What Linux can I run, if any?

mikeasa

Member
Jan 4, 2001
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I just inherited some old hardware and I would like to run linux on it. In fact, I would like to host a website and have a mail server on it. I would also like it to communicate with my Windows XP Pro machine. The PC that I inherited is a dual Pentium Pro 200 256k with 192MB RAM. I will be putting a moderately new hard drive in it with a Promise IDE controller that came with the 180GB Western Digital drive that I bought for the XP Pro machine. (Supposing that Linux will support that controller card.) I am a total newbie to Linux. Please let me know if there is any reasonable way that I can do this or if I need faster hardware.

Thank you very much for any responses.
 

drag

Elite Member
Jul 4, 2002
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Dual pentium pro's? 192Megs RAM?! Good greif, man! You can run what ever the hell you want!

Anything over a 100mhz pentium and 32megs of RAM is would make a good linux workstation, if you don't mind sacrificing some nice GUI features...

Literially, a machine that powerfull will run a file server or static webserver for a medium sized company without even breaking a sweat. I always wanted to get my hands on one of those dual pentium pros.

Of course your main limitating factor in this bad boy is graphics ability, lots of anti-aliases text/images, cartoony icons, and special effects require a nice video card. So avoid getting to much eye candy. For instance if you picked Redhat 9.1, don't use kde or gnome as your default desktop. Use something small like IceWM and you'll be fine.

With such a massive harddrive this would make a great fileserver for you home network. installing and configuring Samba to file share with windows would be a moderiately difficult, but good learning experiance.

This is GREAT hardware for learning linux on, you may have to go thru a few extra steps to get everything configured and setup because it may have some unusual componates that may not be common amoung home users. But once it gets going, you can go ahead and unplug the monitor and keyboard and it will run months without even so much as a peep.

good luck!

(I have a old prolient server I got from my dad's company when they upgraded. It had a 486, but I installed a pentium overdrive chip for 86mhz, and added some RAM for a total of 96megs. It has some scsi drives (whoho) on it. I ran a nfs/apache/ftp/samba/ssh plus a few other services running on it, and it handled it without any problems. Actually when accessing it only had a slight laggy fealing that betrayed it's age, but in every other aspect (and once the connection was made) it ran as well as any modern kit)
 

skyking

Lifer
Nov 21, 2001
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If you do not need a gui, don't install it..... sounds like you want a server to me.
Apache2, samba, any of the many mail programs available will just scream on that box, really.
If you have a friend who is willing to help out, use the distro he is familiar with. That is how I got going in freeBSD.
Seems like a lot of the experts here will help you out in RH 9, openBSD and Debian, based on the responses I see.