Puppy in the fight against E-waste

[wiak]

In the early days of adopting Puppy Linux (or similar distributions that would run on old hardware) there was an often stated mission/benefit attached to doing so: reducing landfill electronic-waste.

Unfortunately, many of our dreams of avoiding such e-waste seem to have been destroyed. For example, the dream of providing old but useful computers to schools, who otherwise struggled to pay for computer systems for their students to use. But nowadays, my local primary school, as an example, would reject such hardware/Puppy solution - they have stacks of Apple ipads for students to use - it is as if money is no object (despite their continuing claims more generally).

And even most of the oldest pensioner can often be seen tapping away at their android mobile txting or browsing or whatever it is they are doing.

And do you remember that case of one forum member (ecomoney?) who ran some kind of Internet cafe or similar provision via old hardware and Puppy Linux?

Alas it seems we have too much. The world has become too rich (smartphones being the rage even throughout Africa) such that no-one cares to have old hardware whether it is running Puppy Linux or not.

So is this part of the Puppy Linux dream dead and gone and Puppy only now a plaything for a few experimentors who love to be frugal and achieve the best they can on the least capable hardware?

Certainly, I personally continue to use only old hardware, with the likes of the DebianDogs, WeeDog, and an occasional Puppy installation too (plus dabbling with other offerings such as TazPup and EasyOS. And my wife and kids also use similar for most of their activities (though I guess that is my fault). But workplace of my wife gave her shiny new all singing all dancing touchpad laptop long time back and now she has two of these. E-waste is consuming our little home...

wiak

[s243a]

I don't think that devices like ipads and android tablets are anywhere near as useful from a productivity perspective as a desktop. Given this there might still be some hope yet

[wiak]

I don't think that devices like ipads and android tablets are anywhere near as useful from a productivity perspective as a desktop. Given this there might still be some hope yet

Which reminded me that my original post, where I claim to still only use old hardware, is a bit misleading. I use cheap android (a phone and also an 8 inch tablet) often. Saves switching the 2008 HP elite book on, and easier to carry to the cafe. These android devices are pretty old, in android terms, though. Android 5 on the phone and 6 on the tablet. Both have 1GB RAM, which proves enough for my simple browsing habits currently. However, when seated at home, on goes the HP elitebook except for when I csst videos to old TV when old android phone proves to be more convenient. Developing on Linux needs the laptop tho.


Just now I'm in cafe and on old small screen android phone cos I forgot the tablet...

wiak

[mikeslr]

As someone who promoted the idea of employing Puppy to re-direct old computers from landfills to schools and villages in the third world I've since had occasion to reconsider it.

Smartphones in third-world countries actually fill a niche more efficiently than even a netbook could. One of the problems to be overcome in the third (developing) world was the absence of a banking infra-structure and associated road system linking dispersed villages and their respective inhabitants together. Cellphones and financial related apps enabled the establishment of such links without the need to build modern highways to swiftly carry paper records between banks in order to clear transactions.

Additionally, cellphones utilize fewer natural resources than computers, reducing the need for landfills or recycling. Of course, at some point it will make sense for people to go into the cellphone update and refurbishment business, albeit doing so would be more physically challenging than involved with computers. More in the nature of 'watch-repair' than auto-repair. But until the labor costs of manufacturing cellphones in China and elsewhere increase significantly (or the amount of discretionary funds available to households in 'The Western World' decrease significantly) replacement of the old remains as good, and often better, choice.

Computers, however, remain the better vehicle for learning and experimenting. I really can't see how cellphones or even tablets can be used to learn the fundamentals of the technologies on which they depend. Nor can I envision them being used effectively in the Lower Grades given (a) that age groups' lack of manual dexterity and (b) the detrimental effect which forcing the use of its limited GUI would have upon them.

But getting school districts to rethink how their limited budgets are used would require those in charge of those budgets to know that there is an alternative. Perhaps what is needed is some grass-root organization to refurbish several hundred computers, donate them to a school district without being asked and then nationally publicize the beneficial effects, both on the students and the district's ability to meet other objectives.

But even that process would face competition from computer manufactures which can establish a recycle program and write-off its costs as tax deductions. Self-interest would suggest that Micro-soft, Google and Apple would want to participate, securing for themselves a new generation of acclimated consumers.

[s243a]

How about an after school program where if they pass some test they get to take the computer home? The kid that does the best gets first pick of computers.

[s243a]

Smartphones in third-world countries actually fill a niche more efficiently than even a netbook could. One of the problems to be overcome in the third (developing) world was the absence of a banking infra-structure and associated road system linking dispersed villages and their respective inhabitants together. Cellphones and financial related apps enabled the establishment of such links without the need to build modern highways to swiftly carry paper records between banks in order to clear transactions.

Additionally, cellphones utilize fewer natural resources than computers, reducing the need for landfills or recycling. Of course, at some point it will make sense for people to go into the cellphone update and refurbishment business, albeit doing so would be more physically challenging than involved with computers. More in the nature of 'watch-repair' than auto-repair. But until the labor costs of manufacturing cellphones in China and elsewhere increase significantly (or the amount of discretionary funds available to households in 'The Western World' decrease significantly) replacement of the old remains as good, and often better, choice.

Computers, however, remain the better vehicle for learning and experimenting. I really can't see how cellphones or even tablets can be used to learn the fundamentals of the technologies on which they depend. Nor can I envision them being used effectively in the Lower Grades given (a) that age groups' lack of manual dexterity and (b) the detrimental effect which forcing the use of its limited GUI would have upon them.

Regarding, third wold countries, cellphones can be the primary personal device and desktops can be used for computer labs. BTW, I know someone that was doing some charity work related to Haiti, and one thing that he wanted was computer labs for an orphanage. On advantage of Haiti for this kind of initiative is that it's close so shipping will be easier.

I'll mention this thread to said person, and if anyone is interested in this kind of thing then perhaps they can get in contact with said person. I also on my facebook have a connection to the orphanage. I just have to figure out which contact it is.

[ozsouth]

@wiak - I agree - the original mission seems to have been lost in the proliferation of capable handheld devices. I find ancient laptops with under 2 Gb ram too slow for today's webpages, especially media-rich ones. I continue with Puppy as I don't like win & can't afford mac.

[Moose On The Loose]

@wiak - I agree - the original mission seems to have been lost in the proliferation of capable handheld devices. I find ancient laptops with under 2 Gb ram too slow for today's webpages, especially media-rich ones. I continue with Puppy as I don't like win & can't afford mac.

Sadly web pages will get worse and worse about needing lots of files from all over the world and a zillion megs until someone somewhere starts to make the developers have to pay for the waste.

People are lazy and afraid of having to learn something new. Thus folks can sell "tools" that are claimed to make web development a snap while actually requiring more work. Many such tools default to bringing in everything including the Out house sink. The old joke about an MS-Word document with the word "hello" on it no longer fitting on a floppy perhaps could return as the web page no longer fitting in a 32 bit address space.

[Colonel Panic]

"And do you remember that case of one forum member (ecomoney?) who ran some kind of Internet cafe or similar provision via old hardware and Puppy Linux?"

Yes I remember Rob (as he was called) and met him once; he came to our local community centre in July 2009 to show us how he managed to run his cafe and made a very good impression on us. I wonder what he's up to now?

I agree with a lot else of what's been said above too, especially this;

"Sadly web pages will get worse and worse about needing lots of files from all over the world and a zillion megs until someone somewhere starts to make the developers have to pay for the waste."

I can remember when you could surf the Web with a Pentium 133 with just 16 MB of Ram; you probably can just about do it with a distro like Puppy Turbo Extreme but you'd lose almost all the functionality (Flash, Javascript ertc.), and a lot of pages simply wouldn't load. Now even 2GB of RAM is barely adequate for the full multimedia experience a lot of pages offer up.

One suggestion I'd want to make is to use a good text browser such as ELinks. You lose the multimedia and many of the pictures but the text on a page comes up faster than you can click on it so it's easier to navigate by keyboard.

[wiak]

Computers, however, remain the better vehicle for learning and experimenting. I really can't see how cellphones or even tablets can be used to learn the fundamentals of the technologies on which they depend.

This is very true. Smartphones/tablets have really helped bring internet communications cheaply and conveniently to developing countries, such as in Africa, and especially when it comes to energy/charging needs. However, old laptops with the likes of Puppy as an OS are perfectly useful for learning programming and still perform well enough for most other skilled computing tasks (GIMP/Inkscape/webpage design come to mind). As has been commented in some of the posts above, however, Internet browsing has become an issue because of the RAM-intensive technologies now required to render an increasing number of website pages. I certainly don't wish to suggest that developing countries deserve to have to use cast off old machines but the world being as it is the fact remains that wealth is far from equally distributed.

One suggestion I'd want to make is to use a good text browser such as ELinks. You lose the multimedia and many of the pictures but the text on a page comes up faster than you can click on it so it's easier to navigate by keyboard.

This is indeed a situation where a good text browser can provide the best result. We tend to overlook such browsers since if we can get by with Firefox, Chrome, Seamonkey, or whatever, we probably never load up a text browser alternative. But there are many advantages in terms of speed and efficiency of using text browsers and when it comes to RAM-limited machines they really help keep the machine usefully alive so should continue to be very useful indeed in, for example, the developing country type situation. Desktops not so useful since they do generally have heavy energy consumption and after a year of using them the additional energy costs might well have paid for an old low-consumption laptop instead. Being heavy, desktop systems are also expensive to ship and take up more volume all adding to the carbon footprint.

wiak

[s243a]

]
However, old laptops with the likes of Puppy as an OS are perfectly useful for learning programming and still perform well enough for most other skilled computing tasks (GIMP/Inkscape/webpage design come to mind).

As has been commented in some of the posts above, however, Internet browsing has become an issue because of the RAM-intensive technologies now required to render an increasing number of website pages. I certainly don't wish to suggest that developing countries deserve to have to use cast off old machines but the world being as it is the fact remains that wealth is far from equally distributed.

What do we mean by "cast off old machines". I bet a lot of 4GB machines could be obtained cheaply, using second hand components. People might give such machines away if they new it was for charity. That's the minnimum spec, that the guy who was doing charity work for Haiti was thinking about for the proposed computer lab at the Orphanage.

One suggestion I'd want to make is to use a good text browser such as ELinks. You lose the multimedia and many of the pictures but the text on a page comes up faster than you can click on it so it's easier to navigate by keyboard.

[/quote]

If we're talking about machines in the 2gb to 4gb rage then we don't need to use text browsers, although that's worth looking into. If resource heavy sites like Facebook don't work well on their computer then the will use other sites instead and competition is good. There could even be a search engine that down ranks sites that are too resource heavy.

[wiak]

I bet a lot of 4GB machines could be obtained cheaply, using second hand components. People might give such machines away if they new it was for charity. That's the minnimum spec, that the guy who was doing charity work for Haiti was thinking about for the proposed computer lab at the Orphanage.

Yes, 4GB machines would be fine to a large extent with current webpage bloat situation. My old machines are pretty much all 2GB and RAM for older machines no longer always easy to source at reasonable cost. (Can be cheaper simply to look for slightly more modern laptop with already installed 4GB). Tons of old laptops accumulating though - many max out at 1GB - these machines still useful with text-based browsers or when avoiding the heaviest webpages.

wiak

[watchdog]

I'm using 1,5 Gb laptops 64 bit capable (I have 3 machines like that). I'm happy with the internet surfing with puppy and these machines: just disable ads and javascript in normal surfing. I reload a single page with javascript at a time and this works. The mostly bloated loading is on Google news with javascript but I can afford it. I use old and recent puppies and a variety of browsers from palemoon to portable chrome without problems. I do not watch Netflix and I have not DRM needs. Youtube works.

[dancytron]

I bet a lot of 4GB machines could be obtained cheaply, using second hand components. People might give such machines away if they new it was for charity. That's the minnimum spec, that the guy who was doing charity work for Haiti was thinking about for the proposed computer lab at the Orphanage.

Yes, 4GB machines would be fine to a large extent with current webpage bloat situation. My old machines are pretty much all 2GB and RAM for older machines no longer always easy to source at reasonable cost. (Can be cheaper simply to look for slightly more modern laptop with already installed 4GB). Tons of old laptops accumulating though - many max out at 1GB - these machines still useful with text-based browsers or when avoiding the heaviest webpages.

wiak

I just bought a seller refurbished HP 8000 ELITE DESKTOP PC - INTEL E8400 CORE 2 DUO 3.0GHZ CPU - 250GB HDD - 4GB RAM - DVDROM that came with a keyboard and mouse for $38 plus tax and shipping.

That's from a one of the pretty big recycler places with a warranty. I think buying them more than one at a time off of ebay and refurbishing/cleaning them yourself, you could probably do a lot better than $38.

Needless to say, it runs Puppy and Dogs at pretty much lightning speed, even with the latest browsers. I far as I am concerned, the few webpages that choke it even a little are just defective.

For running kiosk type setup internet cafe or something similar, it would be more than adequate.

[wiak]

I'm using 1,5 Gb laptops 64 bit capable (I have 3 machines like that). I'm happy with the internet surfing with puppy and these machines: just disable ads and javascript in normal surfing. I reload a single page with javascript at a time and this works. The mostly bloated loading is on Google news with javascript but I can afford it.

Yes, I also find Google pages (including Gmail) to be among the most bloated. Indeed, I normally test how many tabs I can open in any particular RAM/hardware configuration by loading up multiple Gmail pages (which use a relatively consistent heavy RAM amount per loaded tab) until such time as I notice browser beginning to freeze (and I also monitor 'free' RAM utility statistics to watch RAM running out during that test process).

Limiting tabs loaded certainly works well on my 2GB machine, and normally modern browsers work well on that machine, except I sometimes forget to limit the number of tabs I open and occasionally thus run into a major freeze situation and have to reboot...

wiak

[Colonel Panic]

If we're talking about machines in the 2gb to 4gb rage then we don't need to use text browsers, although that's worth looking into. If resource heavy sites like Facebook don't work well on their computer then the will use other sites instead and competition is good. There could even be a search engine that down ranks sites that are too resource heavy.

I'm not a fan of Facebook but some news sites (at least in my part of the world) are resource heavy as well and that is where a text browser or other lightweight one like Netsurf really comes into its own - because all you really need are the headlines and a couple of paragraphs of explanatory text below.

[watchdog]

Limiting tabs loaded certainly works well on my 2GB machine, and normally modern browsers work well on that machine, except I sometimes forget to limit the number of tabs I open and occasionally thus run into a major freeze situation and have to reboot...

wiak

I use to load folders of tabs (50-100 tabs at a time) with my limited hardware using a trick. Palemoon has Tab Mix Plus extension to perform the tab loading on select. But with any other browser just go out of internet connection with a script which renames resolv.conf, load the tabs in error, connect again renaming back resolv.conf and you can see your tabs by reloading one by one.

[RedQuine]

Limiting tabs loaded certainly works well on my 2GB machine, and normally modern browsers work well on that machine, except I sometimes forget to limit the number of tabs I open and occasionally thus run into a major freeze situation and have to reboot...

wiak

I used to have the same problem, till I installed the Limit Tabs add-on for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefo ... fernandes/

Re smartphones v laptops: older versions of Android become obsolete and can be difficult or impossible to upgrade, especially on low-end devices. I've already "lost" devices that way, and would be wary about donating them to charities as I might just be passing on the problem to them.

My netbook with 512MB RAM is slow but usable with Iron and mobile versions of websites. (I find text browsers difficult to navigate, but that's probably lack of patience - which isn't in any minimum spec, for some reason.)

Example of desktop v mobile versions, for comparison:
https://www.facebook.com
https://m.facebook.com

[infromthepound]

[quote="RedQuine"][quote="wiak"][quote="watchdog"]



Re smartphones v laptops: older versions of Android become obsolete and can be difficult or impossible to upgrade, especially on low-end devices. I've already "lost" devices that way, and would be wary about donating them to charities as I might just be passing on the problem to them.


Do not forget that the OS in Chromebooks is not supported beyond 5 years, as I found out when I bought a second hand one.
I bought it to run Puppys but due to the way the BIOS is set up I have not yet managed it.
JB

[dancytron]

Limiting tabs loaded certainly works well on my 2GB machine, and normally modern browsers work well on that machine, except I sometimes forget to limit the number of tabs I open and occasionally thus run into a major freeze situation and have to reboot...

wiak

I used to have the same problem, till I installed the Limit Tabs add-on for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefo ... fernandes/

Re smartphones v laptops: older versions of Android become obsolete and can be difficult or impossible to upgrade, especially on low-end devices. I've already "lost" devices that way, and would be wary about donating them to charities as I might just be passing on the problem to them.

My netbook with 512MB RAM is slow but usable with Iron and mobile versions of websites. (I find text browsers difficult to navigate, but that's probably lack of patience - which isn't in any minimum spec, for some reason.)

Example of desktop v mobile versions, for comparison:
https://www.facebook.com
https://m.facebook.com

I keep my old android phone useful by giving them small tasks.

I have one really old one in the Out house I use as a clock/timer and occasional camera.

Another one I use as a remote for my computer when I am watching stuff on vlc.

I have a Droid 4 with the great slide out keyboard I finally gave up on because 2 times in a row the batteries went bad (swelled up) after less than 3 or 4 months, which is too bad it would make a great remote control.

I am still using a rooted Samsung 4 as my main phone, but it will probably get demoted to remote control fairly soon.