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Got an old Dell box

mrSHEiK124

mrSHEiK124

Lifer
I need ATOT's help with my endeavor
I've pretty much run out of space on my rig, hosting my sister's music, my dad's old TV shows, etc., so I've decided to use an old Dell box someone gave me a couple weeks ago after I built them a new system into a fileserver.
I have no intentions of buying a Windows license for it, and I don't use Windows if I didn't buy it, so, for simple fileserving, and accessing from "My Network Places" on my dad's laptop, my sister's PC, and anywhere else on the network, I need to know what flavor of Linux I'd be better off with, if not anything else. I'm throwing this in a closet and never looking at it again, I want it to boot on its own in the event of a power outage, and work w/o a keyboard and mouse.
I already have a 120GB drive I'm gonna throw in it, and a 10GB drive I'm gonna load Linux/pagefile (whatever its called) onto, so that its......faster or something.
Specs of the rig:
Dell Dimension 8200
Pentium 4 2.0 GHz
256MB of RDRAM
120 GB HDD (Seagate, 8MB cache, IDE)
whatever cheap GFX card I decide to shove in there, thinking of getting like an MX4000 for 20 dollars
 
It's a Dell. After you go to all the work of setting everything up it will crash and you will hae to buy proprietary Dell parts to get it running again. Just build a cheap POS machine that will do a much better job.
 
Originally posted by: TriStar
It's a Dell. After you go to all the work of setting everything up it will crash and you will hae to buy proprietary Dell parts to get it running again. Just build a cheap POS machine that will do a much better job.
Click to expand...

:roll:
 
Originally posted by: TriStar
It's a Dell. After you go to all the work of setting everything up it will crash and you will hae to buy proprietary Dell parts to get it running again. Just build a cheap POS machine that will do a much better job.
Click to expand...

Thats horrible advice. Dell doesnt even have proprietary parts, dumass.
 
Originally posted by: Blayze
a P4 2GHz is old? man I wished someone would give me a system like that.
Click to expand...

Yah, my pseudo-server is a 1ghz celeron. Pseudo as in: It not only serves files, but it runs BitTorrent and other nasty stuff like that.
 
Someone gave that to you? Do they have any more? 😉 You will learn a lot with Gentoo but it isn't what I would consider the most friendly distro for a Linux newbie. Mandrake or Fedora would be a little more friendly. Depends on how much time you want to invest in this and how willing you are to learn some Linux.
 
About the whole P4 2.0GHz is old, I f'ed up, its a 1.8 GHz wilamette, the reason they upgraded is cause they wanted a gig of RAM, but a gig of RDRAM costed just as much as the Sempron (S754) rig I offered to build them 🙂
They had nothing to do with the Dell (I took the drives and GFX card out of it, hence why I'm using my own) so they just gave it to me
 
Originally posted by: TriStar
It's a Dell. After you go to all the work of setting everything up it will crash and you will hae to buy proprietary Dell parts to get it running again. Just build a cheap POS machine that will do a much better job.
Click to expand...

Wow. There's a misinformed reply if I ever read one.

To answer your question, Gentoo would be a nice way to go on this. Gentoo is a source distribution, meaning everything is built from source, and you'll be doing pretty much everything from partitioning the disk to installing the bootloader from scratch. If you've never used Linux, this probably isn't the best way to go since it doesn't do any hand holding whatsoever. There is a GREAT detailed install manual, and is pretty much foolproof if you follow it exactly.

You'll want to put some kind of BSD or Linux on here, especially if you're not using Windows. Most Linux noobs install Fedora or one of its variants. If it's just for a home server, this should be okay. Another good distro to try is Debian or Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a debian-based distro that is meant to be really user friendly, and it has an installer that will walk you through the whole process, and once you have the machine up and running, you won't have to get your hands dirty compiling source from tarballs.

From what you've said about your Linux experience, I'd use either Ubuntu or Fedora for what you want to do. Installing things on Ubuntu (or Debian for that matter) is extremely easy with APT (apt-get, apt-cache, these are easy to learn and are invaluable to your debian system).
 
OK, I've changed my plans, who wants to buy my "old dell box" for 100 dollars? Any takers? j/k
Is Ubuntu good with file sharing? I wanna have this set up by like......tuesday.
 
Originally posted by: sheik124
OK, I've changed my plans, who wants to buy my "old dell box" for 100 dollars? Any takers? j/k
Is Ubuntu good with file sharing? I wanna have this set up by like......tuesday.
Click to expand...

I tried to go that route and gave up after 8 hours. Windows 2000 satisfied me.
 
Yeah, Ubuntu can do pretty much anything those others can in the way of file-sharing. Just depends on how you want to share files. It's easy to get a Samba/FTP/HTTP, etc server going on an Ubuntu box.
 
Originally posted by: sheik124
OK, I've changed my plans, who wants to buy my "old dell box" for 100 dollars? Any takers? j/k
Is Ubuntu good with file sharing? I wanna have this set up by like......tuesday.
Click to expand...

for your information, ubuntu has to be installed on fat32-formatted hard drives instead ntfs-formatted.
 
Originally posted by: sniperruff
man that "old dell box" is faster than my axp 1700 =/
Click to expand...

man, stuff happens
a guy i work with, his friend apparently works for a moving company... should see the stuff people leave behind. this week's take. a free Sempron 2600 machine with an Asus K8N mobo and 512MB of RAM.... cost him nothing! not bad for a freebee.
 
Originally posted by: CraigRT
Originally posted by: sniperruff
man that "old dell box" is faster than my axp 1700 =/
Click to expand...

man, stuff happens
a guy i work with, his friend apparently works for a moving company... should see the stuff people leave behind. this week's take. a free Sempron 2600 machine with an Asus K8N mobo and 512MB of RAM.... cost him nothing! not bad for a freebee.
Click to expand...

Nice, just built a Sempron 2400 for my mom.
 
Originally posted by: adambooth
Yeah, Ubuntu can do pretty much anything those others can in the way of file-sharing. Just depends on how you want to share files. It's easy to get a Samba/FTP/HTTP, etc server going on an Ubuntu box.
Click to expand...

No I mean like a "right click -> sharing and security -> share this file on the network" kinda fileserver
 
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