TR Forums

Distro for old computer?

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• #1

Fri Dec 05, 2003 12:17 pm

I bought a computer yesterday for £2.50 It's a Pentium 90, with I believe a 1gig hard disk, don't know how much RAM. Anyway, I thought this would be the ideal box to mess around with Linux on - maybe with a view to turning it into a Samba fileserver (with a hard disk upgrade obviously!) or something.

So, anyone have suggestions? I could just stick Slack 9.1 on it. Gentoo's one I've been meaning to try out, but I don't think a source distro is quite right for a Pentium Is Slack likely to run reasonably (in command line mode, or possibly X with a lightweight WM), or should I look for something lighter?

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• #2

Fri Dec 05, 2003 3:09 pm

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• #3

Fri Dec 05, 2003 4:15 pm

Slack + fluxbox

(second time I post exactly the same thing )

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• #4

Fri Dec 05, 2003 4:39 pm

Or blackbox.

Debian

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• #5

Fri Dec 05, 2003 5:09 pm

Just throw in the absolute minimum in the install...then apt-get the only packages you need...

I wouldn't try to run X if I were you...tho you could (if you try I'd recommend an older less bloated version of X) withs omething REALLY light like twm or fvwm...certainly none of the bloatware that is KDE or GNOME...

But really, depending on what you want this thing to do all you need is the base (which is essentially jsut the common libs and commands...and bash i think)...then just apt-get install sudo and whatever else (apache, samba, bind, exim, ssh) you might need...No need to install all sorts of bloatware that comes with a standard distro if you know exactly what you want

-Tim

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Fri Dec 05, 2003 5:57 pm

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Fri Dec 05, 2003 7:16 pm

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Sun Dec 07, 2003 3:06 am

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• #9

Mon Dec 08, 2003 8:07 am

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• #10

Mon Dec 08, 2003 8:55 am

Or distcc. Distcc makes life better.

I used distcc between one Athlon XP box, one P4 box, and one dual PPro box. The PPros never carried their weight in compiles, but the P4 and the Athlon pitched in on each other's work, making Gentoo updating a breeze, and the PPro got a free ride, and held the shared distfiles directory (so for all three machines, each package only got DLed once).

It was a farking lovely little arrangement, I was sad to break it up. I think I'll redo it on my Athlon64+AthlonXP+P4+PPros soon, though.

Distributed computing to compile your source distro. It's the Linux/Gentoo way.

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• #11

Mon Dec 08, 2003 3:41 pm

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Mon Dec 08, 2003 3:45 pm

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• #13

Mon Dec 08, 2003 4:22 pm

Another vote for FreeBSD here. Or, if it definately has to be Linux then try a Gentoo Stage 3 GRP install (make sure you follow the GRP instructions tho -you don't want to be compiling much on a P90 with GCC 3.2.3 ) and prelink everything(ish) afterwards for improved loading times.
Really it comes down to how much RAM you've got, anything under 32Meg and you can say goodbye to a GUI in FreeBSD, and 64Meg is the recomended minimum for a Gentoo install.

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• #14

Thu Dec 11, 2003 5:04 pm

Hmmm.

Well, the thing's too old to boot from CD, so I've been trying to boot off floppies. Unfortunately, the Debian 2.4-kernel boot floppy images were apparently written by a team of trained monkeys - it gets into an infinite loop at the "select language for install" stage The default (2.2-kernel) boot floppies install fine, but the 2.2 kernel apparently doesn't have drivers for my network card (RTL8029 chipset), and when doing a CD install it gets to the "installing packages" stage, then tells me that the 'apt-get' package is corrupted. (After getting this error, I dd'd the CD I was installing from to an iso file, cmp'ed it with the original ISO I'd downloaded - perfect match. The ISO itself I'd md5'ed after downloading it - also perfect match. So the CD is not the issue.)

Slackware 9.1 got halfway through the "A" package series, and then reported that the "kernel" and "kernel-modules" packages were corrupt. I don't know for sure this disk is still OK, but it certainly was fine when I installed my current working Slack system from it.

Anyone know if this kind of problem (I'm guessing the Slack error and the corrupt apt-get error are related) could be caused by an old CD drive being unable to read 700MB CDRs? I don't have any 650MB disks to test it on at the moment.

Anyone have positive experiences installing any of the distros mentioned in this thread from floppies? Am willing to give BSD a try if it's actually possible to install it

BTW, 16MB of RAM I wasn't planning on using any kind of GUI... don't even intend to install X.

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• #15

Thu Dec 11, 2003 5:21 pm

Your CD drive is dead. Trust me I know the symptoms...

So you'll have to get a floppy with that network adapter and run a network installation. Wish you the best of luck.

Now seriously if you can give me more details... I'm just browsing freeBSD's website looking if there's something for you. BTW netBSD works in my Dreamcast... but lacks support for anything beyond stripped servers... (or compile-it-yourself game machines - MAME)

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• #16

Thu Dec 11, 2003 5:31 pm

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• #17

Thu Dec 11, 2003 5:39 pm

FTP install would have been ideal a few days ago, but unfortunately I'm going home tomorrow (very fast LAN connection at uni, very slow 56k connection at home )... Just grabbed the FreeBSD ISOs just in case.

I think I have a spare CD drive sitting around somewhere, so I might try to use that. Otherwise looks like I'll have to learn how to set up an NFS server...

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• #18

Wed Dec 17, 2003 6:25 pm

# make menuconfig
... { starts building the ncurses menu system - this being a P90, even that's a non-trivial compilation.  Halfway through: }
gcc: Internal Error: bus error.

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• #19

Thu Dec 18, 2003 1:03 am