recently i obtained what could be defined as a lovely paperweight...its an old 266, with 128mb of RAM and a whopping 10 total gigs of storage space, between the 2 gig and 8 gig hds that are installed, and dont even get me started on the simply amazing 4mb video card, it plays HL2 like nobodys business...

but in all seriousness i was thinking about installing linux on it, ive heard alot about it and i thought i might give it a try, i also discovered theres about 10 or so versions of it, which version would be best suited to me? any thoughts?

thats a killer box man-- don't knock it


i like debian-- but i hear mandrake is a good starter system www.mandrakelinux.com


check it out

-Peter

haha actually the ol box isnt too bad, i installed XP Pro on it last night, and aside from countless rundll32 errors, which im assuming is due to the fact that that old CPU doesnt like the 32 bit stuff...but maybe im wrong. and it actually ran XP surprisingly smoothly, granted i didnt run any programs or anything, but as far as going through the control panel and various menus it did just fine...ill check out that linux later, im not even supposed to be on forums or check my e-mail...im violating the acceptable use policy at school...dear heavens!

"acceptable use"

i havent seen a 266MHz proccessor that wasnt 32 bit, the last 16bit OS was windows 3.11-- and that is WAY before the 266 era

hmm interesting, well it was actually a 233, but i overclocked that sucker to 266, but i wonder what was causing those errors. maybe those requirements are just simply too low for XP?

You just answered ur own question.

i started with Mandrake 9.2 then went to Red Hat 9 i like them both...never tried Debian

9.2 is easy to install and runs on most machines...especially one as old as that one.

And also..i had a 233 Cyrix Mk II and overclocked it to 300 mhz...running Win 2000 with 128 mb of EDO. That thing flew... no problems. But i would try DWN Clocking back to 233 and seeing if the errors went away. It should be stable at around 250 if its an AMD..dunno bout a Pentium though.

James

I use gentoo, but it is NOT for the faint of heart. It literally took me 5 days to install. I screwed it up a few times.. and it takes a LONG time to compile everything and such. But, once it is installed, it is AWESOME. I have it on a 500mhz box, and I believe it to be comparable to my 2600+ [at regular clock speed] running win2k. It'* awesome, and very optimized for each system. I wouldn't try anything else from here.


-justin

I would seriously consider either Fedora Core 3 or Novell Suse Linux if you are a newb to Linux. Both are pretty much painless and have automatic-update software included. Suse didn't run the first time I installed it, but I can't remember why anymore. If I use anything now, I use Fedora. I don't program or anything like that, and if I install a driver, it usually has to be an RPM as I am almost always dead set against recompiling the kernel (which is no fun).

I started with Mandrake years ago, and found that nearly zero drivers worked with it. At the time RPM packages were not common, so everything had to be recompiled with the kernel. Not only did Mandrake not have standard partition names at the time, it also did not include the kernel, and it offered no way of assisting in the download/placement of the kernel. I had no idea what I was doing, and neither did Mandrake, so I am somewhat burned by Mandrake and tend to look anywhere BUT Mandrake.

Recompiling the kernel is fun! I love every minute of it [and the minutes add up to days]. Compiling is what is the most fun in Linux. With Gentoo, that'* what you get. You get ethernet, command line [livecd], and a browser. And a 110page install manual. It is awesome, if you ask me. I have used FC2, and it was just like windows. All GUI, no terminal required. I had Slackware, and although that requires use of the terminal, I didn't really learn much anything. With Gentoo, I learned a lot. Linux has grown exponentially in the last few years. Many large corporations are moving towards Linux. I know that AEP has a few Linux boxes sitting around. Along with our High School, they run 2k on the workstations, but their servers run SuSe [Novell]. Linux software is free [big plus for corporations], you can customize it to your systems [great for speed], and a lot of times it is more compatable with big servers than windows. My SATA controller was a PITA to install on 2k, but with Gentoo it was no problem. Didn't need to do a damn thing to get it responding. Plus there is an opensource program [alternative] to pretty much every windows app. Photoshop -> GIMP. MS Office -> OpenOffice[.org]. AIM/MSN/YAHOO -> Gaim. Etc. . .


-justin