Member Avatar for whipaway

One of my companiies recently dumped a bunch of Gateway Pentium-75 computers, and I was wondering if it was worth it to put Linux on then and network them together. Which Linux distribution should I use? I have RH 5.2 & 6. The computers have an 800M HD, but I can throw a 6.4G into one of 'em and make it a server if that would work better. Any ideas?

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Member Avatar for Dani

RedHat 5.2 is the earliest version of RedHat I've used. I installed it on my PII 400Mhz machine at the time, and later on my PII 233Mhz where it worked perfectly. I've also seen it run a bit slow on a 486, and a 75mhz machine is faster than that, right? RH version 6 also worked perfectly on my 266Mhz for an awfully long time.

The only big thing to take into consideration with such old versions of RedHat is hardware compatibility. Sometimes it's a lil flaky if you don't have name brand PCI cards. (It can't find drivers for them). It would be great if you had an old Trident 3D Image or one of those old ATI Rage 2 or 4mb video cards. As far as sound cards do, it would be great if you had access to an old Sound Blaster (any model will do) but otherwise, sound isn't really necessary for Linux at all (especially if you don't have speakers! LOL).

An 800mb hard drive should be sufficient just as long as you don't install every single package available. I think a full install is about a gig and a half. A 6.4 gig drive would make a nice server if you have files, etc. that you want to serve. Otherwise 3/4 of the drive would probably go wasted.

You might want to go to the store and pick up a KVM switch so that you could share a keyboard/mouse/monitor among the machines when you finally do get them all up and running. Just be careful because many of the knock-off brands don't fully support Linux, so you'll want to make sure that it says somewhere on the box/manual that it has Linux support. (I know all of the Belkins do, but that's a bit pricy to invest in a 75mhz machine).

Member Avatar for whipaway

Thanks for the info. I have a box full of video cards, so if there are any incompatibility problems, I will just try various cards until it works. I also obtained a couple PentiumPro towers so maybe I should trash the p-75 stuff and use those instead.

Member Avatar for Z28James

Also keep in mind that the bios may not support a 6gb HD.

Slackware would probably be your best bet...my buddy runs a www serber on a P75 no prob.

Member Avatar for Forse

If u're familiar with BSD u should run NetBSD on that. I can bet that NetBSD would outperform any linux distro on lowend machine

Member Avatar for TKSS

Slackware 8 runs on a P-75. I had to flash the mobo BIOS to get it to recognize my large hard drive. The CD didn't work for booting so I had to use the program that is available from slackware to force boot the CD. Nice that they include it...allows you to boot from an unbootable CD-ROM.

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