Got an old IBM Thinkpad T41, probably 6 or 5 six years old: Intel Pentium 1.6GHz, 748.8Mb RAM, 30GB harddrive. Had plans for some sort of media server: maybe VortexBox, maybe Plex, maybe XBMC (I didn’t really actually know much about any of these, just that they could run on old machines, and you know, stream shit). The machine has XP on it, completely wiped of any and all anything else than then day it was first turned on. So at first I just did some driver updates and installed iTunes and Chrome. iTunes was just playing our shared iTunes libraries via Home Sharing and I had Chrome for MOG. Whee, except even using MOG with the latest version of Chrome was horribly slow, and I realized more than ever what a sluggish, bloated POS iTunes has become.
So the laptop is old and slow, and we don’t really watch movies or TV or play video games. So these heavy duty media server installs are too much, clearly. We want to play music, and maybe be able to hop onto allmusic.com or wikipedia for some fact-checking. We want to use mainly web-based streaming apps like MOG, Spotify and last.fm, be able to listen to NPR and other podcasts, watch/listen to stuff on youtube, and play from our iTunes libraries remotely. Hmm, barring that last requirement, doesn’t it just sound like what I really need is a Chromebook (Google’s netbook? Say, can I install Chrome OS on my machine? No, but you can install Chromium OS and it might not work amazingly well. Read through that post and its one of those that keeps us all afraid of Linux. But check the comments and enter Jolicloud OS!
