I want to create a webserver on an old machine.

Pentium Pro 200MHz (256L2, MMX)
64MB EDO RAM
2 HDD
Generic CDROM
Old SB 16 (I think)
D-Link 10/100 NIC
Some crappy Diamond Video card

I want this machine to:
- Make use of XAMPP
- Autoupdate itself and any packages installed
- Reasonably small


I currently have DSL (Damn Small Linux) installed on it, but nothing on it seems like it works correctly. Using the menu or launching applications does nothing. It doesn't grab an IP address from my router etc. I've tried numerous installs and some part of it seems to get messed up.

I'm open to *BSD, but it has to have some sort of webserver package like XAMPP that's easy to config/install.

I also would like to setup my other HD but don't know how to get it into ext2.

I'm pretty much a Linux Newbie, so go easy on all the explanations, please!

Thanks!

Maybe you could try a custom slackware distro. But you would really have to trimm it down to work on a machine like that. I mean to work normally.

Hmm. I'll do some digging into slack.

Do you happen to know any get-arounds for isolinux? I need syslinux or the cd won't boot

I have system like that running slack and it works fine. It's actually 266 MHZ but mine is also running a file server, ftp server, and a mp3 player. It's not going to be handle any massive traffic, but it should run a slackware install without X.

I guess I've never used XAMPP, but as long as you don't need X to install it you should be fine with a minimal slackware install.

If you really want a challenge you could try Gentoo. If you have a reasonable amount of experience. It would take a while but you know exactly what you have and how it works. It would be compiled to run at maximum efficiency.

My friend ran Gentoo for a while, and advocated me to use it, but I saw the headaches of compiling that he went through (longer than most because he had SCSI raid). I do like emerge though, simple to update everything.

But I'm too much of a newbie and I don't have enormous amounts of time to invest in a project like this. I just need something that will be simple to setup.

If you want simple then FC4 Slackware or similar.

Gentoo is nice to maintain, but a drag to install (compile from source). The emerge command is really nice, but it took me 2 days to install on a 1800MHz box. I can't imagine how much it will take you or if you are willing to invest tha tmuch of your time into this :P It is worth it, but then again, so is Slack

I can do a stage 2 install on a 500 MHZ box in a day. That should give you enough of a performance increase. Slack is great, but if you are trying to get the most out of an old box, gentoo is worth the time if you don't absolutly need it tomorrow. Not only for the speed but for portage. It makes all the benefit of slack dissappear rather quickly.

FC4 has nothing on slackware. Slackware is much faster than any Fedora distribution. Though if we are talking ease of use that's another story.