Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, mac_h8r1, Nemesis
The Egg wrote:I've always wanted to mess with a Pentium Pro system. I wonder how modern an OS you could run if you put your 200Mhz chips on that dualie Socket 8 board and loaded it with as much RAM as possible.....
just brew it! wrote:The Egg wrote:I've always wanted to mess with a Pentium Pro system. I wonder how modern an OS you could run if you put your 200Mhz chips on that dualie Socket 8 board and loaded it with as much RAM as possible.....
I believe the current Debian Stable ("Jessie") still supports Pentium Pro.
DrDominodog51 wrote:I just checked and it appears i586 and above are supported.
just brew it! wrote:The Egg wrote:I've always wanted to mess with a Pentium Pro system. I wonder how modern an OS you could run if you put your 200Mhz chips on that dualie Socket 8 board and loaded it with as much RAM as possible.....
I believe the current Debian Stable ("Jessie") still supports Pentium Pro. No idea on the Windows side of the house, but I'd assume XP would probably run (albeit slowly). Maybe even Vista (but good luck getting enough RAM).
Trivia: One of the Pentium Pros (and the corresponding motherboard) in his collection is from the Micron PC workstation I bought when I quit my full-time job and went full-time contractor back in the '90s.
Edit: Per this notice from Debian, the current release is the last one which will support K5, K6, K6-2, K6-3, DM&P/SiS Vortex86/Vortex86SX, Cyrix III/MediaGX/MediaGXm, Winchip C6/2, Pentium, Pentium MMX, Rise mP6, and VIA C3. (WTF is a Vortex86, anyway?) So it appears that Pentium Pro will even still be supported for a while yet (through the next release, at least).
The Egg wrote:Pretty cool about it being able to run the latest Debian.
just brew it! wrote:
Trivia: One of the Pentium Pros (and the corresponding motherboard) in his collection is from the Micron PC workstation I bought when I quit my full-time job and went full-time contractor back in the '90s.
just brew it! wrote:The Egg wrote:Pretty cool about it being able to run the latest Debian.
I'd temper that with a warning that attempting to run a full-blown modern DE like GNOME or KDE on it probably won't end well. Something lighter-weight like LXDE (if you must have a GUI), or headless server duty are probably better bets.
just brew it! wrote:So what did you do with it all? Donate it to Goodwill?
gerbilspy wrote:I'm fairly certain you still have every piece of hardware I've ever owned. You must have a huge basement!
Chrispy_ wrote:Not dissing your huge collection, but why?
I'm hanging onto a PCI graphics card (for testing purposes) and an original voodoo card for nostalgia, but I loathe having boxes of old hardware taking up space.
Do you have plans for all this stuff eventually?
Chrispy_ wrote:No, I get it.
It's more that the collection appears to be either a bit random, or incomplete at the moment. Take a car collection for example - every car in the collection has a story which is why the collector is hanging onto it. It's either exotic, rare, or not. The bog-standard everyday cars in the collection are being kept because they have a backstory or history that makes them worth keeping.
I'm interested in what the long-term plan for all this stuff is. For example, if I had all of SF's stuff, I'd whittle it down to just the milestone articles and keep perhaps just the best working example of each.