Skip to main content

Xtra-PC

The advertisement for Xtra-PC is alluring.
Xtra-PC: The $25 Computer.
New life for old or dead computers.

If you were an MS-Windows user with an older or non-functional desktop or laptop, and you just needed to do a few things: Use Facebook to keep in touch with the grandchildren, send a few emails, type a letter or even watch a few cat videos, it would seem too good to be true . . . but it's not.

Behind Xtra-PC is the power of Linux, Debian Sid (Casper?) to be exact. That knowledge would be intimidating to that MS-Windows user. After all, Linux is for computer geeks and hackers and is way to complicated for ordinary folks to install, configure and use.

By touting its virtues and barely mentioning its underpinnings, Xtra-PC will entice the unwary and deliver on its promise.  Linux users know this, so Xtra-PC may seem to them as a waste of money. They already know how to install, configure and use Linux, but they are not the market for this device, their grandparents are.

I purchased the $ 25 version which comes on an 8GB thumb drive. The same software is also available in 16GB, 64GB and 128GB versions. Bigger drives provide more storage space with possibly, maybe faster memory chips on them.

The 8GB drive is partitioned as follows:

Partition 1: 47MB fat32

Here, you will find the autorun.inf file and a README.TXT instruction users to read the docs from the website and remind them that Xtra-PC must be accessed from the system startup, not from MS-Windows.

Partition 2: 5.50GB ext4
This is where Debian lives. There's not too much room to install additional software, but the most commonly used software is already installed. Also, the most current version of Debian (jesse.sid) is not installed but not really needed since things just work out of the box.

Partition 5: 1.82GB swap
Since this is targeted to old or low-end machines, some swap is probably necessary.

Installation and setup is quick and non-technical and it works as advertised. As a Linux user, you might want to purchase the $25 device to have handy after installing a few repair tools.

There have been several attempts to offer MS-Windows work-alike Linux distros. Xtra-PC appears to be the closest yet.

Since it is intended for low-resource machines, I did disable the whoopsie process, a Canonical error reporting mechanism not likely to be useful to granny.

There are some tips to optimize Debian running on a flash drive here.

The special scripts that Xtra-PC uses are located in /opt/xtra-pc.

Since it is intended to run on older hardware, it might be useful for Linux to identify itself to the machine as "Windows XP". YMMV.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DOS4GW.EXE Version 2.01a and Alternative DOS Extenders

DOS4GW.EXE The Tenberry DOS extender DOS4GW.EXE was used by many early DOS games. I still enjoy playing many of these games and DOS4GW.EXE is usable with DOSBox , so they can be played on Linux. However, the version of DOS4GW.EXE that was included with the game was whatever was current at the time. The most recent version that includes many bugfixes that possibly affected the games when used with DOSBox have been fixed in the latest version, 2.01a. It's not free at US$49, but you can downloaded it here . Simply substitute it for whatever version of DOS4GW.EXE your game provided and enjoy the bug-fixed goodness. Tenberry also makes a "high-performance" "pro" version of DOS4GW.EXE, but it costs $300. I think that they could sell quite a few of these to hobby users (since, you know, DOS is dead) for US$5. Open Souce to the Rescue There are better performing, free and Open Source alternatives available and worth a look. DPMI Explained Let's unders...
1 comment
Read more

Unpack those .EXE game files from GOG.com (Plus other un-packers)

I just came upon innoextract today. I have many of the wonderful games from GOG.com, some of which have native Linux Clients. Before now, I've had to use PlayOnLinux or Crossover to install these for use with WINE, then add the Linux client. InnoSetup as a way to create an installer to install the games on Windows.  Daniel Scharrer has created innoextract to allow the unpacking of those archives on a non-Windows platform. The website provides information on using innoextract , but this information from the page is very useful: GOG.com Installers GOG.com installers with a 2.x.x version number on the download page or in the filename use InnoSetup 5.5.0 and cannot be extracted by innoextract 1.2 and older. Older installers use InnoSetup 5.2.3 and usually have no version in the filename. Some GOG.com multi-part installers with version 2.1.x or higher use RAR archives (renamed to .bin) to store the game data. These files are not part of the InnoSetup installer and require...
1 comment
Read more

Lighttpd and Simple Virtual Hosts Configuration.

I manage some websites for car clubs I belong to. They had been paying for web hosting and had some volunteers who knew not quite enough about maintaining and administrating the sites. Having some prior experience with similar small club sites, I volunteered to host them and admin them. With the first site, the pages were a train wreck of PHP and making even a small change on the existing pages caused the site to crash. Way back around the turn of the last century, I had a few Linux user’s groups that wanted a website, so I worked with Cynthia Manuel of Flamingo Internet Navigators to make a template for a web site that would be easy to maintain and easy to add static content. She developed templates that relied on Server Side Includes (SSI) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to make administration and content additions simple and easy, so I ported all the content over to that template and hosted the site myself. Later, another car club needed the same assistance and I ported it ov...
Post a Comment
Read more