An Old Soldier

[raymac46]

I have an old soldier slowly fading away in my basement junk room - a 2005 vintage Dell Optiplex GX620 desktop unit.

 

Some comments about it:

• It's slightly smaller (more narrow) than a mini-tower but about the same footprint otherwise.
  
• It's bulletproof - solid metal chassis - one of the great commercial machines built in the USA when Dell still made them there.
  
• Some 2005 Optiplex motherboards have capacitor issues but this one is fine and still works great.
  
• When new this machine was absolutely top end and state of the art - 3GB DDR2 memory, Pentium D 840 processor - and I'm not sure what the original owner did with it. I got it off lease in 2008 and at the time it ran Windows XP Pro.
  
• I used it as my main Windows driver up until 2012 and after that it went to the basement except for a brief time at my son-in-law's place while he fixed his own desktop.
  
• It runs HOT. The CPU is a real burner, the case is on the small side and the fans run like a vacuum cleaner when the machine does some serious computing.
  
• The only upgrade I made was an old low profile Nvidia 8400GS video card so that I could get DVI output.
  
• In the past it was wired in to the router. There's no room inside it to put in a wifi adapter,, so I use an ASUS N10 USB dongle most of the time since I don't want to run a 50 foot wire to the basement.
  

I was playing around with it the other day, installing some different distros. I started out with Manjaro Xfce and it worked fine until an upgrade. After the upgrade I had no wifi any longer - only Ethernet showed up. I think the Realtek chipset in the USB dongle doesn't get along with the new module provided by the upgrade. I've installed MX-15 and it works fine.

I could probably install an Atheros based USB adapter and Manjaro would be OK, but for now I'll stick with MX-15. An old soldier deserves a stable life.

[ebrke]

I have an even more ancient Dell Optiplex P3 from 2003 (also pretty high end when I bought it) with 1GB of memory that originally ran win2K. It still chugs along with OpenSuSE 13.1 and xfce. Those old Optiplex machines were workhorses--the only thing that happened to mine in 13 years is that the on-board sound failed. It still browses and gets email and uses Libre Office fine. I've never bothered trying wireless though.

Edited May 1, 2016 by ebrke

[raymac46]

You have to see the inside of this Optiplex to believe it. There is a slot on the motherboard which holds a riser card. The riser card has both PCI-e and regular PCI slots. There is only enough room to install two items on the card. If you put in a low profile video card it takes up both slots and you cannot install anything else - so an internal wifi card is out.

Not many people in 2005 would have worried about it, frankly. They would just plug in a Ethernet cable. And to be fair there are tons of USB slots so getting wifi working shouldn't be a big deal. Unfortunately there are quite a few USB adapters that are either Linux unfriendly or the chipset module is still in development. If you choose a real old school stable distro like Debian Jessie you can get just about any wifi working eventually. However, if you want to go with the latest software you'd be well advised to get an Atheros based USB dongle like this one:

http://www.tp-link.c.../TL-WN722N.html

Edited May 1, 2016 by raymac46

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Don't know how it would play with your USB wifi dongle-thingie, but that old soldier would ROCK THE CASBAH with Slackware in it.

[raymac46]

Realtek has quite a large share of the USB wifi market - especially for Windows where you might want to add a wifi connection to an older desktop. They've always worked fine for me in Linux if the realtek-firmware package is installed but that is on older stable kernels such as used in Linux Mint 17 and Debian Jessie. So probably you could get them to work OK in Slackware.

The latest kernels and leading edge software you get in Arch and its cousins have given Realtek adapters some problems. I am sure the kernel and wifi driver developers will sort it out but in the meantime the obvious answer is to just use an Atheros based adapter and save yourself the aggravation. I have two different flavors of Manjaro installed on netbooks with Atheros and everything is just fine. In fact even Broadcom works better in Manjaro than Realtek.

I'm sure the Realtek boys will want to sort this out since Raspberry Pi users depend on these USB adapters too.

[raymac46]

Well the Old Soldier is back on duty. The solution to the wifi problem is the same in 2016 as it was in 2007. No matter what wifi adapter you have - PCI, PCi-e, USB, A, B, or N - Atheros wifi is always stable and fast no matter what kernel version you have. Always works out of the box whether you're doing wpa-supplicant manually with Arch or just installing Linux Mint.The adapter that works for the Old Soldier is a TP-Link TL-WM722N:

http://www.tp-link.c..._TL-WN722N.html

Right now the Old Soldier is rocking Manjaro Xfce - latest beta with no issues at all. It has to use Nouveau since its video card dates from 2007.

 

Edited May 5, 2016 by raymac46

[sunrat]

...The adapter that works for the Old Soldier is a TP-Link TL-WM722N:

http://www.tp-link.c..._TL-WN722N.html

I use and recommend this product.