Stupid Old Hardware

Today I took about an hour to play with some old boxes that I still have lying around -more like hidden in closets- on the house, the all time beauty Quicksilver, the Powermac from halcyon (PPC) days and an ancient Celeron, or I don't know "what kind of crap CPU it has", but has 1 GB RAM, and a DVI NVIDIA video card, AKA: Zeus.

The idea was to see if they even boot, and if they do, try to test a lightweight Linux Mint XFCE (32 bits of course) on Zeus and Ubuntu Mate (PPC, of course) on the Quicksilver.

Zeus booted all-right to an Ubuntu 10.04, and the damned CD-ROM (remember those???) refused to work for quite a while, when it did, it was impossible to boot from it; go figure.
Gave it a try booting from a USB, but I had even less luck. With the Quicksilver I had no luck at all, impossible to make it boot from the CD-ROM, although, it did boot A Ok onto Tiger (remember that glorious OS?).

Total fail on this matter, but, ITOH, I don't know why I even bother, those boxes, specially Zeus, are a total a complete piece of crap, I should throw it to the garbage.
The Quicksilver is really beauty to look at, but both would make a terrible desktop experience nowadays.

Nouveau Glory

 Taken last Saturday, an external monitor connected to the W530, thru VGA. using the Nouveau driver for the NVIDIA card.
Not that many problems doing so, just a little bit of plug and play, with a minimal configuration needed.

The xorg.conf (bug) remains the same

Strange thing I've noticed after Monday's upgrade to LM17, the NVIDIA bug (or is it a Thinkpad one? Not sure) that prevents adjusting the brightness still goes on...
I've been dragging that one since 2011, as I see on previous posts on the same problem (used the exact same xorg.conf file copied and pasted, from the old post to fix things up on the lappie)

• Usul's xorg.conf

• Usul's xorg.conf, another go... 

Usul's xorg.conf, another go...

What you know...
It's been a year or so, and the NVIDIA card (on the Thinkpad T410) has the same problem than while running Lucid Lynx.
The keyboard shortcut to lower or brighten the LCD doesn't work, it does launch the OSD icons for both up & down, but it doesn't actually do dink.
On the same laptop, with Lucid, it was necessary to do something similar.
Not a big deal.

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Default Device"
        Driver          "nvidia"
        Option          "NoLogo"                "True"
        Option          "RegistryDwords"        "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
EndSection

Usul's xorg.conf

The /etc/X11/xorg.conf file from Usul, with an NVIDIA NVS 3100M:

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        DefaultDepth    24
EndSection

Section "Module"
        Load            "glx"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Default Device"
        Driver          "nvidia"
        Option          "NoLogo"                "True"
        Option          "RegistryDwords"        "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
EndSection