The saying goes that old clothes are still useful, and when the market determines that a piece of hardware has become obsolete, we all feel a bit annoyed. A simple change of role, or the installation of a more humble operating system, can be all that hardware needs. The LinuxConsole project aims to turn old computers into “consoles”, and it recently released version 2.3.
Now, someone might ask: “Another Linux distro for gaming?” What prevents us from taking the latest Debian or Ubuntu netinst, working the installation from there, creating a completely custom environment, and reducing excess software to zero? Of course, the answer is nothing. But anyone who asks these questions knows very well that a netinst is not for everyone. I blew up six netinst installations until the spirit of the Debian community hit me over the head with all its tutorials condensed into a baseball bat. Can we throw all that responsibility on someone who is wondering what to do with the hardware they have left over? Obviously not, and that's when distros like LinuxConsole show their benefits.
Features and limitations
The LinuxConsole adventure begins with a lightweight package manager, opkg-gui, and several scripts to facilitate the installation of additional programs, such as Firefox and Google Chrome. It also offers a series of open-source games, but one of the great benefits in the latest version 2.3 of LinuxConsole is the possibility of installing Steam. Of course, this carries a technical limitation. Although it can run with just 256 MB of RAM, LinuxConsole requires PAE support on the processor under its 32-bit image, because Steam demands Multilib for its execution in 64-bit, and LinuxConsole does not have that support. In case LinuxConsole needs to be installed on a system without PAE, the developers recommend its parallel project Albatros.
Installation and competition
The LinuxConsole 2.3 image takes up exactly 700 megabytes, ideal for burning it to a CD and carrying out a traditional physical installation. LinuxConsole has accumulated several years of development, and must face very strong competitors, starting with Puppy Linux, also the Crunchbang, and the minimalist Tiny Core. If the idea is to install emulators, a good repertoire of MAME games and a gamepad, no more is needed. But those looking for a bit more robustness should consider LinuxConsole as one of their first stops.
