ever spent. It has the following specs:




This section really needs a lot of work, but here is the overview:

1. Now that Sarge is the new Debian stable, installation is straight-forward and it is not necessary for a kernel recompile.
2. The Netgear MA401 PCMCIA Wifi card is supported and is detected properly during the installation process. Right from the start, it can be configured to be used to download the packages needed for installation.
3. Use the "eepro100" module for using the integrated 10/100 ethernet
4. When I have tried using the precompiled 2.6x kernels, the power management stuff has not worked properly. The screen doesn't get turned off automatically after a period of inactivity.
5. Installing using one of the percompiled 2.4x kernels fixes that problem. However, I then have the problem of the USB mouse not waking up the system. If only the mouse is being used (like when I browse the web), the screen will turn off after the specified inactivity interval. The screen will only be turned back on if a key is hit on the keyboard. When I used to use a PS/2 mouse with Debian Woody, this was not a problem. This problem is kind of annoying, but I haven't had the motivation to figure out exactly how to correct this behavior.... yet.
6. With one of the precompiled 2.4x kernels, when the lid is closed, it attempts to suspend to RAM. However, when the computer is woken back up, it does not come back correctly.
7. The computer seems to be too slow to really run KDE at an acceptable speed, even with all of the effects turned off. I will have to try one of the lightweight window managers.

The following is a list so that I remember which packages I frequently use.

• mozilla-thunderbird
  
  
• mozilla-firefox
  
  
• yarssr (RSS reader)
  
  
• gqview (picture viewer)
  
  
• gftp (FTP client)
  
  
• gpdf (PDF viewer)
  
  
• openoffice.org
  
  
• kmix
  
  
• xmms
  
  
• totem-xine
  
  
• ksnapshot
  
  
• k3b