Hi, following is a feedback on antiX 15 to revive an old mama PC (AMD 3000).
Your notes or else questions are welcome.

Place: our district « Neighbours' House » I volunteer in
PC: Geforce4 mobo 1 gb DDR Athlon 3000 with a Maxtor Diamond 9 spinning HDD, Geforce 6600 GPU. Box's full of added Sata/Firewire/USB/cards reader and DVD burners. Device is 10-11 years old (BIOS reads: 2004-10).
Persons: Old mama called Rosemonde (means"Roseworld" in French or"La vie en rose" __{{emoticon}}__ ) who came here with her Windows 7 box as fast as a scooter on an highway. 90% persuaded she needs to find the money to buy a new PC. Windosw aware colleague and the Linux aware me (ten years since I managed a Debian OS).

Part 1
---------

Colleague greeted her and cleaned her Windows the next couple of days (!), best he could. PC then as fast __{{emoticon}}__ as copying 20 gig of pictures to Mama's NTFS external HDD in lots of *hours*...
He was happy to let me in. Note this is first time I can try --and be reliable for-- doing something"big" in the place.

Part 2
---------

That $%*#£ PC won't boot on any of my USB keys, but throwing in an external IDE-USB2 HDD did the job (tried a dozen different BIOS and IDE/SATA wires settings). Finished saving her files then wiped the Maxtor and installed antiX 15.1. ...leading to these 4 partitions: Then And in Settings » Network » hosts file system ads blocking ON.

Graphics, Ethernet (Marwell + nVidia) and every needed components running fine from first boot. CPU @ 0-2% and RAM @ 190 MB with Iceweasel browsing half a dozen pages. Desktop and browser are about 25 time faster than with the Redmond OS. And I must admit, a bit faster than on my 64-bit Core i3 Arch linux with SSD and 4 gig DDR3!

Default IceWM/Rox's not that cool for an old lady though. And removable medias don't mount nor show up anywhere for her (or my Windozw aware colleague actualy __{{emoticon}}__ ) to use it. Which leads to:

Part 3
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vim slash etc slash lightdm slash lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf Note I didn't like the session manager conf easy nor well documented [1].

Configured:
- The windows' setting with a clearer minimize/maximize/close window theme
- swapiness and vfs_cache_pressure as per [2]
- bottom bar

Asked another colleague (computer aware especialy Mac) at the house to give it a shot: both to Handy linux 2.3 and to the started antiX / Xfce4. He went for a good try, surfing web sites he knows kill his old Macbook. Result on the antiX powered old box:

« WTF, this system is blazing fast! (...) Woow, this always crashes my laptop (...) Hey do you think It'd fit on my Mac? »

Guys, Iceweasel starts in seconds and load heavy pages as my cat a fly. At six tabs of which 2 killer sites (hello airbnb) we're at 320 MB RAM total __{{emoticon}}__ __{{emoticon}}__

anticapitalista, the antiX team and helpful users: Congrats men!

Next
---------

Rosemonde will give her brand *new* system a try. Next, folowing your comments if any I should:

• upgrade Xfce4 to Debian Jessie's Xfce 4.10.1 (or Testing 4.12.2 ?)
• Get external ntfs auto-mounted (not the case atm)
• Install Shotwell beside Mirage as she's got these pics by the thousands
• Add Skype (or an open source replacement that'd meet Mama's need if I find any)
• Add some bookmarks for her most visited sites (I saved her Chrome's)
• Clean the distro from unused or replaced software
• Get conky with transparency (disapeared upon installing xfce4 and we know why, but is now acting as a windowed app)
• Do ya know whether antiX super cool hosts file system ads blocking script auto-updates the chosen list?
• Anything else I should look upon you think?

Sources I used:
[1]:
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://wiki.debian.org/LightDM"
linktext was:"https://wiki.debian.org/LightDM"
====================================
and
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://wiki.debian.org/Xfce"
linktext was:"https://wiki.debian.org/Xfce"
====================================
on the Debian wiki as well as Arch wiki and a couple others.
[2]: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=124

PS : the server error message when posting a path to 'slash etc' is super blocking and
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=417546"
linktext was:"airon3000 hack"
====================================
doesn't play nice when in code blocks.

Lovely story. Kudos to you for helping the old folk.

Mission acomplished! __{{emoticon}}__

For a more polished Xfce experience maybe try installing MX-15?
Or if you don't want to reinstall add MX repo and install xfce4 version 4.12 from MX.
Another alternative would be installing LXDE with metapackage-installer.
But maybe it is already good enough which for many users means good.

Yeah am now seeding Antix MX Fusion since I found the torrent yesterday (doing so is not that straight from AntiX main page).

these MX and antiX, Debian repos?:
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.mepiscommunity.org/wiki/system/repos-mx-15"
linktext was:"http://www.mepiscommunity.org/wiki/system/repos-mx-15"
====================================


Yesterday my"windows" colleague launched a HD video on youtube (Flash) and computer crashed. Upon restart it wouldn't go any further than the screen *before* ya can enter the BIOS settings. Power button uneffective at this step. I handled that with a bios reset, but wondering what caused this! Your thoughts welcome!

GPU is a nVidia nv 43 geforce 6600.
Will add html5 support for videos and audios format through gstreamer and request manual activation of Flash.

EDIT: repos and boot freeze (couldn't find how to edit on the mobile version of freeforums)

There are a lot of motherboards that reset to BIOS factory upon a dab shutdown.
ASUS was ral good about doing that and a BIOS reset was the answer.

Some people never understand that just because it is old it is not trash. You have shown a good example where antix has helped more than hurt with these older computers.

As shay stated, some of those older MB had a habit of resetting the BIOS themselves. But once you get everything settled down, it happens less frequently.

Are these repos okay + enough for Mama usage on the mid term? At Shay and jdmeaux a factory reset would be okay, but a freeze before ya can even enter the BIOS? Old machine did it again upon a reboot after we had an electrical powersurge yesterday.

kozaki wrote:
At Shay and jdmeaux a factory reset would be okay, but a freeze before ya can even enter the BIOS? Old machine did it again upon a reboot after we had an electrical powersurge yesterday.

Time for a uninterruptible power supply. And visually inspect the Capacitors on the motherboard for damage.

Thanks Shay, I'll check the capacitors next Thursday.

Can I let Mama takes her box back with the source.list above please?

kozaki wrote:Can I let Mama takes her box back with the source.list above please?

Yes, the repo is ok. I just wanted to recommend to update Xfce from the MX-15 repo, if it has a newer version. You probably know how to do it with Synaptic?

Sure! Am more a cli guy though.