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Old Linux Boxes

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Paperlantern

Platinum Member
Well I'm afraid Ive fallen in with VinDSL and am tinkering with old machines and different flavors of Linux. Ive got an old Dell Dimension XPS T500 from around circa 1998 or so. Sports a PIII 500 Chip with 384MB of PC100 RAM. I have a PLETHORA of IDE drives (seriously, like, literally a box full), so I selected a modest 30GB to slap in and I think it only sees 8GB. Yikes.

I'm playing with Linux Mint 9 right now, i'm trying to make a scan station. i hav an old SCSI card and a SCSI Scanner that i'm going to attempt to make work. I know Isadora was LTS, so i can still get updates for this distro.

It was the only one i had on CD because i dont have an IDE DVD drive for some of the other distros I have and I can't burn anymore because I dont have any blank CD-Rs in the house. Though if anyone has any ideas for a distro that MIGHT support any old SCSI card I'll be super appreciative.

I'll try to post from it some screenies with Conky if i can get it to work.
 
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You'd probably need to know exactly what card you have to ensure compatibility. Since you're just scanning, security updates, and other modern niceties won't be a concern, so something old could work better than a newer distro. If it doesn't work with newer kernels, something from the 2.4 branch may work.
 
lxskllr said:
You'd probably need to know exactly what card you have to ensure compatibility. Since you're just scanning, security updates, and other modern niceties won't be a concern, so something old could work better than a newer distro. If it doesn't work with newer kernels, something from the 2.4 branch may work.
Click to expand...

Yeah I'd thought about that as well. I even have an old copy of like Ubuntu 5.1 Breezy Badger laying around here somewhere. What kernel is that?

mv2devnull said:
BIOS IDE limits ... http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

What are the chances that generic scsi drivers cope with the card?
Click to expand...

It actually looks like I was mistaken, I was using an OLD HDD testing utility that I think couldn't see it all, the BIOS does see it all and in turn so did Linux Mint 9. however, I think the drive was bad since it errored on installation saying it couldn't copy files. I switched the drive and have started the install over, hoping its not my media.
 
Paperlantern said:
Yeah I'd thought about that as well. I even have an old copy of like Ubuntu 5.1 Breezy Badger laying around here somewhere. What kernel is that?
Click to expand...

It looks like 2.6x. The most recent distro I remember using the 2.4 kernel was DamnSmall. They've just come back with new development, and I'm downloading RC1 now. I don't know if they updated the kernel or not. I saved a copy of the last release cause you never know when you'll need something old, and it doesn't take much room :^)
 
Looks like it was my media, damnit. Well, i'll roll back to Mint 8, even though I wont get patches and such, it wont matter much, it'll either support the driver or it wont. I might be able to install one if all else fails.

Maybe i'll try DSL if nothing else.
 
I just loaded RC1 in a VM, and it's still on the 2.4.31 kernel. That's an antique :^D

Good to see DSL back though. I'm gonna do some playing :^)
 
lxskllr said:
I just loaded RC1 in a VM, and it's still on the 2.4.31 kernel. That's an antique :^D

Good to see DSL back though. I'm gonna do some playing :^)
Click to expand...

I've created a monster!

Found a DVD drive, though im gonna fire up 9 again anyway, see if it was just the drive that was causing the read error, cuz the disc looks to be in really good shape.
 
Well, the built in Scanning utility from Linux Mint 9 doesn't detect the scanner right out of the box so I'll have to do some tinkering it appears.
 
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